'Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.'—JOHN iii. 14.
This is the second of the instances in this Gospel in which our Lord
lays His hand upon an institution or incident of the Old Testament, as
shadowing forth some aspect of His work. In the first of these
instances, under the image of the ladder that Jacob saw, our Lord
presented Himself as the sole medium of communication between heaven
and earth; here He goes a step further into the heart of His work, and
under the image, very eloquent to the Pharisee to whom He was speaking,
of the brazen serpent lifted up on the pole in the desert, proclaims
Himself as the medium of healing and of life to a poisoned world.
Now, Nicodemus has a great many followers to-day. He took up a position
which many take up. He recognised Christ as a Teacher, and was willing
to accord to the almost unknown young man from Galilee the coveted
title of 'Rabbi.' He came to Him with a little touch of condescension,
and evidently thought that for him, a ruler of the Jews, a member of
the upper and educated classes, to be willing to speak of Jesus as a
Teacher, was an endorsement that the young aspirant might be gratified
to receive. 'Rabbi, _we_ know that Thou art a Teacher sent from
God'—but he stopped there. He is not the only one who compliments Jesus
Christ, while he degrades Him from His unique position. Now, to this
inadequate conception of our Lord's Person and work, Christ opposed the
solemn insistence on the incapacity of human nature as it is, to enter
into communion with, and submission to, God. And then He passes on to
speak—in precise parallelism with the position that He took up when He
likened Himself to the Ladder of Jacob's vision—of Himself as being the
Son of Man that came down from Heaven, and therefore is able to reveal
heavenly things. In my text He further unveils in symbol the mystery
and dignity of His Person and of His work, whilst He speaks of a
mysterious lifting up of this Son of Man who came down from heaven.
These are the truths that the conception of Christ as a great Teacher
needs for its completion; the contrariety of human nature with the
divine will, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Crucifixion of the
Incarnate Son. And so we have here three points, to which I desire to
turn, as setting forth the conception of His own work which Jesus
Christ presented as completing the conception of it, to which Nicodemus
had attained.