Now, of course, the sole purpose of setting that brazen serpent on the
pole was to render it conspicuous, and all that Nicodemus could _then_
understand by the symbol was that, in some unknown way, this
heaven-descended Son of Man should be set forth before Israel and the
world as being the Healer of all their diseases. But we are wiser,
after the event, than the ruler of the Jews could be at the threshold
of Christ's ministry. We have also to remember that this is not the
only occasion, though it is the first, on which our Lord used this very
significant expression. For twice over in this Gospel we find it upon
His lips—once when, addressing the unbelieving multitude, He says 'When
ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He'; and
once when in soliloquy, close on Calvary, He says, as the vision of a
world flocking to Him rises before Him on occasion of the wish of a few
Greek proselytes to see Him, 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men
unto Me.' We do not need, though we have, the Evangelist's commentary,
'this He spake signifying what death He should die.'
So, if we accept the historical veracity of this Gospel, we here
perceive Jesus Christ, at the very beginning of His career, and before
the dispositions of the nation towards Him had developed themselves in
action, discerning its end, and seeing, gaunt and grim before Him, the
Cross that was lifted up on Calvary. Enthusiasts and philanthropists
and apostles of all sorts, in the regions of science and beneficence
and morals and religion, begin their career with trusting that their
'brethren should have understood' that God was speaking through them.
But no illusion of that sort, according to these Evangelists, drew
Jesus Christ out of His seclusion at Nazareth and impelled Him on His
career. From the beginning He knew that the Cross was to be the end.
That Cross was not to Him a necessity, accepted as the price of
faithfulness in doing His work, so that His attitude was, 'I will speak
what is in Me, though I die for it,' but it was to Him the very heart
of the work which He came to do. Therefore, after He had said to the
ruler of the Jews that the Son of Man, as descended from Heaven, was
able to _speak_ of heavenly things, He added the deeper necessity, He
'must be lifted up.' Where lay the 'must'? In the requirement of the
work which He had set Himself to do. Beneath this great saying there
lies a pathetic, stern, true conception of the condition of human
nature. That desert encampment, with the poisoned men dying on every
hand, is the emblem under which Jesus Christ, the gentlest and the
sweetest soul that ever lived, looked out upon humanity. And it was
because the facts of human nature called for something far more than a
teacher that He said 'the Son of Man must be lifted up.' For what they
needed, and what He had set Himself to bring, could only be brought by
One who yielded Himself up for the sins of the whole world.
But that 'must,' which thus arose from the requirements of the task
that He had set before Him, had its source in His own heart; it was no
necessity imposed upon Him from without. True, it was a necessity laid
on Him by filial obedience, but also true, it was the necessity
accepted by Him in pursuance of the impulse of His own heart. He must
die because He must save, and He must save because He loved. So He was
not nailed to the Cross by the nails and hammers of the Roman soldiers,
and the taunt that was flung at Him as He hung there had a deeper
meaning, as scoffs thrown at Him and His cause ordinarily have, than
the scoffers understood: 'He saved others,' and therefore 'Himself He
cannot save.'
So here we have Christ accepting, as well as discerning, the Cross. And
we have more than that. We have Christ looking at the Cross as being,
not humiliation, but exaltation. 'The Son of Man must be lifted up.'
And what does that mean? It means the same thing that He said when,
near the end, He declared, 'The hour is come that the Son of Man should
be glorified.' We are accustomed to speak—and we speak rightly—of His
death as being the lowest point of the humiliation which was inherent
in the very fact of His humanity. He condescended to be born; He
stooped yet more to die. But whilst that is true, the other side is
also true—that in the Cross Christ is lifted up, and that it is His
Throne. For what see we there? The highest exhibition, the tenderest
revelation, of His perfect love. And what see we there besides? The
supreme manifestation of the highest power.
''Twas great to speak a world from nought,
'Tis greater to redeem.'
To save humanity, to make it possible that men should receive that
second birth, and should enter into the Kingdom of God—that was a
greater work, because a work not only of creation, but of restoration,
than it was to send forth the stars on their courses and to 'preserve'
the ancient heavens 'from wrong.' There is a revelation of divine might
when we 'lift up our eyes on high,' and see how, 'because He is great
in power, not one faileth.' But there is a mightier revelation of
divine power when we see how, from amidst the ruins of humanity, He can
restore the divine image, and piece together, as it were, without sign
of flaw or crack or one fragment wanting, the fair image that was
shattered into fragments by the blow of Sin's heavy mace. Power in its
highest operation, power in its tenderest efficacy, power in its widest
sweep, are set forth on the Cross of Christ, and that weak Man hanging
there, dying in the dark, is 'the power of God' as well as 'the wisdom
of God.' The Cross is Christ's Throne, but it is His sovereign
manifestation of love and power only if it is what, as I believe He
told us it was, and what His servants from His lips caught the
interpretation of it as being, the death for the sins of the
sin-stricken world. Unless we can believe that, when He died, He died
for us, I know not why Christ's death should appeal to our love. But if
we recognise—as I pray that we all may recognise—that our deep need for
something far more than Teacher or Pattern has been met in that great
'one Sacrifice for sins for ever,' then the magnetism of the Cross
begins to tell, and we understand what He meant when He said, 'I, if I
be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Brethren, the Cross is His
Throne, from which He rules the world, and if you strike His sacrifice
for sins out of your conception of His work, you have robbed Him of
sovereignty, and taken out of His hand the sceptre by which He governs
the hearts and wills of rebellious and restored men.
II. Notice, again, how we have here the look at the uplifted Son of
Man.
I do not need to paint for you what your own imaginations can
sufficiently paint for yourselves—the scene in the wilderness where the
dying men from the very outskirts of the camp could turn a filmy eye to
the brazen serpent hanging in their midst. That look is the symbol of
what we need, in order that the life-giving power of Christ should
enter into our death. There is no better description of the act of
Christian faith than that picture of the dying Israelite turning his
languid eye to the symbol of healing and life. That trust which Jesus
emphasises here in 'whosoever _believeth_ on Him,' He opposes very
emphatically to Nicodemus's confession, 'We know that Thou art a
Teacher.' We know—you have to go a step further, Nicodemus! 'We know';
well and good, but are you included in 'whosoever believeth'? Faith is
an advance on credence. There is an intellectual side to it, but its
essence is what is the essence of trust always, the act of the will
throwing itself on that which is discerned to be trustworthy. You know
that a given man is reliable—that is not relying on him. You have to go
a step further. And so, dear brethren, you may believe thirty-nine or
thirty-nine thousand Articles with an unfaltering credence, and you may
be as far away from faith as if you did not believe one of them. There
may be a perfect belief and an absolute want of faith. And on the other
hand, blessed be God! there may be a real and an operative trust with a
very imperfect or mistaken creed. The wild flowers on the rock bloom
fair and bright, though they have scarcely any soil in which to strike
their roots, and the plants in the most fertile garden may fail to
produce flowers and seed. So trust and credence are not always of the
same magnitude.
This trust is no arbitrary condition. The Israelite was bid to turn to
the brazen serpent. There was no connection between his look and his
healing, except in so far as the symbol was a help to, and looking at
it was a test of, his faith in the healing power of God. But it is no
arbitrary appointment, as many people often think it is, which connects
inseparably together the look of faith and the eternal life that Christ
gives. For seeing that salvation is no mere external gift of shutting
up some outward Hell and opening the door to some outward Heaven, but
is a state of heart and mind, of relation to God, the only way by which
that salvation can come into a man's heart is that he, knowing his need
of it, shall trust Christ, and through Him the new life will flow into
his heart. Faith is trust, and trust is the stretching out of the hand
to take the precious gift, the opening of the heart for the influx of
the grace, the eating of the bread, the drinking of the water, of life.
It is the only possible condition. God forbid that I should even seem
to depreciate other forms of healing men's evils and redressing men's
wrongs, and diminishing the sorrows of humanity! We welcome them all;
but education, art, culture, refinement, improved environment, bettered
social and political conditions, whilst they do a great deal, do not go
down to the bottom of the necessity. And after you have built your
colleges and art museums and stately pleasure-houses, and set every man
in an environment that is suited to develop him, you will find out what
surely the world might have found out already, that, as in some stately
palace built in the Campagna, the malaria is in the air, and steals in
at the windows, and infects all the inhabitants. Thank God for all
these other things! but you cannot heal a man who has poison in his
veins by administering cosmetics, and you cannot put out Vesuvius with
a jugful of water. If the camp is to be healed, the Christ must be
lifted up.
III. And now, lastly, here we have the life that comes with a look at
the lifted-up Son of Man.
Those of you who are using the Revised Version will see that there is a
little change made here, partly by the exclusion of a clause and partly
by changing the order of the words. The alteration is not only nearer
the original text, but brings out a striking thought. It reads that
'whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life.' Now, it is far too
late a period of my discourse to enlarge upon all that these great
words would suggest to us, but let me just, in a sentence or two, mark
the salient points.
'Eternal life'; do not bring that down to the narrow and inadequate
conception of unending existence. It involves that, but it means a
great deal more. It means a life of such a sort as is worth calling
life, which is a life in union with God, and therefore full of
blessedness, full of purity, full of satisfaction, full of desire and
aspiration, and all these with the stamp of unendingness deeply
impressed upon them. And that is what comes to us through the look. Not
only is the process of dying arrested, but there is substituted for it
a new process of growing possession of a new life. You 'must be born
again,' Christ had been saying to Nicodemus. The change that passes
upon a man when once he has anchored his trust on Jesus Christ, the
uplifted Son of Man, is so profound that it is nothing else than a new
birth, and a new life comes into his veins untainted by the poison, and
with no proclivity to death.
'May have eternal life'—now, here, on the instant. That eternal life is
no future gift to be bestowed upon mortal men when they have passed
through the agony of death, but it is a gift which comes to us here,
and may come to any man on the instant of his looking to Jesus Christ.
'May in Him have eternal life'—union with Christ by faith, that
profound incorporation—if I may use the word—into Him, which the New
Testament sets forth in all sorts of aspects as the very foundation of
the blessings of Christianity; that union is the condition of eternal
life. So, dear brethren, we all need that the poison shall be cast out
of our veins. We all need that the tendency downwards to a condition
which can only be described as death may be arrested, and the motion
reversed. We all need that our knowledge shall be vitalised into faith.
We all need that the past shall be forgiven, and the power of sin upon
us in the present shall be cancelled. 'The blood of Jesus Christ
cleanseth from all sin,' because it was shed for the remission of the
sins of the many, and is transfused, an untainted principle of life,
into our veins. What Jesus said to Nicodemus by night in that quiet
chamber in Jerusalem, what He said in effect and act upon the Cross,
when uplifted there, is what He says to each of us from the Throne
where He is now lifted up: 'Whosoever believeth shall in Me have
eternal life.' Take Him at His word, and you will find that it is true.