The Look of Faith

12Jul10 The Look of Faith

This is another installment in a series that has been adapted from my 11-part CD teaching series on A. W. Tozer’s spiritual classic, The Pursuit of God.

In the book of Numbers (21:4-9) we see this kind of faith in action.

“Then they set out from Mount Hor by the way of the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; and the people became impatient because of the journey. And the people spoke against God and Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the

wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loath this miserable food.’”

The interesting thing to note is that the more the children of Israel complained the more they came to idealize Egypt. Of course God had done the exact opposite. They had been in slavery and were now being brought into a “land of milk and honey.”

The story continues,

“And the Lord sent fiery snakes among the people and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. So, the people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned, because we have spoken against the Lord and you; intercede with the Lord, that he may remove the serpents from us.’ And Moses interceded for the people. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he shall live.’ And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.”

When John records the story of Jesus’ interchange with Nicodemus in the third chapter of his Gospel, he recalls this event in Israel’s history. Jesus says in verse 12,

“If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? And no one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven, even the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the Son of Man must be lifted up; that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

In John 3, Jesus is explaining to Nicodemus how he can be saved. Nicodemus, a Pharisee, is having a difficult time with the concept of being “born again.” So Jesus points back to the familiar illustration of the brass serpent on a pole and connects it to saving faith. Thus, Nicodemus would come to understand that to look and to believe are synonymous terms. As Tozer puts it, “’Looking’ on the Old Testament serpent is identical with ‘believing’ on the New Testament Christ. That is, the looking and the believing are the same thing. And he would understand that, while Israel looked with their external eyes, believing is done with the heart. I think he would conclude that faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God.”