Look Up When Life Bites You

You know that feeling of being surrounded, where every direction you look there is another problem waiting. The Israelites in the desert knew it literally. Snakes everywhere.

Numbers 21:8 says, "Then the Lord said to Moses, Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live." Strange cure. No antivenom, no ritual, nothing for them to produce. Just look and live.

That moment was never really about snakes. It was a preview. Centuries later Jesus would be lifted up on a cross for the same reason, so that anyone poisoned could look at Him and live.

Here is the exchange nobody earned. He took everything that was killing us and handed back what belongs to Him. Our guilt for His righteousness. Our pain for His healing. That trade is finished, it is not pending approval.

1 John 4:17 says, "Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world." As He is, so are you. Right now, not after you clean yourself up first. So when the day bites, when the message comes in that wrecks your afternoon or the guilt shows up again over something you already brought to God, you are not hunting for a solution. You are looking at a Person who already handled it, and the Holy Spirit in you is the one who makes that real to you.

Look up. That was the whole instruction in the desert and it is still the whole instruction now.