Numbers 21:9 Meaning Moses Made a Serpent of Bronze

The serpent lifted on the pole is Christ, the creative power that came down into man and now must be raised in him. The pole is the spinal cord, and the bright serpent set upon it is that same power ascending. It descended into flesh and lay coiled there, and life returns to a man when it climbs. That ascent is the second birth, the resurrection worked out within the body.

Moses fashions the very thing that bit them and lifts it high, because the power that struck the world down is the power that raises it. The Son of Man must be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness, and this is fulfilled when a man ascends within himself as the Lord God. No stare at metal healed them. The descended power rises through you until you awaken as what it always was.

The venom and the cure are one energy in 2 conditions. The serpent is the life-force at the base of the spine, and while it bites downward into the flesh it poisons, but lifted up on the pole it heals. The pole is the spinal column, and raising the brass serpent upon it is the raising of that same coiled current up the backbone toward the head.

Whoever looks upon the lifted serpent lives, because the gaze turns inward and upward to the very power that had been sinking him. The same fire that kills at the loins gives life when it is drawn to the crown.

The serpent of brass: the life-force of the lower body, poison when it sinks into the flesh, healing when it is raised. The pole: the spinal column up which the coiled energy is lifted from base to head. Brass: the hardened, tested metal of an energy purified through the fire of the body.

The thing that poisons a person is also, when he can look straight at it, the thing that heals him. The people were dying from the bite of the snake, and the cure was an image of that same snake, lifted up where everyone could see it.

This is how the mind recovers from a wound. Running from the danger keeps the poison working in the dark. But when the harm is given a shape and set in plain sight, a person can turn and look at it instead of being ruled by it. Facing the thing that hurt him is what lets him live.

Healing comes from turning toward the very thing that wounded you, not away from it. The people were being bitten in the desert, and the cure was not to flee the serpents but to lift one up and look at it directly. What poisons a man is often what he refuses to face. Raise it into full view, hold your gaze on it, and its power over you begins to break.

The suffering, the fear, the venom already in the blood, all of it has to be confronted where it lives. A man who stares honestly at what is destroying him has already started to recover. Look at the thing squarely. That is where you live again.

A man dying of a real wound is still saved or lost by where he aims his eyes.

Attention works like a supply line: whatever it feeds grows, and a person carrying real poison will pour all of it into the bite unless he is given somewhere else to send it. That is why the remedy God appointed was a direction for the eyes and not an argument. Fixation on the wound raises panic, panic freezes a body that needs to keep moving, and the freeze finishes what the venom started.

Looking up removed nothing from the blood. It changed what was governing the state, and the state decided whether the man still behaved like someone who intended to live. Anyone who stares at the injury long enough dies in stages the injury alone would never have caused.