The Antidote They Refused to Trust

In 1796, Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccine after observing that milkmaids exposed to cowpox seemed immune to the deadly disease. The solution was remarkably simple — a small scratch on the arm, a brief exposure to something that looked harmless. Yet when Jenner presented his findings, crowds rioted. Clergy denounced him. Cartoonists drew people sprouting cow heads from their bodies. Thousands continued to die from smallpox, not because the remedy was unavailable, but because they refused to trust something that seemed too strange, too simple, too counterintuitive to work.

The Israelites in the wilderness faced a similar crisis. Serpents were among them, and the venom was spreading. When they cried out, the Lord did not remove the snakes. Instead, He told Moses to raise a bronze serpent on a pole. Anyone bitten needed only to look up and live. No elaborate ritual. No costly sacrifice. Just a gaze of faith toward the very image of what was killing them.

That is how God so often works — offering a remedy that offends our expectations. We want complexity; He gives simplicity. We want to earn healing; He asks us to receive it. The bronze serpent anticipated what Jesus Himself would later claim in John 3:14 — that He too would be lifted up, so that everyone who looks to Him in faith might not perish, but live. The only ones who died in that wilderness were those who refused to look.