The Antivenom

Every year at the Australian Reptile Park in Gosford, New South Wales, handlers carefully grip the heads of eastern brown snakes and taipans — two of the deadliest serpents on earth — and press their fangs against collection vials. Drop by drop, the venom flows out. It is painstaking, dangerous work. But that harvested poison becomes the raw material for antivenom, the only treatment that can save a snakebite victim from certain death.

The cure comes from the very thing that kills.

Paul understood this paradox when he wrote to the Corinthians. "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" He was not pretending death had no fangs. He had seen plenty of graves. He knew the venom of sin was real and lethal. But he also knew what God had done with it.

On the cross, Christ allowed death to sink its fangs into Him. He absorbed the full dose of its poison — every drop of sin's venom spent on the only One it could never ultimately destroy. And when He rose on the third morning, He held the antivenom in His scarred hands.

Death still bites. We still feel its teeth at hospital bedsides and gravesides. But the venom has been neutralized. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. The sting has lost its power, because the cure was drawn from the wound itself.