The Cure in the Venom

In a dusty laboratory at the Australian Reptile Park north of Sydney, keeper Billy Collett does something that looks like madness. Several times a week, he holds a taipan — one of the world's deadliest snakes — and presses its fangs against a glass vial, coaxing out drops of venom. That venom is then shipped to CSL Limited in Melbourne, where technicians inject tiny, controlled doses into horses. Over months, the horses' immune systems produce antibodies. Those antibodies become antivenom — the only thing that can save a snakebite victim from death.

The cure is made from the very thing that kills.

This is the strange, scandalous logic of Numbers 21. When venomous serpents ravaged the Israelite camp — a consequence of their own bitter complaining — God did not simply wave the snakes away. He told Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and lift it on a pole. The dying had to look directly at the image of the thing that was destroying them. Not a golden angel. Not a symbol of power. A snake.

It offends our sensibilities. We want our remedies to look nothing like our wounds. But the God of Israel has always worked through paradox — bringing life from death, strength from weakness, salvation from a cursed cross. Just as Billy Collett reaches into the cage knowing the venom holds the cure, so faith asks us to look at the very thing we fear and find there, lifted high, the mercy of the Almighty.