The Cure Made from the Poison

At the Australian Reptile Park north of Sydney, trained handlers pin down eastern brown snakes, taipans, and death adders to milk venom from their fangs. The extracted poison is shipped to laboratories where technicians inject tiny, controlled doses into horses. Over months, the horses develop antibodies. Those antibodies are harvested, purified, and bottled as antivenom — the only thing that can save a snakebite victim racing against the clock in a rural emergency room.

The cure is literally made from the poison that kills.

When the Israelites grumbled against God and Moses in the wilderness, venomous serpents came among them and many died. But the remedy the Almighty prescribed was startling: a bronze serpent, lifted high on a pole. The people had to look directly at the image of the very thing destroying them. Not away from it. Not past it. Straight at it.

This is how God so often works. He does not pretend the wound is not there. He meets us inside it. Centuries later, Jesus pointed to this very moment, telling Nicodemus, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up." The cross — that instrument of death — became the wellspring of life. The curse became the cure.

Whatever venom runs through your life today — bitterness, shame, despair — God does not ask you to deny it exists. He asks you to look up.