Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Well, if you have your Bibles, if you'll take those now and turn, if you will, to numbers, chapter 21.
I could almost hear an audible groan. People say there cannot possibly be an interesting sermon from the Book of Numbers. If you'll turn to Numbers, chapter 21.
And after that we'll read from the third chapter of the gospel as John records it.
Numbers 21.
And when King Arad, the Canaanite, which dwelt in south, heard tell that Israel came by the way of the spies, then he fought against Israel and took some of them prisoners. And. And Israel vowed a vow unto the Lord and said, if thou wilt indeed deliver this people into mine hand, then I will utterly destroy their cities. And the Lord hearkened to the voice of Israel and delivered up the Canaanites, and they utterly destroyed them and their cities. And he called the name of the place Hormah. Hormah, by the way, is a fascinating word in Hebrew because it has multiple meanings. You have to decide what it means by the context in which you say it.
So Horma could mean banned. B, A N N E D Banned. As if you would ban some practice. It might mean broken, but it could mean, and this is what I think it means in this passage is set aside for destruction.
So they called the name of the place Hormah. And they journeyed from Mount Hor by the way of the Red Sea, to pass through the land of Edom. And the soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way. And the people spake against God and against Moses. Wherefore you have brought us out up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness. For there is no bread, neither is there any water. And our soul loatheth this light. Bread, meaning what? Manna. They're sick of it. And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people. And much people of Israel died.
Therefore the people came to Moses and said, we have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against thee. Pray unto the Lord that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto Moses, make thee a fiery serpent and set it upon a pole, and it shall come to pass that everyone that is bitten when he looketh upon it shall live.
And Moses made a serpent of brass or bronze perhaps, and fiery, meaning that it shone when there was a light on it and put it upon a pole. And it came to pass that if a serpent had bitten any man when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.
Now turn in the New Testament to the Book of John. The Gospel of John, the third chapter.
There can be those passages of Scripture that are so familiar, we quote them. We quote them from memory. We learn them in vacation Bible school.
But we miss entirely the power of the context. The text is familiar. John 3:16.
I suspect that there's hardly a handful of people in this room that don't know John 3:16 or can quote it from memory. But the context of John 3:16 is. Is often forgotten. So John chapter three.
We'll begin reading at verse nine.
Nicodemus is a Pharisee who has come to Jesus and is talking to him in a night meeting.
Nicodemus answered and said unto him, how can these things be? And Jesus answered and said unto him, art thou a master? In other words, a rabbi? Art thou a rabbi of Israel and knowest not these things?
Verily, I say unto thee, we speak that we do know, and testify that what we have seen and receive, and you receive not our witness. I have told you earthly things and you believe not. How shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things? Now pause a moment. Heavenly meaning supernatural, transcendent things.
And no man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but. But that the world through him might be saved.
Put your hands on your Bible, if you will, and let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, in the next few moments, I pray that your spirit will brush aside every barrier to divine communication, rush in over the threshold of our souls. Speak to us by your might in the inner person of every listener, in the powerful name Jesus, the strong Son of God.
Amen. Amen. And Amen.
There are all kinds of ways that one can understand the transitions from the Old Testament to the New Testament. A Permissible hermeneutic. And it is the one to which I subscribe. I'm not laying it on you like the law of the Medes and the Persians, but I believe everything that is revealed in the New Testament is hinted at, spoken of, shown in the Old Testament. That the tabernacle, the sacrifices, the trumpets, everything that is revealed in the New Testament is spoken in the Old Testament. Any of you here old enough to remember the arithmetic manipulative that they used to use in elementary schools called flashcards? Anybody remember flashcards? Do you know why we quit using flashcards?
It's because they actually worked.
We wouldn't want practical reality to stand in the way of educational theory.
So I can remember flashcards. And I remember the teacher would hold up the card, so three plus two, and you'd yell out the answer from the back of the classroom, you know, five. And she'd turn the card over and it'd be a five on the other side. And then she would hold up another one, four plus one, that's also five.
And the reason she did that was why?
So that when you saw it on the test, you would say, this is the same. It was three plus two on the card. It's going to be three plus two on the test.
Everything that is revealed in its full expression in the New Testament is spoken of, spoken to, hinted at in the Old Testament.
One of the most powerful and brilliant of all the New Testament realities is the cross of Jesus Christ.
Jesus, speaking to Nicodemus, says, and I, if I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me. It's a fascinating passage of scripture, and we know it. For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son into the world that whosoever believeth in him should not die, but live, but be saved.
But Jesus coaches it.
He frames it in the context of a remote passage from the Book of Numbers.
Now, let's talk about that.
The Hebrew people have moved down into the southern desert toward the modern town of Eilat, or the Arab community called Aqaba. It is a barren, terrible. I've been there many times. It's the way that one has to go to go over into Jordan.
If you're going into southern Jordan, you have to go down to Eilat, then go across the border and go up. It is barren. I wonder if there's anybody. I've already tested your age. And here. Is there anybody here old enough to remember the movie Lawrence of Arabia? Anybody remember that it's filmed.
Much of the filming is Right there. And you can actually see places. Barren, rocky, totally terrible. And the people begin to murmur, complain. Throughout the book of the books of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Throughout those books, the people's number one sin is murmuring and arguing and bickering.
Yes, they have sins, sexual immorality. Yes, they have other things. They worship the golden calf. But the most constant sin is just murmuring, just complaining. And they're complaining. Oh, why did you bring us out in this desert to die? There's no water.
And this, this manna which you've given us, we hate it. It says, our soul loatheth manna.
Now, I just. I just want you to think about the context in which they are saying these things. They have just seen two major opposing tribes defeated supernaturally, the Canaanites, that were stronger and more powerful and more numerous than they who defeated them. At the first, when they prayed and sought God, God gave them miraculous victory over the Canaanites, the Amorites, same way the Ammonites. They have defeated tribe after tribe after tribe.
When they're in the desert alone with nothing to eat, God gives them bread on the desert floor, mana. When they complain about that, God gives them coil to eat. When they complain about that, God is constantly struggling with these complaining, murmuring, rebellious people that can't seem to get enough blessings. They can't seem to get enough miracles.
Now they're complaining about water. But think about it. Not once, not twice, but three times, God has miraculously supplied water when there was nothing but either poisonous water at Marah or no water. And he has brought water to gush out of the side of a boulder.
So now they're in a place with no water. This is the same people. They've seen God make water out of a rock.
They have seen God, when there is no food, give them food. And now they say, we hate this food. When they complain about that food he gave them quail. They have seen and experienced and walked in a miraculous transition.
Go back a little bit further.
They saw, after 430 years, they saw their escape from bondage in Egypt. They saw the Egyptian army drowned in the Red Sea. They themselves, these are not their descendants.
They themselves walked through dry shod, on dry land, through the bottom of the Red Sea. They have seen miracles, signs, wonders. And now they are here in a desert place and they're murmuring against Moses and murmuring against God.
And God allows or sends snakes among them. It says fiery serpents, but fiery means poisonous.
These are venomous serpents who move through the camp and they're biting them, and they're beginning to die in their numbers.
Now, somebody said to me, did God send the snakes or did he allow the snakes?
When you are being bitten by a rattlesnake, you will almost never ask, where did this come from?
It will not be a question you will struggle with at that moment.
And so they came to Moses and they confessed their sins. Okay, yes, we've murmured, okay, yes, we've been rebels. Yes, we've complained.
But now we're dying. Will you help us?
And so Moses goes to God and he says, remove the snakes.
This is very important.
God does not remove the snakes.
The cause of our death spiritually is among us.
The death which is the result of sin is not going anywhere. Now, you need to hear this.
The snakes that bite them are not removed. God gives them a cure for the poison.
He doesn't take away the snakes.
What is the snakes got to represent exactly what they are.
The sin that touches us, that infects us, that has infected the bloodstream of humanity from the Garden of Eden.
The sin which is our death is among us. It's with us. It's not going anywhere. We don't live in a sinless paradise.
This is not the Garden of Eden. I know you're saying to yourself, this is mole tree.
This is as close to the Garden of Eden as you can get.
But whether you've realized it or not, there is sin and temptation in the sweetest little towns in America.
There is no place in the world where you are safe from the ubiquitous devastation of sin.
And the serpents are biting them, and they begin to die.
God says, I won't take the snake away. I'm not going to do that. What I will do is give you a cure.
And he tells Moses, fashion a snake that looks like the snakes that are biting them, make it out of brass, somehow attach it to a pole and lift it up.
And those who will look on that snake will be healed, will be saved, if you will, from the poison of those snakebites.
It's a fascinating moment because it almost seems like idolatry.
It's a statue. It's a thing he's lifting up, but there must have been attached to it. It's not a magic charm.
It wasn't a magic serpent. He doesn't wave it over everybody and they all get healed. That's not what it says.
It says only those who looked on it.
So there probably were people who said, ah, I'm not doing that.
Look on a brass serpent snake. No, they wouldn't look up.
There may have been those who got bitten by more than one snake.
This is very important.
What if you got bit by a snake and you looked on the serpent and got healed and you got bitten again?
We have a phrase for that, that's called backsliding.
So there are people, there may be people in this room that have been bitten by more than one snake.
There may be people in this room that have been bitten by the same snake over and over and over again.
It doesn't say that you only got one shot at the brass serpent.
There's nothing that says that. Every time anybody looked on that brass serpent, they got healed.
So there is an element of faith.
They had to look up, they had to see that serpent. Now, why would it work?
Because in the law of Moses itself, right, in the law of Moses, it says anyone that hangs on a tree is cursed. And that if that curse remains overnight, the land itself is cursed.
So they said if anybody's hanged, if anyone gets hanged, you've got to take his body down and bury it before nightfall, otherwise the curse prevails.
So this serpent hanging, this brass serpent hanging suspended on this pole is on a stick. The element, the fundamental part of which is a tree.
It's wood. So this serpent is lifted up on a piece of a tree, a stick.
So that.
What is happening is that the curse of those snakes is lifted up and fastened on the brass serpent, so that their curse is fastened here, so that the curse that would have killed them, should have killed them, was killing them. Now is lifts them from them, and by faith they see that their curse is now fastened on this brass serpent and they are healed.
Now hundreds of years pass and a young king comes to the throne of Judah. His name is Hezekiah.
And Hezekiah finds that brass serpent has become an object of idolatrous worship. He calls it nehushtan.
Nehushtan is another hard word in Hebrew.
It can mean. It can just mean something made of brass.
And so I think he calls it Nehushtan, because I think it means that that brass thing and the people are worshiping it, and Hezekiah chops it up in pieces and melts it and destroys it, because this prefigurement of the cross has now become an object of idolatry because it is now deprived of its spiritual power, which was to heal them of the death which was in the camp.
Now it just becomes a brass object.
That's what can happen with tradition.
That's what can happen with anything religious, something religious that Works for us that is powerful and effective in healing can become just nothing but dead religion.
So what can happen is that even. Even that which delivered us from the curse at some point now becomes just a religious artifact, something that we just do because it's religious. It can happen.
It can happen with Sunday morning church, where we have experienced God, where we have known his grace, where we have known his touch, his healing power, where he's delivered us from the curse of sin and death now just becomes that family traditional thing that we do to just before we go to lunch on Sunday.
And at that point, it loses its efficacy, it loses its potency.
It just becomes a religious mannerism, if you will, and it destroys its own effectiveness.
Now, hundreds of years pass.
Hundreds of years pass from the destruction of Nehushtan. So you have about 500 years, another 500 years, and another 500 years.
So you have the serpent in the wilderness. You have the destruction of Nehushtan under Hezekiah. And now you have Jesus Christ speaking to Nicodemus, and he's talking to him about the healing power of the cross.
He says the Son of man must be lifted up.
What it means to be lifted up. Does he mean to carry him on our shoulders?
That's not what he means.
He means to be lifted up on a tree to become what Moses said in the law. What God said through the law of Moses was that whoever hangs on a tree is cursed.
So that Jesus is telling Nicodemus the means and manner of his death to be crucified.
He is also telling him the efficacy of his death. This is the effect of this is what will happen. That whoever looks on me on the cross in faith as those people looked on the serpent, that they will be healed of that which is killing them. The snakebite of sin and death.
It is a remarkable reference reaching back nearly 1,000 years to the serpent in the wilderness.
Paul ties into the same theory.
He says whoever hangs on a tree is cursed, and therefore he has redeemed us from the curse of the law.
Pastor made a statement about prophesying, about end of life ministry.
It is not a bad prophecy. It's a wonderful prophecy, and I receive it.
But here's what I want to say to you. I have a prophecy for you.
Every one of you.
I see young guys here in their early teens, a baby over there in a carrying basket. Look up here. I have a word for you. Whether you like it or not, you will die.
I'm not talking about before lunch.
However, I don't have a Guarantee on that.
You will face death if Jesus doesn't come before then. If you live long enough, if the rapture awaits, if the church is still here, every person in this room will die. It's the hardest thing in the world to face. We can't even.
I look in the mirror, am I the only senior citizen here? You ever look in the mirror and say, who is that?
Because I don't feel like. I don't feel like I look to you.
I feel young. I still do the same stuff. I'm nearly 75 years old. I feel great.
I'm still rolling.
I preach almost every Sunday. I travel all over where I feel great. But the fact of the matter is, there come those moments when I start to get up out of a chair and I oh, M.G.
i am 74. I now feel it in my back.
But young people can't do that.
I spent 16 years as the president of two different universities, and I was surrounded by young adults. And I love the little brats.
I mean, our beloved students, I love them. But they all have the same failing.
They not only think they're going to live forever, they think they're going to live forever young.
They look at old dudes like me and they think, what happened to him?
They cannot imagine that I ever looked like them, that I was ever young. They can't contemplate that reality. Because if I was once young as they are now, and now I'm old, the extrapolation of that thought, ooh, they might someday.
But they don't believe that. They do not believe. They think they will live forever and live forever young. How old are you, son?
Fifteen.
Perfect.
Look right up here.
Preachers all over America today preaching good news. Good news. I've come to you with really bad news.
Look up here, son. I am your future.
As you were so once was I.
As I am you soon will be.
Yeah. Rub it in. She says that must be his mother.
Yeah.
We're all.
Time is passing, our bodies are getting older, and the fact of the matter is we're all going to die.
Now listen to Dr. Mark.
You can die physically and go straight to heaven, or you can die physically and go straight to hell.
I don't know any simpler or clearer way to say it. The poison of death is coursing in our veins.
There is, of course, the doctrine of original sin.
The only people that don't believe in original sin are childless.
But I want to say something to you. No one in this room will go to hell because of original sin.
We've done quite enough on our own.
Our sin is real.
I rebel.
Do you see what this passage means?
It means it's not just adultery or murder or theft, murmuring, rebellion.
Just being argumentative and difficult is plenty enough to let the snake bite of sin destroy you physically and eternally.
That's the hard thing to realize when you read the sins of the Bible. Do you realize that envy and gossip are listed between murder and adultery?
We're all guilty.
This snake of sin and death has bitten everyone in the room.
Everyone in the room will die physically and everyone in the room will have to. There will have to be a decision made eternally about everyone. Everyone in the room, those that are watching online, every one of us will die. It's so hard. We live in a kind of ongoing denial about ourselves and about each other.
You get that newborn baby, that sweet little baby, and you look at this little baby and the cute little cupid mouth and you say, oh, look at this sweet little baby girl. That's a darling. It's a little thing. You can't believe that 15 years from now that sweet little mouth will sass you.
Life is real. Life is real. Life is earnest. But the grave is not the goal.
God doesn't want one person in this room. God does not want one person in this room. Are you listening to me? God does not want one person in this room to die eternally.
He has raised up a mechanism of faith, a serpent in the wilderness that has the capacity to heal us, everyone.
But if we make it into traditional religion, we turn it into Nehushtan.
If we think for one moment because my parents take me to church that I'm saved, then it's nothing but a brass thing. It's Nehushtan.
I have to look on the serpent. I have to look on him that is lifted up. I have to have faith. It has to not be my parents thing.
My parents thing won't work for me. My wife, husbands, men. You need to listen to me. And more than one husband that fools himself into believing that somehow or another his wife is gonna get him in the door. It's not gonna happen, brother.
You're snake bitten.
You're snake bitten. We all are.
But God has lifted up a means by which we can be eternally, transcendently, supernaturally healed.
God is not going to remove us from the valley of the snakes.
They're all there.
We live in a world that's snake bitten.
We live with sinful people. That's what Isaiah said. I'm a man of Unclean lips. And I dwell among a people of unclean lips. The snakebite of sin and death is among us and no one is exempt.
The Bible puts it this way.
All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
All have sinned once. You can ever look in the mirror and say, I am snake bitten.
Many years ago I went to make a visit in a nursing home to a lady that was in my church. She was in a semi private room and I talked with her and prayed with her. There was a curtain there. And then as I started out of the room, the lady in the other bed said, come over on my side. I went over there and she said, are you a minister? I said, yes ma', am, I sure am.
Would you like me to have a prayer with you? And she said, I would. I said, are you a Christian? She said, yes, I am.
And I said, well then, let's pray. And I started to pray. Lord, we thank you that you have forgiven us of our sins. And she put her hand over my arm and she said, stop right there, young man.
She said, I want you to know I've never done anything in my life for which I had to ask God's forgiveness.
That old lady was already dead and she just didn't know it.
I'm telling you, this is the scriptural truth.
We are all snake bitten.
We will all die physically.
And unless you look upon him who is lifted up in the wilderness of our lives, even this same Jesus and him crucified, you will not only die physically, you die will, you will die spiritually.
But God doesn't want it. That's the wonderful News of John 3:16.
God lifts Jesus up the cross wasn't the idea of the Roman government.
Jesus is the Lamb slain from the foundation.
He used Rome, he used the Sanhedrin, he used hateful people. In order to execute his purpose. Somebody had to lift that serpent up in the wilderness.
He used Rome.
He used the satanic impulse to want to kill God because Jesus had to be lifted up.
So what does it mean?
It says he became sin.
Listen to this.
He became sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Christ.
That's. That's huge.
That's huge.
Him who had never known a sin, never committed a sin, never thought a sin was absolutely sinless, perfect, had never known a moment of separation from God the Father Almighty, that all of the sin in the whole world that has ever been committed or ever will be committed was fastened into him. And he became sin itself. He became the curse.
The Cross, Forget the world.
What about in this room?
What if just the sin in this room was gathered up in some supernatural way and bound into some kind of cord and fastened into the body of a sinless creature all at one moment?
Imagine the horror that has never known a moment of separation.
The only place in the New Testament where Jesus calls his Father God is on the cross.
Everywhere else he says, father, Father, Father, Father. On the cross he cries out, quoting Psalm 22, Eli, Eli Lama Shabbachthani.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
The God forsakeness was not the physical pain of the cross.
It was the absorption of our sin into his sinless body. He became the curse.
The snake that was biting me, the poison that coursed in my veins and from which I deserve to die now was fastened into him, all of us, so that we may look upon him and be healed.
Dwydell Moody tells a story that he was on a bus, on a train.
Dwy Dil Moody said. On the train there was a young man who sat next to him and said, look, I ran away from home.
Been gone. Living in rebellion, living in sin. He said, I sent a telegram to my dad and said, I'd like to come home, but if you will let me come home.
Then the train comes near our farm, and it goes slow around the bend, and our farm is up on the right. Tie a handkerchief on the mailbox and I'll get off in town and come back.
So the boy said to Moody, I can't stand a look.
He said, would you look for me?
So they turned the bend, and Moody said, look, son, look.
The sheets, bed sheets were on the fences.
Bed sheets were on the bushes, Bed sheets tied in the trees.
The old man was by the railroad track, flapping his sheet.
All he wanted was a handkerchief from the mailbox and there were sheets in the trees.
All we want is to say, oh, God, somehow is there some way I can just escape hell? And God says, I have more, so much more. I'll give you everything. I'll give you all that I have.
I'll take everything that you've ever done, everything you've ever thought of, every sin you've ever committed, and I will fasten it into the sinless body of my own son so that he will experience your death and your hell and your snakebite and the venom of your death, which you deserve. I will put on him that never deserved one second of it, that he will die, that you may live.
And Jesus says, look up here.
Look up here.
In faith and be healed.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr.markrutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
