deliver Him to death, is He
at last slain and proved to be dead, so certainly dead that not a bone
of Him need be broken? Then in this we are to read that sin is thus
doomed by God, has been judged by Him, and was in the cross of Christ
slain and put an end to--so utterly slain that there is left in it not
any so faint a flicker or pulsation of life that a second blow need be
given to prove it really dead.

When we strive to get a little closer to the reality and understand in
what sense, and how, Christ represented sin on the cross, we recognise
first of all that it was not by His being in any way personally tainted
by sin. Indeed, had He Himself been in the faintest degree tainted by
sin this would have prevented Him from representing sin on the cross. It
was not an actual serpent Moses suspended, but a serpent of brass. It
would have been easy to kill one of the snakes that were biting the
people, and hang up its body. But it would have been useless. To exhibit
one slain snake would only have suggested to the people how many were
yet alive. Being itself a real snake, it could have no virtue as a
symbol. Whereas the brazen serpent represented all snakes. In it each
snake seemed to be represented. Similarly, it was not one out of a
number of real sinners that was suspended on the cross, but it was one
made "in the likeness of sinful flesh." So that it was not the sins of
one person which were condemned and put an end to there, but sin
generally.

This was easily intelligible to those who saw the crucifixion. John the
Baptist had pointed to Jesus as the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin
of the world. How does a Lamb take away sin? Not by instruction, not by
example, but by being sacrificed; by standing in the room of the sinner
and suffering instead of him. And when Jesus, Himself without sin, hung
upon the cross, those who knew His innocence perceived that it was as
the Lamb of God He suffered, and that by His death they were delivered.

Another point of analogy between the lifting-up of the serpent and the
lifting-up of the Son of Man on the cross is to be found in the
circumstance that in each case the healing result is effected through a
moral act on the part of the healed person. A look at the brazen
serpent was all that was required. Less could not have been asked: more,
in some cases, could not have been given. If deliverance from the pain
and danger of the snake-bite had been all that God desired, He might