First cut of Num 21:4-9

1) Now we’re talking: snakes in the wilderness. Samuel L. Jackson with Moses.I assume they are fiery serpents, burning serpents, either because of glittering skin, or the burning of the poison of their bites.
2) The best job I have ever seen with our texts today is a sermon by James Kay in Seasons of
Grace. Not only that, he is one of the rare preaching professors who publishes short sermons, actual 12-15 minutes sermons.
3)Recall Dennis Olson’s path in his Birth of the New book.The original generation cannot move from slavery to freedom, so they will fail to reach the Promised Land in favor of a new generation. for their complaining they get killed off.
4) A good sermon could make a distinction between lament prayers and this sort of complaining.
5) I don’t know what to make of the cure not being the snakes being removed but this bronze, shiny image. A really powerful image is looking up at it instead of down at the snakes. Maybe we have a hint of homeopathy and getting a touch of the poison.
6) This image apparently then gets destroyed later in a purge against idolatry by a later king of Israel, Hezekiah. Why this snake would not be a graven image in the first place mystifies me.
7) We are in the middle of some wordplay here. nahash means serpent and nahoshet is brass/bronze/ Isaiah links this to seraphs as fiery serpents in a number of places 14, 30.
Is the image a sort of sympathetic magic so that the shiny serpent image counters the fiery serpent bite? We have some evidence of snake worship in Canaan.
8)I suppose one could make a good study of the serpent’s mythic power throughout Scripture.
I don;t know how far we could go in linking this story with Gen.3