God’s Image Study — Inside the Mind — Where the Word Leads
We return to Commandment 2 after our connected False Christs Study with a question:
Can something associated with God’s work become an object of misplaced devotion?
The bronze serpent gives us a concrete account to examine. We must follow its beginning, its purpose, and what people later did with it.
In Numbers 21, the people speak against God and Moses. Serpents come among them, and many die. The people acknowledge their sin and ask Moses to pray for them.
Moses prays. YHWH (יהוה) then instructs him to make a serpent and place it on a standard. Those who have been bitten are to look at it and live. Moses makes the bronze serpent, and the passage records the promised result. See Numbers 21:4–9.
The object’s origin matters.
Unlike the golden calf, this serpent was made in response to God’s instruction. The passage identifies a particular purpose and the action the bitten person was to take.
Making it and looking at it belonged to that instruction. Burning incense to it was not part of the instruction given here.
Now move forward to Hezekiah’s reign.
Second Kings identifies the bronze serpent as the one Moses had made. Hezekiah breaks it into pieces, and the account supplies the reason:
“for until those days the sons of Israel were burning incense to it”
— 2 Kings 18:4, LSB
The surrounding verses describe Hezekiah as doing what was right, trusting YHWH (יהוה), and keeping the commandments given through Moses.
Preserving Moses’ object and keeping God’s instruction were no longer the same thing.
The object had a genuine connection to God’s earlier work. Yet that history did not authorize the devotion people later gave it.
An authorized beginning does not authorize every later use.
Jesus brings another important detail into the comparison. In John 3:14–15, he connects Moses lifting up the serpent with the Son of Man being lifted up, and speaks of eternal life for the believer. See John 3:14–15.
We should preserve the correspondence he identifies: the lifting up and the connection with life. The passage does not direct people to offer devotion to the bronze object.
This helps us distinguish an object’s role in an account from the response people later choose to give it.
That distinction belongs in our examination of religious imagery today.
A cross, a statue, a treasured object, or an image may be described as a reminder of something sacred. The explanation should lead us to examine what actually happens:
What does the object represent?
What power or protection is attributed to it?
What acts of devotion are directed toward it?
Is its religious history being used to place its treatment beyond examination?
Would questioning the practice be treated as rejecting God himself?
These questions concern what people believe and do. Calling something a reminder does not settle every question about how it is treated.
The bronze serpent makes that examination especially searching. Someone could accurately say that Moses made it under God’s instruction. That statement would still leave unanswered whether burning incense to it was faithful.
We can apply the same care when considering something we have inherited or cherished. Its age, familiarity, or association with a meaningful experience does not remove the need to examine our present response.
Perhaps an object has become something we believe we cannot approach God without. Perhaps defending a practice has become more important than considering the passages that challenge it. Perhaps our attachment is so familiar that we no longer notice what we are asking the object to provide.
These are questions for ourselves as well as others.
Our False Christs Study examined claims to represent Christ. Here we examine a physical object with a real place in the biblical account. The subjects differ, but both call us to distinguish what God supplied from what people subsequently claim or do.
The bronze serpent’s history brings us back to allegiance:
Am I responding to God’s instruction—or giving something associated with him a devotion that instruction never required?
Threads to Follow
Looking → living → believing: Compare Numbers 21:8–9 with John 3:14–15. Which details does Jesus connect, and what response does he identify?
Commanded craftsmanship → intended purpose: Read Exodus 25:18–22. What does God specify about the cherubim and his meeting with Moses?
Idols in the heart → a stumbling block before the face: Read Ezekiel 14:1–8. How can inward allegiance affect what a person seeks outwardly?
Trusting an object → becoming like it: Examine Psalm 115:4–8. What does the passage say about the makers and those who trust?
The books were opened…
🌿 By Maria Emilia
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