God tells Moses to throw the staff on the ground, and when he does, it becomes a snake, and Moses runs from it. The response is entirely human: he fled from it. Even the man being commissioned as the deliverer of a nation flinches at a snake. This is not a failure of faith but a reminder that Moses is a man, with the same instincts as every other man. God is not calling a statue; He is calling a person. Genesis 3:15 places the enmity between the seed of the woman and the serpent at the very beginning of the redemptive story; here Moses encounters its echo in sign form. Numbers 21:8–9 will later involve another serpent on a pole that brings healing to those who look at it, and Jesus in John 3:14 draws the direct line: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. The snake Moses runs from today is the sign of the enemy the deliverer will ultimately defeat.

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