In Numbers 21, the children of Israel became discouraged in the wilderness of sin. “’And the people spoke against God,’ that is against Christ, their chief conductor, whom they tempted, 1 Corinthians 10:19." (John Wesley)— “And against Moses [saying]: ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this light bread.’ Their words are full of contradictions. “This light bread - hakkelokel, a word of excessive scorn; as if they had said, This intuitive, unsubstantial, cheat - stomach stuff...” (Adam Clarke), "which in truth had sustained them on the journeys thus far." (John Gill)
“‘So the LORD sent FIERY serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died.’—…. If ‘fiery’ is the correct rendering, it probably refers to their venomous bite which produced a burning inflammation. The article may imply ‘the serpents so well known to the readers by tradition.’ The punishment by serpents is referred to in 1 Corinthians 10:9 as a warning to Christians." (Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges) Many claim that it is not a warning of final punishment but I disagree. It is about the sting of death whose threat should be well known for "in the day you eat thereof you shall surely die."
The people came to Moses and confessed their sins and asked that he intercede for them. The issue is about "answering the judgment of God” (Darby)— either temporal or final. “Moses interceded once again, as he often did, for the rebellious, complaining people of Israel… Notice, God did not give the people what they asked for. They asked for God to take away the snakes.” (Jefferson Vann) But instead God provided a way of escape for the people of God.
GOD'S PROVISION- "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.” "All the fitness He requireth, Is to feel your need of Him" (Come Ye Sinners) This story speaks against universal reconciliation or relief from the Judgment of God. “Moses lifted up the snake on a pole, many Israelites disapproved of God’s command to look at it because it wasn’t pleasant. Only believing Israelites—and no one else—understood and were healed because of their faith in the Word.” (Martin Luther)
GOSPEL OF JOHN— Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, came to Jesus at night "enveloped, as he was, in the darkness of ignorance, and not yet come to the light, i.e. the belief that our Lord was very God. Night in the language of Holy Writ is put for ignorance." (Haymo) —
"and asked Him, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” And Jesus' answer cuts to the chase— “You must be born again to enter the Kingdom of God!”— “In order to be saved, you must believe that I am the Son of God. By this knowledge, I will create a new heart in you, making you a new creature "with a new nature, new habits of life, new tastes, new desires, new appetites, new judgments, new opinions, new hopes, and new fears." (J. C. Ryle)
Jesus "introduces the teacher of the Mosaic law, to the spiritual sense of that law; by a passage from the OT history, which was intended to be a figure of His Passion, and of man's salvation." (Bede)—> “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15) “When man is offered ‘eternal life’ or ‘everlasting life,’ he is literally being offered perpetual existence ... but by the grace of the Father, and again, only through Jesus Christ… Faith, or belief, is here established as the key to immortality.” (Asleep in Christ by Helaine Burch)
Jesus is that true Bread from heaven! “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) “Unless he was theologically prejudiced, Nicodemus would have simply interpreted Jesus to mean that people who don’t believe in Him will perish, and in contrast with that, people who do believe in Jesus will not perish, but will enjoy the opposite fate of perishing, that is, living forever.” (The Hell Debate, Part 2 – A Continued Look at Annihilationism by David Servant)
“‘Perish’ is almost a synonym of ‘die.’ [Bruner, The Gospel of John, 203,’] Bruce notes that ‘to perish’ is the alternative to having eternal life, and compares with 8:24 where ‘those who refuse to believe in Jesus will ‘die in their sins.’’ [375—Bruce, The Gospel of John, 90.] Similarly, Carson notes: ‘the alternative [to eternal life] is to perish (cf. also 10:28), to lose one’s life (12:25), to be doomed to destruction (17:12, cognate with ‘to perish’). There is no third option.’ [376— Carson, The Gospel according to John, 206.] So again, as we saw in several texts above, what we see here is a contrast between life and death. Clearly no everlasting torment can fit in any form or shape in this description.” (A Consuming Passion: Essays on Hell and Immortality in Honor of Edward Fudge (pp. 183-184, from The Extinction of Evil The Biblical Prerequisite for New Heavens, New Earth by Gordon L. Isaac)
IN SUMMARY: “It is demonstrably clear that those who accept Christ as Messiah and conduct their lives accordingly, will be given eternal life and will not suffer the ‘perishing’ of the ‘second death’ of other Scripture references (Rev. 2:11; 20:6, 12-15; 21:8). And what of those who do not accept this offer? They are also specifically addressed in this verse, not by name but by direct comparison, and in just as complete and deep a manner as the accepters are, though most readers apparently fail to observe this fact. The message is clear that those who accept the poured-out love from God through his Son, and who live accordingly, will have eternal life. Those who do the opposite will get the opposite: no eternal life. So, though John 3:16 is not normally used as a proof text for conditional immortality, it can be, and should be.”
(Henceforth— A Journal for Advent Christian Thought— John 3:16)
“Those Israelites... were mortal, so the snakebites were potentially fatal. They would die without the remedy that Moses gave them with the fashioned snake on a pole.… As Jesus was explaining to Nicodemus, that OT story applies to all of us. We will not all suffer the painful death of snakebite in the desert, but we all know the pain of sin, and know that without God’s provision for that problem, we will face permanent death.“ (Jefferson Vann) But Jesus “bids us come from North and South and East and West, and find salvation in the atonement made by God’s dear Son. It beckons to young and old, to high and low, to rich and poor, and overleaps all distinctions of race and caste and colour in its gracious eagerness to draw us back to the forgiving Father who loves us, and gave His Son to save us.” (J. Sidlow Baxter)
Two interpretations are before us: "We can hold to a penalty for sin that the literate secular world doesn’t take seriously because it’s inconceivable [the traditional view]. Or, we can read John 3:16 with the heart of a child and provide humanity with the answer to a profound concern that everyone longs for a solution to. Through faith in Christ, there is not only forgiveness of sins and a love relationship with God, there is rescue from death. Believers will not perish but have eternal life. If Christians were to take John 3:16 at face value, what a powerful message we would have to share with the world!” (Rescue from Death by Robert Taylor)
"These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." (Mat 25:46) Both fates of the wicked and the righteous "are said to be ‘eternal.’.. The promise to the righteous is life. The promise to the unrighteous is death… God has always placed before men two great destinies: life and death; the blessing and the curse (Deu 30:15-20).” (Al Maxey)
“My mind fails to conceive a grosser misinterpretation of language than when the five or six strongest words which the Greek tongue possesses, signifying 'destroy,' or 'destruction,' are explained to mean maintaining an everlasting but wretched existence. To translate black as white is nothing to this." (R. F. Weymouth) But Baxter, like other traditionalists, tries to make that very case. He affirms: “our English word ‘perish’ is not even a shade too harsh to represent the Greek word here. If we wish to verify this we can easily turn to other verses where this Greek word occurs. For instance, it comes in Matthew v. 29, where we have our Lord’s solemn words: ‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee, for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ It comes again in Matthew viii. 25, where we find the almost shipwrecked disciples exclaiming: ‘Lord, save us; we perish!’ And again it turns up in chapter ix. 17, where Jesus, speaking of the old-time skin bottles, says: ‘Neither do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish.’ Sometimes this Greek word is translated by our word ‘destroy.’It is thus rendered in Matthew ii. 13: ‘Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word; for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.’.” (God So Loved by J. Sidlow Baxter)
BUT THEN HE MAKES AN UNWARRANTED DISTINCTION between a perishing body and a perishing soul: “When the body perishes it gradually decomposes; so that besides having lost all consciousness, it loses any separate existence: but the soul does not perish with, or like, the body: it does not lose either its existence or its individual consciousness. Nothing is more plainly taught in Scripture than that.” (Baxter) But where is such a thing taught? ”Nothing in the passage suggests that an understood end should be understood as endless. There is no contextual argument. Rather, everything in the context would bind the meaning of perish to its plain and primary sense. From the immediate context of the brazen serpent in the wilderness upon which those who looked would not die from snake bite (Numbers 21:9), to the wider context of a spiritual birth versus a fleshly one, Christ’s transparent words appeal to commonly understood realities.” (Wholly Smoke! The Myth of Endless Torment By Bro. Bird)
“The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” (Eze 18:20)
“‘For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.’ (John 3:17) “Like the treacherous signal-boats that are sometimes stationed by wreckers off an iron-bound coast, the shifting systems of false religion are continually changing their places. Like them they attract only to bewilder, and allure only to destroy. How different from these floating and delusive systems is that unchanging Gospel of Christ which stands forth like the towering lighthouse of Eddystone, with its beacon blaze streaming far out over the midnight sea! The angry waves, through many a long year, have rolled in, thundering against its base. The winds of heaven have warred fiercely around its pinnacle. The rains have dashed against its gleaming lantern. But there it stands. It moves not, it trembles not; for it is ‘founded on a rock.’ Year after year the storm-stricken mariner looks out for its star-like light as he sweeps in through the English Channel. So is it with the unchanging Gospel of Christ. While other systems rise and fall, and pass into nothingness, this Gospel (like its immutable Author) is ‘the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’ While other false and flashing lights are extinguished, this, the ‘true light,’ ever shineth.” (Theodore Cuyler)
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