The Fiery Wrath of God

                                 Numbers 21:5-9 (KJB)

One of the human sins that most angers God happens to be when people whom God has liberated from slavery complains about how God is treating them. The Israelites complained about the manna that God had given them to eat, but they had forgotten that God had promised them a land flowing with milk and honey. They may not have had as much water as they desired, but they must have had enough because no one of them died of thirst.

God punished them for their sins by sending fiery serpents among them and their bites killed some of the people. God's punishment for sin is always temporary, never eternal. The Bible relates that every time God killed humans with His fiery wrath He never said it was eternal. God provided only temporary punishments to Adam and Eve and so to all of their descendants. The fact that God made Eve "the mother of all living," and all humans are alive in God's sight proves that God never consigns eternal punishment to any living human. Genesis 3:14-20; Luke 20:38 (KJB). This fact does not mean that living humans were not in danger of eternal death injected into them by the Devil. But God sent His Son to take that eternal death, along with all the sins and evil that causes it, upon Himself on a cruel cross and rose from the dead victorious over it all. Genesis 3:15; John 6:33; John 12:31-32; John 12:47; Revelation 1:17-18 (KJB).

II Timothy 1:10 clearly teaches that Jesus came to abolish death itself, not any living human. This verse further states that Jesus "brought life and immortality to light" through His death, burial, and resurrection. Christ has made a way to save all of His living humans from eternal death, some by His grace and all others when He appears to them within the regions of death in the end of the world. John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14 (KJB).

When the people confessed to God that they had sinned, God instructed Moses to make a fiery serpent and put it on a pole so that everyone who looked at it would be saved from the death that the serpents bite caused. The crawling serpents were fiery and the brass serpent on the pole looked fiery because they symbolized the fact that the Devil had injected sin, evil, and eternal death in a burning Hell into the inner beings of every human whom God creates. Genesis 2:17; Genesis 3:15 (KJB). But the fiery brass serpent also represented Christ nailed to a cross to save all humans who look to Him in faith that only His power over evil and the Devil can save them. John 12:47; John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14 (KJB).

When Jesus died on the cross, He dismissed His Spirit who descended into Hell and left behind there all of the sins, evil, and eternal deaths that Jesus had borne on the cross. The Father and the Spirit also suffered to save humanity. Psalm 16:10-11; Acts 2:25-31; Luke 23:46; Matthew 27:46 (KJB). This can only mean that any living human who looks to Christ in faith while still alive in the flesh will be saved by God's grace, and every living human "on the earth and under the earth" who looks to Jesus in faith when He visits them in the end of the world will be saved by God's mercy, and God will give them an eternal life with new bodies on His recreated earth. John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14; Genesis 8:20-21; John 11:25-26; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 21:1-5; Revelation 22:11-12 (KJB).