In John 1 there is the tabernacle. Verse 14 says that when the tabernacle came in the flesh, He was full of grace. Don’t consider that grace is merely unmerited favor. That is too vague. We don’t need to guess what is grace. Even the Bible does not allow us to guess anything. This is God’s revelation. God’s revelation does not need our guessing and our inference.
John 1 says that the tabernacle is among us full of grace and truth. Then it says, “Behold, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world” (v. 29)! This is the first item of grace! The first item of grace is the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the world.
In the Gospel of John this tabernacle was traveling and talking to people. Nicodemus, an old gentleman, who was very ethical and very moral, came to Him in the night. He was a teacher and a ruler of the Jews. He came to talk to this tabernacle. But by that time he had not entered into the tabernacle. He was talking with the tabernacle outside of the tabernacle. In this wonderful talk the tabernacle indicated to him, a teacher of the Old Testament, that he surely should know what Moses did. At one time Moses lifted up a brass serpent on a pole because the children of Israel had been bitten by poisonous serpents in the wilderness. Because the children of Israel were bitten by serpents, they needed a serpent to be judged on the pole on their behalf. So Moses lifted up a brass serpent in the wilderness. It had the form of the poisonous serpent, but it did not have the poisonous nature. Whoever had been bitten by the serpent and was dying, had only to lift up his eyes and look at the brass serpent, and God healed him, making him alive (Num. 21).
Then the tabernacle talked to this old gentleman teacher telling him that as Moses had lifted up the brass serpent on the pole, the Son of Man, this tabernacle, this One in the flesh as a Son of Man in humanity, would be lifted up. The next verse, 3:15, says, “That every one who believes in Him may have eternal life,” that is, to be made alive. These two verses show us the fulfillment of the type in Numbers 21:8-9. Verse 16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that every one who believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” These three verses together show us Christ as the sin offering. He was the sin offering so that Nicodemus might enjoy the One who came to him.
Why in chapter one is there the Lamb and in chapter three the brass serpent? This is to indicate something deeper. In chapter one there is the Lamb, and there is sin, not sins. But in chapter three there is a brass serpent replacing the Lamb and the poison of the serpent replacing sin. In other words, the very Lamb of God in chapter one became the brass serpent. The sin in chapter one became the poison of the serpent in you. You have to realize that sin in you is just the poison of the old serpent, Satan the Devil. In the eyes of God every descendant of Adam is a serpent, full of poison. This poisonous person is the flesh. And Christ as the Son of God and as the Word of God became flesh. But this does not mean that Christ became flesh with the sinful nature. Christ became flesh having only the form and the likeness, not the nature. This is like the brass serpent. It had the form and the likeness but not the poison of the poisonous serpent.
Second Corinthians 5:21 says that “Him Who did not know sin He made sin on our behalf, that we might become God’s righteousness in Him.” Concerning this matter Romans 8:3 says, “God sending His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and concerning sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” The Word became flesh but without the sinful nature, without the poison of the serpent.
You have to see that sin within us equals our flesh, even equals us. We, sin, and flesh are synonyms. You are sin, you are flesh, and you are you. Christ was made flesh in your sinful likeness, but without your sinful nature. He knew no sin. He had nothing to do with sin, but He was made sin. When He died on the cross He was at that moment a serpent in the eyes of God. But He was a serpent only in likeness and in form, not in nature. Don’t forget that the serpent in the wilderness which was lifted up was a brass serpent. No one could say that a brass serpent has the nature of poison. But surely it has the form and the likeness of the serpent.
In the Gospel of John there is the tabernacle and the first main offering, the sin offering. I doubt that Nicodemus, on the night that the Lord Jesus was talking to him, was so clear what the Lord Jesus meant when He referred to the brass serpent. But it may be after the Lord was resurrected, when the Spirit came, and through the help of the other brothers, that he found out the brass serpent referred to the Lord Jesus as his sin offering. It was through such a sin offering that he entered into the enjoyment of the Lord. But this entering into the enjoyment of the Lord might not have been in John 3. This might have come later.