Look & Live!

A conversation on snakes, shame, and unwanted desires

This past weekend I held a photography exhibition. I had been working on this project for about 2 months. Throughout the night there were about 50 people gathered around creativity, music, and fun. It was a beautiful blur.

photos of photos

But now that that’s over I want to have a conversation. A conversation about a peculiar story found in the book of Numbers chapter 21 and how this story might help us heal from the skeletons and secrets in our closets.

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There is a curious story found in the Book of Numbers. It’s actually translated as the “book of the wilderness” for it tells the story of a people moving from slavery through the wilderness and into the land of diginity and idenity.

The story is set in the ancient Near East, and it centres on a group of people – the Israelites – coming into formation as well, a people. The Israelites are establishing a language, culture, worship, practices, and rituals in light of their liberation from slavery.

The people are en route to a long-awaited land of promise and peace. And the story of the wilderness “alternates between the heights of obedience and hope and the lows of rebellion and despair.”¹

In other words, like every people group in history, they get some right and a lot wrong.

In chapter 21 the people find themselves at a low. After moaning and complaining that Moses and God freed them only to make them suffer in the wilderness (oh how we moderns miss the irony!) – snakes begin attacking the Israelites.

They cry for help to the God they just cursed - and then God tells their leader Moses to create a bronze serpent, put it on a tall stick and anyone looking into the serpent's eyes will be healed. The RSV reads:

And the people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.” 

6 Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. 

7 And the people came to Moses, and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 

8 And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” 

9 So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.²

A lot is happening here theologically and literarily.

But one interpretation I’ve been pondering is the idea that our greatest healing comes not when we look away or conceal our pain, wounds, and malformed desires but when we meet our very pain face-on.

When we look the snake in the eyes.

God’s Curious Pursuit

Let’s take the example of sexually unwanted desires.

Whether it be addiction to porn, lust, or sexually destructive or harmful patterns and habits. Anything that diminishes the beauty and capacity of our God-given desires of sexual intimacy. Because the reality is our sexuality, attractions, and sexual desires are a gift.³ Thanks be to God that we can see and delight in beauty.

But what happens when these desires take on unwanted forms? Again, let’s talk about the sexual desires that have run amok in our lives.  

For those that have struggled with pornography - How many times have you shared with a trusted pastor or leader your failures in lust or pornography only to be met with what I like to call “lust management.” The conversation usually goes something like this:

• Get accountability software

• Call someone when you’re feeling “tempted” (ie horny)

• Read more of your bible

• Good luck!

These are all good things, but they are not sustainable.

paintings are wild

Maybe you do well for a week or two, then find yourself back in the place you’d promised to return. And you spiral for days, then wallow in shallow and think “This is just who I am.” That sucks and that is not the life on offer in and through Jesus.⁴

What if instead of judgment and self-deprecation we chose to explore our unwanted desires through the lens of grace, curiosity, and compassion?⁵ As A.J. Swoboda argues the places of pain and shame are perhaps the places God wants to do his best work.⁶

So could it be that by befriending the skeletons and snakes in our closets we might truly experience healing?

Where are you going?

In his phenomenal book Unwanted, Therapist Jay Stringer makes a strong case that the key to undoing our sexually unwanted desires is not running from them, gritting our teeth and trying harder but like the snake-bitten Israelites looking at places of pain head-on.⁷

Stringer writes, “if you want to understand why you are addicted to something, you have to understand the conditions that keep you in place.”

After all, we are each as sick as our secrets. So, if you find your soul anguished and hopeless. I’ve got good news.

Like the exploited and exhausted maid Hagar (Genesis 16), God’s voice to us in the middle of our pain is not condemnation, anger, or aloofness but curiosity and kindness.⁸

The invitation of God to his people in the wilderness of the Ancient near east is the same for you and I today. Jesus, the God-Man, reminds us that he came to seek and save the lost and hurting.⁹

God longs to liberate and heal us more than we could ever hope, dare, dream or imagine. Put differently, perhaps the place God wants to work most deeply in our lives is not where we shine but the shameful and wounded parts of our souls and stories. Is that not the power of the resurrection? (2 Cor 12).

As the late poet Robert Bly eloquently put it:

Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genuis will be.¹⁰

So, will we allow our hearts to waste and wander from the venom of secrets and shame? Or will we look at the One whom like the bronze serpent was lifted up to heal our wounds once and for all?

1. Jay Sklar, Tremper Longman III, & Scot McKnight, Numbers: The Story of God Bible Commentary, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 2023), introduction.

2. Number 21:5-9 RSV

3. Writer and Professor A.J. Swoboda, argues that the female orgasm is a great argument for the existence of a benevolent God. “It turns out (this is no joke) that biologists can provide zero anatomical explanation as to why the female body can climax with an orgasm from an evolutionary perspective…. Could it be that we worship God that gives the gift of pleasure just because?” See A.J. Swoboda, The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War of Our Wants (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024), chapter 10.

4. “The reality that more than half our faith leaders and the great majority of Christians view pornography should indicate that our strategies have proven ineffective,” writes Jay Stringer. See Jay Stringer, Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2018), xxvi.

5. There are interesting studies done on the correlation between addiction and shame. See Andrew Bauman, “Self-Contempt as Addiction", Allender Center, June 22, 2017, https://theallendercenter.org/2017/06/self-contempt-addiction/, Andrew Bauman, “When Shame is Deeper than Salvation,” Allender Center, October 22, 2015, https://theallendercenter.org/2015/10/shame-deeper-than-salvation/.

6. Swoboda, The Gift of Thorns, 121.

7. This is easily the most helpful, honest, and hopeful book on the subject of sexual addiction I have ever read.

8. The power of this passage was first brought to my attention by Dr Brian Harris in my Pastoral Ministry unit. See also Kellay Chapman, "Untangling Our Stories," Allender Center, March 13, 2018; Stringer, Unwanted, xxiii.

9. Mark 2:17.

10. Here “man” is used in a general sense for humankind. Quote borrowed from Jefferson Bethske and Jon Tyson, Facing Shawdows: Overcoming 7 Lies That Keep Men From Becoming Fully Alive, (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2024), xxiv. Originally from: Robert Bly, Iron John (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015), 43.