The Ones Who Encouraged You to Look

The Serpent, Moses, and Jesus as Truth-Bearers — and the Price They Paid

*As always, my posts are not intended to teach, but rather to challenge all to take a deeper, more honest dive. Never take my word for it. Search for yourself. The whole point is to not follow blindly.

The Shape of Truth

There is a pattern that runs through the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament — consistent, structurally coherent, and almost entirely obscured by centuries of institutional interpretation. It is the pattern of the truth-bearer as villain: the figure who arrives not to comfort, not to confirm the existing order, but to force an encounter with what is real. Ugly, unmanaged, unmediated reality.

Three figures embody this pattern with striking symmetry: the serpent of Eden, the bronze Nehushtan lifted by Moses in the wilderness, and Jesus of Nazareth. Each offered the same essential thing — the opportunity to see. Each was punished or vilified for it. And in every case, the punishment was administered by the same force: the institution that depended on managed ignorance for its authority.

This is not a heterodox reading layered onto the text. It is the reading the text itself invites, when read in its own internal logic rather than through the doctrine built around it.

The Serpent of Eden — The First Truth-Teller

What the Serpent Actually Said

The serpent of Genesis 3 has borne the label of deceiver for millennia. But the text does not support it. Let us read what is actually written.

God* tells Adam and Eve: "You will surely die" if they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). The serpent tells Eve: "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:4-5).

They eat. They do not die. And then — in what should be the definitive verdict on who told the truth — God himself confirms the serpent's statement:

"Then the LORD God said, 'Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.'" — Genesis 3:22

The serpent said: you will know good and evil. God confirms: they know good and evil. The serpent's words are corroborated by God himself. What the serpent offered was not deception. It was gnosis — direct, experiential knowledge of the full spectrum of reality — in place of a managed, protected ignorance that God called paradise.

*You're likely wondering why God would place a prohibition. God in this context refers to YHWH Elohim. See The God Who Doesn't Need Your Applause: A Challenge to Monotheism, Divided Divine Characters, Worship Culture, and the Institutions Built Around Both for why I emphasize this distinction.

The Nature of What Was Offered

The garden was not a place of blessing in any liberatory sense. It was a place of shelter that functioned by exclusion — specifically the exclusion of knowledge. YHWH's prohibition was not designed to protect humanity from harm. It was designed to prevent a particular kind of awakening: the awakening to moral complexity, to the full weight of choice, to the experience of being a being who can distinguish between states of being rather than simply existing within one.

If blessing requires moral agency, then Eden's innocence was not liberation but protected dependence. A cage can be beautiful. A garden can be safe. But safety without knowledge is not freedom — it is containment.

The serpent did not promise ease. The serpent did not promise comfort. The serpent promised sight. "Your eyes will be opened." That is the offer on the table — not pleasure, not rebellion for its own sake, but the capacity to see.

Sight is what the institution has always most feared. A garden whose inhabitants cannot distinguish good from evil is a garden whose inhabitants cannot evaluate whether the gardener is acting in their interest. The prohibition on knowledge is the prohibition on critique.

The serpent broke that prohibition. It was called cursed for it. Its image became synonymous with evil. And the textual record was closed before most readers thought to ask: but did it lie?

It did not.

Moses and the Nehushtan — Look at What Kills You

The Bronze Serpent in the Wilderness

Numbers 21 records a crisis in the wilderness. The Israelites have spoken against God and against Moses. Poisonous serpents appear among the people; many are dying. YHWH instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it on a pole. The instruction is precise: anyone who is bitten must look at the serpent to be saved.

The mechanism is striking. The cure is not prayer. It is not sacrifice. It is not the intercession of a priest. It is a direct, individual act of looking — specifically at the image of the thing causing death. Those who looked lived. Those who refused to look died.

The Symbolic Grammar

This is not incidental. The logic embedded in the Nehushtan narrative is the same logic embedded in the serpent of Eden. The serpent represents the confrontation with what is real and what is feared. Eden's serpent represented the confrontation with the full knowledge of reality — good and evil, beauty and horror, creation and destruction. The Nehushtan represents the confrontation with death itself, lifted up and made visible rather than hidden.

The instruction is not: look away. It is not: trust in God without looking. It is: look directly at the thing you fear. Make the choice to see. That act of seeing — that refusal to avert the eyes — is what saves.

It is worth sitting with how counterintuitive this is within the framework of institutional religion, which so often asks for the opposite: trust without evidence, faith without sight, submission without interrogation. The Nehushtan inverts that logic entirely. The act of faith, here, is the act of looking.

What Happened to the Nehushtan

The bronze serpent Moses made was preserved. By 2 Kings 18:4, it had become an object of worship among the Israelites, who burned incense to it and called it Nehushtan. King Hezekiah destroys it in his religious reforms.

This detail is rarely examined, but it is revealing. The artifact of the confrontation with truth — the object that required the individual to choose to look — was first venerated and then destroyed by the reforming religious establishment. The serpent, again, ends as a casualty of institutional religion's need for managed engagement with the sacred.

Jesus and the Serpent — The Comparison He Drew Himself

John 3:14 — The Most Underread Verse

In the Gospel of John, Jesus offers what may be the most theologically dense comparison in the New Testament — and one of the least examined by mainstream Christianity:

"Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him." — John 3:14-15

Jesus does not compare himself to a king, a high priest, a judge, or a prophet in this passage. He compares himself to the bronze serpent. He explicitly invokes the Nehushtan — the image of the feared thing raised up, which saves those who choose to look at it.

This is not rhetorical accident. The author of John's Gospel understood the Nehushtan narrative precisely. The comparison is structural: as the serpent was lifted up and the people chose to look or not look, so Jesus would be lifted up — crucified, displayed — and people would choose to engage with what they saw or turn away from it. The mechanism of salvation in both cases is the same: the willingness to look directly at the thing the world treats as cursed.

The Ministry as a Sustained Act of Unmasking

Jesus's entire public ministry can be read as a continuous act of forced confrontation with truth — truth about power, about religious hypocrisy, about the gap between institutional practice and moral reality. He did not do this gently. He named the scribes and Pharisees as whitewashed tombs: clean on the surface, full of dead things inside (Matthew 23:27). He overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple, not as a tantrum but as a prophetic act exposing the corruption built into sacred space. He healed on the Sabbath, deliberately and publicly, to force the question of whether the law existed to protect human beings or to protect the institution.

In every encounter, Jesus functions as the serpent in Eden: here is what is true, here is what is real, here is what has been hidden from you. You may choose to see it or you may choose to look away. But the offer is on the table.

This is the ministry that killed him. Not blasphemy in any theological sense — but the unmasking of institutional power, the refusal to let the religious establishment manage the encounter between human beings and truth. The Temple system, the collaboration with Rome, the performance of piety over the practice of justice — Jesus named all of it. The execution was the institution's response.

The Cross as the Nehushtan

Lifted up on the cross, Jesus becomes, as he said, the serpent raised on the pole. The instrument of Roman execution — the thing the powerful used to destroy dissenters — becomes the image that, looked at directly, carries transformative weight. The cross is not sanitized in the gospel accounts. It is brutal, public, shameful in the eyes of the Roman world.

And yet the gospel says: look at it. Do not look away. The early Christian proclamation was not that Jesus avoided death but that death was looked at directly and something was found on the other side of it. The symbol of state execution becomes the symbol of liberation — but only for those who are willing to look at it for what it is.

The pattern holds.

The Institutional Logic of Villain-Making

Why Truth-Tellers Become Enemies

The pattern across all three figures is not coincidental. It reflects a consistent structural reality: managed ignorance is a source of institutional power. When people cannot evaluate what is true, they must rely on intermediaries to tell them what is true. The priest, the scholar, the king, the institution — these figures derive authority from their position between ordinary people and unmediated reality.

The truth-bearer — the one who removes the intermediary and says here, see for yourself — is therefore not just inconvenient to the institution. The truth-bearer is an existential threat to it. The garden cannot survive an awakened population. The Temple cannot survive transparent accounting. The empire cannot survive people who have looked directly at what the cross means and decided they are not afraid of it.

So the institution does what institutions do. It names the threat. It reframes the truth-bearer as the villain. The serpent becomes the agent of evil. The Nehushtan becomes an idol that must be smashed. Jesus becomes the blasphemer who deserved execution. In each case, the reframing serves the same purpose: to make the act of looking dangerous, transgressive, disobedient. To ensure that the next person who encounters the offer to see thinks twice about accepting it.

The Cost of Consistency

It is significant that the vilification is not limited to death. The serpent did not die in Eden — it was cursed, stripped of dignity, made to be feared and despised across all subsequent generations. The Nehushtan was destroyed by the very tradition it came from. Jesus was tortured before he was killed, and the torture was public — designed not only to end his life but to communicate to everyone watching what happened to people who did what he did.

The punishment for being a truth-bearer is disproportionate because the threat is existential. You do not respond to an existential threat with measured proportionality. You respond with maximum force and maximum reputational damage. You want the example to be legible across generations.

Snakes are still feared and loathed in ways that exceed rational threat assessment. The Nehushtan is forgotten. And Jesus is remembered — but largely in a form that the institutional church has shaped to remove the danger from his message, replacing the disruptive truth-teller with a figure of comfort, submission, and deferred justice.

Truth as the Ugly Thing

There is a reason the offer in all three cases is uncomfortable. Truth, as these figures present it, is not reassuring. The knowledge of good and evil is not a gift that makes life easier — it is a burden that makes life more complicated. The serpent's gift came with consequence, not because the serpent was punishing humanity, but because sight has cost. You cannot unsee what you have seen.

The Nehushtan required the dying Israelites to look at the image of the thing killing them. That is not comfortable. That is a demand for radical unflinching engagement with mortality — the same mortality they were trying to escape. The cure required the confrontation.

Jesus offered people a vision of the world that exposed the violence on which their religious and political systems rested. That is not comforting news. The kingdom of God, as Jesus described it, is not a better version of the existing order. It is its inversion: the last become first, the powerful are sent away empty, the meek inherit the earth. If you are among the powerful, this is not good news. If you are among the comfortable, this is not good news.

Truth, as these figures offer it, is ugly because reality is ugly. The garden was a beautiful lie. The wilderness was dying people in the desert. The cross was state execution. The truth-bearer does not beautify these things. The truth-bearer says: look. Look at what is actually here. And then choose.

The choice is always the hinge point. No figure in this lineage compels anyone. The serpent offers, Eve chooses. The Nehushtan is raised, the individual looks or does not look. Jesus speaks, and everyone in range of his voice decides what to do with it. The vilification that follows is always about the offer, never about compulsion. The truth-bearer never forces the encounter. The institution fears that the offer will be accepted.

The Lineage of the Lifted Thing

The serpent, the Nehushtan, and Jesus occupy the same structural position in the symbolic grammar of the biblical text. Each appears at a moment of crisis. Each offers a confrontation with reality rather than an escape from it. Each requires individual choice rather than institutional mediation. And each is punished, vilified, or destroyed by the power structures that cannot survive transparent encounter with truth.

This is not a coincidence of theme. The author of John's Gospel understood it well enough to place the comparison explicitly in Jesus's mouth. The symbolic grammar is consistent: what is lifted up and called cursed is precisely what saves — but only for those willing to look at it.

The snake got a bad reputation because it told the truth. The Nehushtan was destroyed because people kept returning to it without the priests' permission. Jesus was killed because he would not stop naming what he saw. The pattern holds across centuries, across genres of text, across the full arc of the canon.

What that pattern tells us is not that truth is rare. It tells us that truth-telling is costly, that the cost is structurally imposed by those whose authority depends on its absence, and that the offer — to look, to see, to know — is always available. The question in every generation is the same one it has always been.

Will you look?

Important Note: I do not write my observations on theology arbitrarily nor to be intentionally controversial. There are real-world consequences, which can be seen throughout history if you take a close look. See my article, The Mirror We Refuse to Hold: What Evil Actually Is, and Why It Believes It Is Good for an in-depth dissection.

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Ashley Sophia is a model, actress, entrepreneur, and engineer. She applies systems thinking from her engineering background to understanding human behavior and building community pathways to independence — translating analytical expertise into accessible resources for the public.