When poisonous serpents brought death among the Israelites in the wilderness, God instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent and place it on a pole. Anyone who had been bitten could look at the raised serpent and live. The event demonstrated both God's judgment upon sin and His gracious provision of a means of deliverance. The bronze serpent itself possessed no saving power; life came through trusting and obeying the remedy God had provided.

Jesus explicitly applies this event to Himself in John 3:14-15: just as Moses raised the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life. John 12:32-33 later makes clear that Jesus' being "lifted up" refers to the manner of His death. This is therefore one of Scripture's clearest examples of typology because Jesus Himself identifies the correspondence. The Israelites looked upon God's provision and received physical life; sinners look in faith to the crucified Christ and receive eternal life. The wilderness sign thus becomes a powerful anticipation of salvation through the cross.