After the people put God to the test, He sends deadly serpents among them. The terrified Israelites beg Moses to appeal to the Lord to end this plague. However, rather than removing the serpents, the Lord gives peculiar instructions. He tells Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole, to which anyone bitten by the poisonous serpents can look and be saved from death. Jesus and Paul will point to this episode to reveal both a wonderful prophecy about the crucifixion, and an important warning for us.