How did the healing come to the dying Hebrew who looked at the brazen serpent? Not from any efficacy in the serpent, not from any magical virtue in the look; the new life that came to him came direct from God. Why, then, did God interpose the looking at the serpent? Why did God make the cure dependent on a gaze at a serpent erected there by Moses? I will tell you why. It was not the look; it was the change of heart that was in the look that God wanted. The real mischief that had to be undone was not the bodily death of those men; there was a worse evil than that, there was the loss of faith in God, the fracture of a loving dependence on God. That is the essence of all sin. Sin is disobedience to God. It means that you snatch your life out of God's hand, that you will not live according to God's will, that you make yourself your God; you will be your own master, you will take your own way—you can do better for yourself than God. Now, mark, you never would choose that sinful course as long as you trusted God. Loss of faith, that is sin. It is no good talking of cures, no good talking of salvation, unless you undo the mischief done by sin. Loss of faith: that is the beginning, the essence, the end of sin. Ah! that doctrine of salvation through faith that men mock at and call a legal sophism, it has got the heart of all truth in it, only I think we are to blame that we have so much talked of faith as the means of salvation as if it were some external condition attached by God to salvation. Faith _is_ salvation; Jesus Christ hangs there on the cross as Moses lifted up the brazen serpent. The moment a man believes on Him he is saved from sin. How? Through some magical virtue in the cross, in the Body hanging there, in the blood poured out, or in the man's mental act of faith? Never, never. That Christ hanging there is the living embodiment of faith in God: His life, His death, are the incarnate declaration that all sin is error, that all sin is an outrage, that men erred and went wrong when they disobeyed God. He condemns all sin by His life of holiness, by His death of antagonism against sin, hanging there on the cross, wrestling with sin, seeking to undo it, offering to God the world's love and obedience that sinful men have failed to give to God, dying in their stead, obeying in their stead, making Himself a perfect sacrifice and substitute for this world of ours. All that still would not be salvation, is not salvation, to you until the sight of it turns you, regenerates you, makes you see that all your sin was madness, folly; fills you with hatred of it. When once the love of God binds you over to follow that Christ in obedience to God, in trust to God, in love of God, that is faith in Christ, that is salvation.