The Brass Serpent and the Key to Healing Generational Wounds
The Bible is stunningly clear about what it takes to heal a people after generations of inherited trauma—and after living through systemic oppression and slavery.
We see this illustrated beautifully in the symbolism of the fiery serpents and the bronze serpent.
The people were being bitten by poisonous snakes in the camp and dying. “Fiery serpents,” Scripture calls them. Their bites created a burning sensation inside people until they died from it.
This is like generational trauma.
Looking at What Is Hurting Us
Moses received instructions from Jehovah that must have seemed baffling and counterintuitive: construct a bronze serpent and raise it up on a pole—a cross.
All the people had to do was look at it and be healed.
Literally. Look.
From that point forward, the way to healing and life had been provided. They had a choice.
Here is the foreshadowing that feels especially instructive: they had to look at the very thing that was killing them—but in a new way.
They had to look at it with Jesus, through the cross. They had to see the source of their poisonous internal burnings—the effects of trauma—and look to Jesus as the source of their healing.
Jesus is the Way. Any Christian, and probably many non-Christians, can recite that.
But this Old Testament story points to a precise way of accessing His way.
Looking With Jesus
We have to look at the source of our internal burnings with Jesus, and then offer them to Him for healing.
He is the only One who can truly remove the effects of what you did not receive from your mother that still aches like a broken bone in your soul 30 years later.
He is the only One who can heal what your father or grandfather did to you—the wounds that left scars no one else can see.
The self-blame. The internalized oppression. The way your nervous system responds when someone gets close to you after everyone you have loved has harmed you.
We can pray, read the Bible, and learn a great deal. We can go to therapy, do trauma work, and make meaningful progress.
But to be truly transformed and relieved from the poisons and effects of those burnings, Jesus must guide and direct the process.
There has to be a surrender of our own ways of thinking about it—and a willingness to look, with Him.
The Risk of Facing Pain
It is a risk.
To look directly at the full impact of the very thing that is hurting us. To feel it. To acknowledge its reality.
This is what our nervous systems are wired to avoid at all costs because the message underneath can feel very real: You will not survive this.
Healing can require a willingness to walk into the valley of the shadow of death without a guarantee of what will happen there—or whether we will come out the other side.
But we do not walk there alone.
The Work I Offer
This is the work I walk people through.
I use clinical tools and the CASCADE coaching model I teach to map trauma loops and patterns. Ultimately, we invite Jesus and the Holy Spirit to work with our spirits, bodies, and emotions—to guide the healing journey so that He can be the Healer.
If this kind of work resonates with you, I would love to work with you.
If you're curious to hear more about what I mean when I talk about Jesus as the ultimate Healer, take a listen to Season 2 of my podcast, Power Back Here.
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