Numbers 21: Strength & Weakness as Conscious States

Compare with the original King James text

🔍 Explore Verse Ranges in Numbers 21

Quick Insights

A journey of consciousness meets resistance, and every outward battle mirrors an inner struggle for identity and territory.
Despair and complaint invite the poisonous thoughts that bite, yet acknowledgment and contrition open the way to healing through inner sight.
Imagination fashioned as a focused, elevated image becomes a pole upon which perception is lifted and old afflictions lose their power.
Victory over outer giants reflects the disciplined reclaiming of attention and the steady movement from wandering to possession of one’s chosen state.

What is the Main Point of Numbers 21?

This chapter maps a psychological drama in which a collective mind moves through fear, rebellion, suffering, and finally chooses a new identity by means of imaginative focus; the essential principle is that attention and assumption create circumstances, and to change the outer pattern one must first change the inner posture and behold the healing image until it informs experience.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Numbers 21?

The opening clashes are not merely historical skirmishes but the toll wars take when consciousness fends off projections of lack and opposition. When the crowd grows discouraged and speaks against guidance, it expresses that interior sense of being led into danger by erroneous belief. Those moments of complaint are not just external muttering but the admission that the self has lost its coherent imagining and has become prey to narratives that bite. The serpents that come among the people are the venom of unguarded attention, the recurring anxious images and resentful thoughts that sting and immobilize life force. Recognition and repentance are pivotal because they mark a shift from identification with the problem to owning the creative role one plays. To say we have sinned is to confess that we have imagined unwisely; it is an interior u-turn from blame to responsibility. The prescription given is imaginative and symbolic: by lifting an emblem, a concentrated vision is provided for the afflicted to behold. This bronze image functions not as a talisman but as a redirection of gaze; when attention is drawn and sustained upon a healing conception, the physiological and circumstantial consequences follow, because imagination reorders perception and so reshapes outcome. The subsequent conquests and settlements portray the phases of establishing a new inner regime. Sending messengers, engaging kings, and taking cities are metaphors for negotiating with entrenched attitudes and displacing them with the mind’s renewed rulership. The victories over Sihon and Og are not about external domination but about dismantling the might of past convictions that claimed territory within the psyche. The song at the well and the digging of the spring picture the recovery of inner resources, a communal rejoicing when the life-giving faculty of imagination has been redirected to sustain the people, and the ascent to vantage points represents the ability to look out from a settled, sovereign state rather than wander in chaos.

Key Symbols Decoded

Serpents represent intrusive, fearful imaginations that strike when attention is scattered or hostile; their venom is the corrosive belief that circumstances are fixed and threat is inevitable. The brass serpent on the pole symbolizes a deliberately made image, an object of concentrated attention fashioned out of understanding and elevated upon a pole of will, so that one’s gaze meets an alternative affirmation instead of the old fearful picture. Wells and springs signify inner wells of conviction and resourcefulness, the imagined source from which faith and creativity are drawn, and singing to a spring is an act of enlivening that inner well through joyful expectation. Cities and kings are the structures and authorities of habit and ruling ideas; taking possession of them is the psychological work of overthrowing the former rulers of thought that governed behavior. Journeys and encampments trace stages of consciousness, moments of preparation and rest between acts of inner claiming. Where there is mention of borders and streams, read this as the limits and channels of feeling that, once reconfigured by imagination, allow expansion and a new experience of territory formerly lost to fear.

Practical Application

Begin by noticing the places within where complaint and fear have become habitual; write them down as scenes you repeat, and acknowledge them without self-condemnation as the job of the creative faculty that has been misapplied. Then design a clear, elevated image that embodies the healed state you seek, small enough to be grasped and vivid enough to command attention. Place that image mentally upon a pole by rehearsing it in stillness until the feeling of the reality is credible, and whenever familiar anxieties arise, shift your gaze to that imagined sign and hold the new feeling until the old agitation subsides. Move forward from momentary sighting to daily practice by digging, in imagination, the well of your chosen state: repeatedly recall scenes that confirm your new condition, sing their truth inwardly with gratitude, and act in small outer ways that reflect the internal assumption. As you meet resistance, name it as a former king and refuse to grant it audience; negotiate with it by asserting the new ruling image until it dissolves. Over time, the territories of thought change hands and your experience will align with the inner sovereignty you have cultivated.

From Serpents to Sight: The Inner Drama of Turning Toward Healing

Numbers 21 reads like a compact, dramatic map of inner states — a sequence of moods, decisions, resistances and victories that take place entirely within human consciousness. When the chapter is read psychologically rather than historically, the characters, places and events become names for states of mind and movements of attention. The through-line is simple: imagination and attention create experience; when misdirected they produce suffering (the fiery serpents), and when deliberately used they transmute that suffering into life (the bronze serpent and the well that springs up).

At the opening, a local king attacks Israel. This king is a state of contracted, reactive ego — the part of the mind that fights the new consciousness as it begins to move beyond inherited patterns. The people vow to utterly destroy their enemy, and the vow is granted. Here we see the first principle: when attention decides — when imagination makes a vow — it mobilizes power. A vow is a concentrated act of attention that dedicates imagination to a single end. Naming the place Hormah (a name that signifies something devoted to destruction) records an inward decision: to remove an identification that once seemed necessary. Psychologically, this is the first purging — the mind declares war on the old self and, in the act of decision, eradicates some fragment of self-limitation.

The journey from Mount Hor by the way of the Red Sea toward Edom pictures transition. Mountains and seas are thresholds of identity. To travel by the Red Sea suggests an emotional crossing; Red calls to feeling, passion, heated reactivity. The soul becomes discouraged because of the way: the long inner road has worn patience thin. Boredom, exhaustion and expectation fatigue show themselves as the common complaint: 'There is no bread, neither is there any water.' These are metaphors for inner nourishment. Bread is the mind's sustaining idea; water is the flowing consciousness that refreshes. When imagination is not fed by a sustaining idea and fresh feeling, it complains and rebels. The people 'speak against God and Moses' — that is, against the inner creative presence and the faculty that should direct it. This complaint is really an identification with lack.

The consequence follows as a natural law: negative speaking and acceptance of lack produce venomous results — fiery serpents are sent among them. Fiery serpents represent self-generated, contracted thoughts that sting consciousness with fear, blame, shame and bitterness. They are 'fiery' because they inflame; they are serpents because they move silently and bite where one is unguarded: in one's assumption of identity. Many die. This is the law in operation: what is imagined in fear consolidates and becomes experience, leading to the death of possibilities. The people, waking to cause and effect, confess: 'We have sinned.' Here sin is recognition of misdirected imagination, the admission that inner language produced outer results.

Moses prays. Prayer in this context is reorientation of attention toward the creative presence. The remedy comes not by negating the serpents but by a transmutative act: 'Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole.' Psychologically this is brilliant. The instruction is to take the very image of the poison and raise it up where it can be seen. The brass serpent upon a pole functions as a concentrated symbol — a sign for attention. When the people look upon the pole, they live. This demonstrates a key imaginal principle: the same faculty that imagined the problem can be used to imagine the cure. Elevation and deliberate viewing turn the venom into a means of correction.

What actually heals is not the metal nor the object; it is the act of focused assumption — 'look and live' — that shifts identity. Looking is not passive; it is the willful assumption of a new fact. The bronze serpent is an imaginal shorthand: a constructed assumption that when accepted becomes the living cause. This is the creative operation of consciousness. The mind that made the serpent of fear now turns that image into a sign of healing by the intention and the direction of attention. In other words, transformation occurs when you deliberately fix attention on the idea of healing until it dominates the imagination and produces corresponding experiences.

After this healing incident the narrative moves to wells and songs: 'Gather the people together, and I will give them water. Then Israel sang this song: Spring up, O well.' Wells are archetypal images of inner supply, the source of life within the psyche. The princes and nobles digged the well with their staves by the direction of the lawgiver. The staves are authority — the discipline of directed imagination or the spoken word as a tool. The lawgiver's direction is the ordering principle of consciousness, the faculty that directs attention. The digging is work: inner work of focused attention and affirming word. The song is imagination expressed as confident expectation; singing to the well is an act of inner speaking that summons forth supply. Psychologically, this is the movement from complaint to creative song: one stops speaking lack and begins to sing abundance. Singing is faith embodied; it makes the well spring.

The encounters with Sihon and Og, kings of Amorites and Bashan, again dramatize inner confrontations with entrenched habit and large, resistant identifications. Sihon refuses passage. This refusal is the mind's defensive reaction to a new itinerary of consciousness; old identifications will not yield space to the new traveler. Israel's insistence and eventual victory represent the disciplined imagination's capacity to insist on passage — to cross into new attitudes, relationships and capacities. The conquest and possession of their land symbolize the appropriation of these new states as permanent domicile within consciousness. Heshbon, Bashan, Jaazer and the other place-names are neighborhoods of the mind surrendered to a new ruler: the willful, creative imagination.

One striking pattern runs through the whole chapter: the oscillation between passive suffering produced by unguarded imagination and active, deliberate use of imagination to transmute circumstances. The people fall into complaint and die; they confess, assume a sign and live. They search for water and find it by digging; they face opposing kings and, by insistence and imagination, possess their lands. Everything is an inner drama of attention and assumption.

Two practical psychological lessons are explicit. First, what you inwardly speak and accept as true will produce results. Complaints and fearful talk call forth serpents. Second, the faculty of imagination can be deliberately used to reverse and transform those results. The bronze serpent is not magic; it is the principle of reversal: take the problematic image, transmute it by elevation and willful attention, and thereby re-pattern the nervous system and experience. 'Look and live' is shorthand for the practice of sustained assumption: fix your consciousness on the desired state until it becomes fact in experience.

Numbers 21, then, is a manual for the inner art of change. It instructs how to recognize self-created adversity, how to admit responsibility, and how to employ symbol and sustained attention to elicit healing and provision. The new life is not somewhere outside; it is the specific occupancy of imaginal territory formerly held by fear. The victories over Sihon and Og teach that what looks like external giants are interior, and can be overcome when imagination assumes the posture of conquest and inhabitation.

Finally, the arc from fear to song is the arc the psyche must travel: from murmuring and self-justification to confession, deliberate redirection, and joyous affirmation. The song at the well celebrates the revolutionary truth at the heart of the chapter: when imagination is disciplined and loved, the inner well springs up and the outer world responds. The creative power operates not as a remote agency but as the root force of personal consciousness; it is moved by vow, by image, by gaze, by song. Numbers 21 is a reminder that all battles, serpents and wells take place within — and that mastery is simply the practice of assuming and living a new inner fact until it shapes the world.

Common Questions About Numbers 21

Where can I find Neville's lectures or writings that discuss Numbers 21?

Look for Neville's lectures and chapters that treat the bronze serpent under titles such as The Law and the Promise, Out of This World, Feeling is the Secret, and selections often published as lecture transcripts like 'The Brazen Serpent' or 'The Serpent' in archives; these works explain the story as an allegory of assumption and imagination. Many lecture transcriptions and audio recordings are available through Neville archives, devotional compilation books, and video channels that host his talks; search those collections for the brass-serpent material to study his practical instructions on lifting an image in consciousness.

What does Neville Goddard say the bronze serpent in Numbers 21 symbolizes?

Neville teaches that the bronze serpent in Numbers 21 is not an external object to be worshipped but a dramatized symbol of an assumed inner state; it represents the imagination lifted up and made the object of attention so that the consciousness may be healed. In his explanation the serpent on the pole is the fixed mental image or conviction you place before yourself until it becomes real within; by looking at it you change your state and thus your outer experience. Read as scripture about inner states, the story points to the creative faculty within that, when assumed, removes the symptoms of a contrary belief (Numbers 21:8-9).

Does Neville connect the bronze serpent to Christ or to a state of consciousness?

Yes, Neville names the bronze serpent as a symbol of the Christ principle, which he identifies with the creative human imagination or I AM; Christ is understood as a state of consciousness to be assumed rather than only an historical person. The serpent lifted up foreshadows the lifting up of the Son of Man — the revealed imagination — so that men might look and be healed; thus 'Christ' is the inner power which, when believed and assumed, transforms experience. In Neville's teaching the gospel scenes are metaphors for entering and embodying states of consciousness that produce redemption (Numbers 21; John 3:14).

How does Neville interpret the Israelites' healing when they looked at the bronze serpent?

Neville explains that the Israelites were healed not by a piece of metal but by the act of looking — by assuming the state the brass serpent represented; their faith was the inward acceptance of being alive and whole. To look is to imagine and feel the scene as already fulfilled, arresting the consciousness that produced the serpents; the cure is the change of state. He emphasizes that imagination, accompanied by feeling, effects the transformation: the brass serpent served as a focus to hold the fulfilled feeling until the inner conviction replaced the outward evidence of disease (Numbers 21:9).

How can I apply the lessons of Numbers 21 to manifest healing or change, according to Neville?

Apply this story by creating a vivid, inner scene that implies your healed or desired state, then persist in living in that assumption until it hardens into fact; imagine the end result with sensory detail and, most importantly, feeling. Use a mental 'pole' — a repeated image, affirmation, or scene — to keep your attention on that state, look upon it daily, and refuse to argue with current circumstances. Neville advises imagination as the only creative power: dwell in the satisfied state, act from it in small ways, and allow external events to conform to your new consciousness (Numbers 21).