The essential Nephite teaching involves the Atoning Messiah. Any threat to Nephite religion also attacked the understanding of the Atoning Messiah, something that we have seen throughout Nephite history. Nephi tries to awaken the slumbering faith in the Messiah from the crowd. Since he has invoked Moses, he invokes Moses as a proof of the Messiah through the event recorded in Numbers 21:9. Nephi clearly sees this as a type of the coming Atoning Messiah. How he sees the connection is interesting. Compare Nephi’s exposition to a parallel statement from John in the New Testament:
John 3:14-15
14 ¶ And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
15 That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
In John we have the similar reference to the serpent in the wilderness. However, for John, the essential image is the lifting up. John makes a direct parallel between the lifting up of the serpent and the lifting up of Christ (on the cross). For John, it is this lifting up of Christ that is the effective action. This fits the New Testament emphasis on reconceiving the cross from a humiliating tool of death to an affirming symbol of resurrection.
In Nephi we have the lifted up phrase, but it is not the effective part. For Nephi, the effective part of the Mosaic symbol was the looking, not the lifting. This is an important distinction because the cross was not as important symbol in the New World as it was in the Old. Christ is important, clearly, but the emphasis in the Book of Mormon is never on the mode of his death, but rather the meaning of his atonement.
Cultural: There is a popular trend in LDS examinations of the serpent on the pole imagery that ties this image to the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl:
“Some scholars of the Book of Mormon have wondered if this story of the serpent as given in the book of Helaman did not account for the “serpent motif” in the art and architecture of some of the American Indian cultures. Also, it is of interest to note that one of the names given by some of the American Indians to the great white God who appeared out of the eastern sky was the name of Quetzalcoatl, which literally means the bird-serpent, or the serpent of precious plumage.” (Daniel H. Ludlow, A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1976], 244.)
While this has been a popular ascription, it is most assuredly incorrect. The arguments and evidences dealing with this Mesoamerican deity and image will not be presented here, but will be reserved for the discussion of Christ’s appearance in the New World, the event to which they are even more inextricably linked in LDS literature.