Hey everybody, welcome back.
Thanks for joining us this Tuesday as we continue through the
book of Exodus.
It’s been a while since we had a chance to be together,
hope holidays were good and that you all are doing well.
We are in the 17th chapter today.
I think probably a familiar story if you’ve been through Exodus,
if you’ve been in church,
certainly if you grew up
in Sunday school.
You probably have heard this one before.
Let me read it
and then we’ll jump in.
From the wilderness of sin,
the whole congregation of the Israelites
journeyed by stages as the Lord commanded.
They camped at Rephidim,
but there was no
water for the people to drink.
The people quarreled with Moses and said,
“Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them,
“Why do you quarrel with me?
Why do you test the Lord?”
But the people thirsted there for water and the people complained against Moses and said,
“Why did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with
thirst?” So Moses cried to the Lord,
“What shall I do with the people?
They’re ready to stone me.”
The Lord said to Moses,
“Go ahead of the people,
take some of the elders
of Israel and take with you in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go.
I will be standing there in front of you on a rock at Horeb.
Strike the rock and water will come out
so that the people may drink.”
Moses did so in the sight of the elders of
Israel.
He called the place Masah and Meribah
because the Israelites quarreled and tested
the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us
or not?”
So this is a pretty powerful image.
I think it remains fairly well known.
The idea of water from a rock is a
visual image.
It’s a profound image.
I think it’s part of the
relief in our sanctuary.
Behind the cross we have the jagged
pattern,
the design, and I think part of that story captures this idea of water flowing from the rock.
Moses is in the place he’s going to spend some time in between God and the people.
The people are complaining.
They’re thirsty.
Give us water.
Why did you bring us?
We’ve seen some of this.
We’re going to see a little bit more of it throughout the story.
That’s Moses’ role, so he takes their complaints to God.
God tells him what to do.
Moses does it, and though we don’t get told the aftermath of the story,
the people are delivered from their thirst.
But Moses, with a kind of bad taste in his mouth, interestingly enough, Michael,
names the place in memory of their attitude.
Masah and Meribah means “complain and bitter,” something along those lines.
And we’re told explicitly he names it because the Israelites quarreled and questioned.
And so Moses, in an interesting way,
gets a last word here,
which I think is kind of fun.
Yeah, so we’ve talked before,
and it bears repeating,
that Moses once again stands in
between God and the people.
There’s been a constant theme throughout the book of
Exodus, quite frankly, that Moses is a servant of God,
and he’s serving the people.
Though Moses is often frustrated with God,
and the people are often frustrated with him,
and in this story,
Moses,
quite frankly, is frustrated with the people.
And that kind of relationship
of quarreling, and it’s worth pointing out that “quarrel” here is different than the
word “complain” that we had previous.
So whether you see a progression in that or whether you
just simply see different word choices,
I don’t think it really matters.
Clint, the main is
there are many different kinds of disgruntled,
and they’re all showing up in
the midst of the camp.
And you know,
a thing that’s always stuck out to me in this section,
you read it in the first verse here, Clint,
is that they journey by stages.
And I think there’s already some spiritual teaching happening there about the way that God leads the people step by step.
And here, as those stages move forward,
the people once again encounter a
situation in which the thing that they need for basic human survival—we’ve already had food,
we’ve actually already had water,
but here we have this idea that
the water is not already present.
You know, there you had the water wasn’t fit to drink.
Here,
there’s not enough of it.
And so it
is a similar theme,
along with what we’ve seen before in our previous
sections here, the last couple studies.
But yet there’s also some differences in the idea
that once again the staff comes into play.
That’s going to be used—the connection
to the very staff that was used to strike the water,
the thing that splits the Nile,
a place of refuge for the Israelites and destruction for the Egyptians is now going to be an instrument
once again that God’s going to use to save the people.
Clint, sometimes the Scriptures do this.
They take a theme,
and as the story’s told,
it gives us different advantages of that theme.
I think that this is another way of seeing
that the people are struggling to trust,
and Moses finds himself in between the people and God.
And in the midst of all of this,
God is remaining faithful,
and the tension is at least being maintained if not increasing.
Yeah, I think to some extent,
Michael, whenever we read Scripture,
right, we’re doing two things.
We’re reading what it says and what it’s about,
and we’re listening for what
it says to us.
And I think this is a great passage because it gives examples of both
sides of that spectrum,
I think.
You know,
it’s interesting.
The people are still using
Egypt as their framework.
Why did you bring us out of Egypt?
And the people have left
Egypt, but their minds and hearts seem to go quickly back there every time there’s a challenge,
every time there’s any adversity or uncertainty.
Egypt is still Israel’s
frame of reference, and I think that that is telling.
Then, you know, so there is this part of the story.
This is the story of Moses and the people,
but I think as you read it,
it’s hard to miss some of the symbolism.
They’re in the wilderness.
They’re journeying by stages.
They’re thirsty.
They need something.
They want something.
Rather than immediately trust God for it,
they complain.
They quarrel.
They’re in the most unlikely of places.
You know, I think part of the reason this story is well
known is because it’s so spiritually true.
You know, the idea of water from a rock,
a place you wouldn’t look,
that you wouldn’t find,
the idea of the unexpected being the
thing that renews and refreshes you.
I think, you know,
this is one of those stories that
I think is kind of fun to preach because you have the historical,
the what happened to them, but there’s so many jumping off places to talk about our own experience in the wilderness
and thirsty and complaining and quarreling and trusting.
So I think this is just one
of those very accessible kind of texts.
This was true previous in the book of Exodus.
I would argue it’s maybe thus far close to example par excellence.
It was something that we point out quite often in our study of Genesis.
But Clint,
isn’t it interesting that this gets included in the history of the people?
You know, if you’re a historian and you’re picking selections of the life of the people,
yeah, there’s a sense in which you want to highlight God and God’s faithfulness.
That’s there’s been very little care taken here to cast the people in a positive light.
There’s a kind of willingness to expose with light
this really hardened,
ungrateful,
untrusting group of people.
And actually, I think that’s one of the most noticeable and in some places
or in some ways,
maybe the most trust building aspect of the scriptures is because instead
of trying to make the people the hero,
the text is honest about the struggle of the people.
And I think to your point about preaching this,
I think one of the reasons it’s so spiritually
accessible is because we can see ourselves in it instead of the people being in the midst
of difficult circumstances and holding fast to their values and remembering God and never wavering,
we can see ourselves just a little bit farther down the road from that Nile experience
and already beginning to be shaken and wonder,
hey,
why did you bring us out here for all
of us to perish?
And I think there’s that honesty about the difficulty of faith, the struggle,
the human desire,
and yet inability to hold on to God and to trust that the one
who has carried you to this point is going to be able to carry you to the next.
Not to begin preaching the text, but I think it is just honest in its assessment.
And there’s something compelling
in that honesty.
The truth invites us in.
Yeah, I think it’s a fascinating idea that some of the
places or the moments of our life are named for our experience in that place or that moment.
If you were with us in Genesis,
you might remember that there’s a moment Jacob is on the run and
falls asleep and he has this dream,
this encounter with God,
and he wakes up and he calls that place
ale, which means the house of God.
Well,
this is very different.
This place is called quarreling and questioning, bitter.
And so you think about what would it look like to label the moments of our own life,
parenthood,
grief,
illness,
marriage,
celebration,
struggle.
This isn’t about the location of the place.
This is about the hearts of the people in that moment.
And I think that’s a challenging,
that’s an interesting way to evaluate some of our own experiences to say,
“What would I name that era?
What could I call it?” And here, unfortunately,
the people don’t exactly measure up.
So the name that that place,
that that moment bears,
is a negative one.
And hopefully, that won’t always be the case.
It is going to often be
the case for Israel in the book of Exodus, though.
So another detail that strikes me here in the story,
Clint, comes in this last verse,
of verse seven.
The people are quarreling, testing God,
saying, “Is the Lord among us
or not?” And isn’t that the question?
I mean, that is,
from a Christian perspective,
as Christians coming to this text and doing so in a season,
we’re recording this right now in the middle of our Advent season.
And in this moment of our own Christian calendar,
we are anticipating God Emmanuel,
God with us.
And in some ways,
it is easy to see how the earliest Christians turn to
a book like Exodus and saw the fingerprints of Jesus all over it.
Because Jesus is God with us.
Jesus is that promise lived out in human flesh.
And here, the people ask it explicitly,
“Is the Lord among us or not?” In the midst of the place of quarreling,
in the place of testing,
“Is God going to show up or is God not?
Is God aloof?
Is God far off?
Is this suffering somehow an image that God has rejected us and that God’s no longer for us?
Or,
even in the midst of adversity, can we somehow see that God is still in the camp,
that God is still among the people?” Scripture,
at its best,
takes the questions of the people and turns it into all of our questions.
It’s a reflection of our own human journeys.
And this is, I think, a beautiful example of that.
Yeah.
It’s one thing to question Moses.
“Hey, that’s a disturbing question for the people to ask,
especially in the aftermath of the quail, the manna,
the pillar,
the parted sea, the plagues,
to at every turn that there is some challenge,
have your faith rocked to the extent of,
“Is God among us?
Is God still with us?
Have we been abandoned?” That’s a sad commentary on the Israelites,
and it’s a sad question
when it lands on us.
And I think it’s worth noting the seriousness of these encounters in some way is increasing.
You had water, and then you had food.
Now you have water again,
except in this case, it’s not that there was water there.
Water needed to be created.
And now, as we continue on the study tomorrow,
there’s going to be military conflict.
There’s going to be fighting.
I think each step away from Egypt by stages is how it was labeled in the text today.
Each move away
is introducing the people to new level of complexity,
new, even size or intensity of conflict and trouble.
And that is also,
I think, a really interesting frame because
when we finish our stories,
we like to finish them at the crossing of the Red Sea.
We like that idea
of the victory, the hero won.
But for the book of Exodus,
it’s striking that this book clearly
was made so that we transition at the Nile into a new reality.
And now we’re learning a new
sort of rhythm and way on the other side.
And it’s not all victory,
and it’s not all easy,
and it’s not all marching on dry ground,
surrounded by water on both sides.
I just think there’s something very beautiful,
even if it is also very challenging.
It’s probably inevitable to read these texts and think about the Israelites.
But ultimately, the point of the story,
as you said many times, Michael,
is not that the Israelites struggle,
but that God is faithful.
I think we tend to the human side of the story quickly,
and we tend to
resonate with the challenges of being hungry and thirsty and asking questions and having doubts.
But remember that the point of this story isn’t to simply tell us the character of Israel,
which is in the story.
Ultimately, the story is to tell us the character of God.
And so
I think we have to be intentional occasionally to remind ourselves of that and make sure that we are understanding that really,
if you’re going to say there’s a point to this story,
yes, we learned something about Israel,
but the ultimate point is what do we learn about God?
Well said.
Our friends hope that there’s been something here today.
Do join us tomorrow as
we turn to another chapter in these troubles.
Hope that there’s been something here that’s encouraging.
Definitely like, subscribe, comment, and we look forward to seeing you all tomorrow.
Thanks, everybody.