Reading: Exodus 17:1-7
Preached at Beckley Presbyterian
Church on September 25th 2005
Déjà vu. Here we go again. The Israelites are still complaining. Last time it was a lack
of meat and bread, and God provided them with quails and manna. This time it’s
about water. “Give us something to drink, Moses...or else.”
Now Moses hasn’t quite got as much patience as he had the last time they started
to complain. In fact everybody is getting a little on edge. Moses is afraid the people will stone him if water doesn’t turn up. He
doesn’t calm things down any by reprimanding the people, for criticizing him, and in the process testing God.
So when Moses goes to ask God for help, there is a very personal element involved. He doesn’t ask God for water. He
asks Him for protection. He’s afraid the people will attack him. “What
shall I do with this people?” he asks God. “They’re threatening to throw rocks at me!”
God, being God, has everything under control. What
appeared to be a major crisis was about to be turned into a blessing. The Israelites
were about to be given yet another sign that the Lord their God was with them, and that they didn’t need to moan and
groan and quarrel, but rather trust in Him.
As with the Quails that came and the bread that fell from heaven, it’s an unusual
sign that they are offered. At first glance it seems to involve the sort of ‘trickery’
that would make Harry Potter proud. Moses is to take his magic staff, strike
a rock that was at a place called Horeb, and ‘Hey Presto’ water would
come flowing out from it.
Lest there be any doubt that this was a genuine miracle, Moses is to take the elders along
with him, so they get to examine the rock, observe the events and testify to the people. It’s almost reminiscent of
a conjurers show.
“I’d like to invite one of the audience here tonight to come and examine this
rock. As you can see, ladies and gentleman, this is just a normal rock, solid
granite through and through. You can check around the edges, on the top, underneath.
There are no secret catches, latches or hatches. This rock is just rock. And now, prepare to be in awe. I take
this staff and I smash it on the rock, and ‘Voila’, water from the Rock!”
In one of those beautiful turn arounds that appear quite frequently in the Hebrew narratives,
the people are turned from seeing rock as something they could use to hurt with Moses with, to rock as a sign of God’s
presence in a thirsty land.
The bringing forth of water in such a way answered for the people a question
that had been troubling them for some time. “Was God still walking with
them?” Yes, He’d been there in Egypt getting them ready for
deliverance. Yes, he’d led them through the waters to freedom. Yes, He had fed them upon meat and bread from heaven.
I do the scriptures a disservice describing the event as ‘magic’. There was no magic about it, in the sense of it being a trick or a deception worked at the hand of Moses.
In fact Moses had very little to do with it. After
all, he had gone to God to save his own skin, not to intercede for the people. The
people weren’t the only ones who needed a sign that God was still with them.
The words of Exodus17:6 are important in understanding this event. The Lord says to Moses, “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb.”
You may remember that at the burning bush God had revealed himself to Moses,
as “I am who I am,” as a God who could not be contained by words or formulas.
This was not a case of Moses manipulating God into performing a miracle so the people would
give up on the idea of stoning him. On the contrary, the whole event was an action
of God to remind the people that as they journeyed onward through the wilderness, God was their God and they were God’s
people. And even though they complained and quarreled and fretted and worried,
God wasn’t about to give up on them!
We are not that different to those wanderers in the wilderness. Have you noticed how when trouble comes our way, people start asking “Where’s God?” As though tragedy and need, thirst and hunger, were somehow a result of God leaving
the building? We trust God in the good times, but in the hard times we are tempted
to assume that the lack of blessing is due to a lack of God’s Presence.
“I will,” declares God, “be standing there in front of you on the rock
at Horeb.” God is here described as not being alongside you or above you
or behind you, but in front of you - the God who goes ahead and prepares the way…the God who knows what is around the
next corner and is in the business of preparing us for what is there.
It is hard to see the road ahead when the troubles of the day cause our heads to hang low.
It is hard to think of future blessings when present troubles fill our agenda. When
the sky turns black, and the thunder rolls and the rain starts to fall, we are not thinking about the sunny days that may
be in the future; we’re just trying to get out of the storm.
Moses was not a sorcerer or magician. These
events took place in a world that was full of unexplained mysteries. So much
so, that many regarded inanimate objects or places as being ‘gods’. Trees
could be gods. Stones could become gods. Springs
of water could become sacred dwelling places for life giving deities. People
would consult them, in the hope that some sign would come from deep inside the stone or tree or waters.
Lest there be any misconception that the God of the Israelites should be seen in such a
way, scripture tells us that God was not in the rock, but on the rock; that the people were not to make an icon of the rock or presume that the place would forever
be a home for their God. They were just passing through. And God was going ahead of them. They hadn’t been abandoned.
They could move on in faith.
For myself, the most powerful imagery in this story is the contrast between the rock of
the desert and the water that flows to bring life. For under the touch of God,
the one is transformed into the other. It speaks of how the hard and bitter and
dry places of our lives can become places where we experience God’s life and love streaming to us.
When we are in a hard place, something that can keep us from going out of our minds is
believing God is way ahead of us; that whilst we can’t see the sunshine right now because the tears keep misting up
the view, God’s got it sorted. We don’t know How. There’s no point in asking Why. We don’t know the When’s,
What’s, and Where’s.
But, with all our hearts,
we believe God doesn’t take people places to leave them high and dry; that when we’re in the wilderness, yes,
we may well complain and murmur. We may well become hungry and thirsty, but God
remains in the business of taking the difficult times and using them as places of blessing.
For was there ever a harder place than the cross? The
cross of Calvary upon which Jesus was crucified has become for the church a symbol of faith because of the resurrection, because
God took the hard place and used it as a means of blessing, and because God took that dreadful hour which was the result of
us having hearts of stone that could not recognize the Presence of God even as He walked before us.
God took that bitter hour and bathed it in glorious light as the stone
rolled away from the tomb and the church declared Jesus Christ as the Rock of Ages from whom love and grace now flow freely.
Do you recall those words that
Jesus spoke to the women by the well of Samaria? John 4:14 - “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that
I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
Jesus tells us that as we place our trust in Him, the Holy Spirit works a miracle in us; that under God’s touch,
our hearts of stone can become places of blessing.
Now of course, Moses had to strike the rock before any water came out.
I don’t intend suggesting that we go around hitting each other with sticks
in order to release the blessings of God. That sounds like the sort of thing
some weird cult may get up to. “So what church do you belong to? Oh, First Presbyterian of ‘Hit ‘em with a stick’ Beckley.”
Yet, is it not true that often it is the hard knocks life throws at us that refine our
faith in ways the good times fail to do? And you may well hear me complain from
time to time about this and that and the other, and some times my complaints will be justified, whilst at other times it’ll
just be me having a groan. So remember this, as we shared last week,
God is Good, All the Time.
All the time, God is Good.
Try and remember this when the wilderness-times come your way. The Israelites wanted to know, “Moses, Is God still with us? Or
are we going to die of thirst out here?” God answered by bringing water
from the rock, and in the process turned their stony hearts towards faithfulness.
May God do the same for us!
May God turn our hearts of stone
To vessels carrying living Holy Spirit water
To a thirsty world.
To God’s name be the Glory!
AMEN.
Rev. Adrian J. Pratt
