The whole Israelite community set out from the Desert of Sin, traveling from place to place as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So they quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses replied, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test?” But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?” Then Moses cried out to the Lord, “What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord answered Moses, “Go out in front of the people. Take with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.” So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
(Exodus 17:1-7)
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Most of you are probably expecting me to be talking about water coming from a rock, and I suppose I could do that – but I think it might be kind of dry! But this is a great story, and there's a lot of material in it for a sermon about God providing for his people in their times of greatest need, or for a sermon about God ensuring that his people would have everything they need for the journey of faith on which they're travelling. It would be easy enough to just talk about the miracle itself, but I've already done that with the children. I don't want you to forget the story, because it's important to what I'm going to be saying, but it's not really my focus today. You see, this particular miracle – as dramatic as it might have been – was just one in a series of miracles that are recorded in Exodus. It was just one of many things that God did for his people during these lean years in the wilderness. Miracle after miracle after miracle happens in the Book of Exodus. It's a book of miracles. The people who were with Moses had seen all of the marvelous things that God had done to free them from slavery in Egypt and then to keep them alive and safe and provided for in the desert. And, as we come to today's passage, what happened? The people got thirsty – and they complained. After all that God had done for them, they complained rather than trusted. And that's my focus for today – how difficult it is for God's people to truly trust God when the going gets tough.
I'm not so much worried about this particular miracle, or for that matter on any or all of the miracles that took place in the desert. What I'm interested in is the response of God's people to the miraculous things they had seen taking place: momentary wonder and amazement which would quickly transform into out of control grumbling and rebellion. Why would that transformation take place so easily?You would think that after everything they had seen (after all the demonstrations of God's presence and power that had happened before them) that they would have learned to trust in God to care for them. But they hadn't learned that lesson at all. Which tells us that trust is a hard thing for us to offer to anyone – even God. In today's story, the people of God faced a hardship – and, yes, being in a desert with no water is a pretty serious hardship – and rather than trusting in God to see them through, they complained and they whined to the point at which Moses was convinced that they were about to kill him! The people acted not in trust, but in fear, and fear led them to irrational actions and threats.
And this isn't just a problem that was restricted to the story of the exodus. We can easily put this into our own context. The story is simply about believers; those who believe in God. Many Christians have seen and felt very dramatically the power of God in their lives but, when push comes to shove and we face tough times and it's time to show trust, a lot of Christians can't do it. That's not a criticism. It's a reflection, I think, on the human condition. Real trust is hard – even for committed Christians – people who are church every week not out of a sense of duty or obligation, not because it's the right things to do, not because the church will close if enough people stop coming, but people who gather regularly to celebrate a joyous relationship with a living God; people whose lives have been touched and changed by the risen Christ. These would be today's equivalent to those who traveled with Moses through the desert: people who should know better; people who should know that God can be trusted. And yet, in that moment when something difficult happens, people who find trust tough. And, really, isn't that potentially all of us? And when tough times do hit – as they hit God's people in the desert, we do have a tendency to ask: why? Why isn't God providing? Why does God seem absent? We ask those things no matter how many times we've felt God intervene in our lives. And really – why doesn't God just swoop down and solve all our problems and make everything better? I've heard that as an objection to faith from a lot of people: if there's a loving God, why is there so much suffering. It's not a bad question.
I wonder if the simple fact is that we're simply being taught something about self-sufficiency here, and about what's God's desire for us truly is. Think about our God-language for a moment. We call God “Father” sometimes. Some people call God “Mother.” The important thing is that we see God is what you might call parental terms. And if we really extend that to its logical outcome, isn't the goal of every parent to let their children make more and more decisions for themselves, even to the point of stepping back and letting them bail themselves out of their own problems? I mean, as much as you love your kids, you can't just constantly bail them out – because if you do, they never grow up; they never learn how to take care of themselves; they never become independent. Instead, they become spoiled. There's nothing more irritating than a spoiled adult! And I wonder if in the Exodus story, God's people hadn't become spoiled? They had seen these great, miraculous things happen over and over again – and so they expected them. Sure – if you're in the desert and you're out of water you're in a pretty desperate situation. But there are things you can try to do to solve the problem yourself. You could try to dig a well. You could send out scouting parties to locate any nearby oases. But according to Exodus, God's people didn't even try. They faced a problem, and they got hot under the collar. They got mad because God wasn't just taking the problem away, and they took out their frustrations on Moses – God's representative – to the extent that if God didn't miraculously provide them with water they were ready to stone him! They would sacrifice their relationship with God because in one case God had apparently expected them to do something for themselves.
Now, if God had taken my parenting advice, God would have just let the people find the water all by themselves. But God doesn't take my advice – a fact for which the world should be eternally grateful. God gave the people water from a rock. Surely, after that demonstration of divine power, the people would be convinced and firmly committed to following God wherever God would lead them. Certainly they'd never turn away again. But if you're familiar at all with the stories of God's people wandering in the wilderness, then you'd know that the story of the golden calf isn't far off. Faced not with a real disaster, but with mere uncertainty (Moses had gone up the mountain and was sure taking a long time to come back, so something must have happened to him) the people would once again turn away from God to wantonness. It's a constant cycle. People complain, God gives, and some at least become so dependent on the displays of God's power (on the signs and wonders that some Christians are so fixated on) that if for whatever reason there are no overt displays of power, we forget that God is always with us.
The ultimate message here is that faith can come in two varieties. There's a kind of faith that constantly wants, constantly asks, constantly demands, and constantly complains when God doesn't act in the ways we think God should act. This is a kind of faith that acknowledges God but wants us to really be in charge. That usually leads to tragedies – because it's a kind of faith that while it on the one hand acknowledges, on the other hand it dismisses God. An obvious example of that kind of faith in the world today I would suggest is the ISIS movement that's been so much in the news lately. It's not Christian, but it declares a belief in God and then acts in ways that the vast majority of Moslems would believe are abhorrent to God. And that can happen in Christianity as well. But there's a different kind of faith. It's one that trusts God, that's content to surrender it's own needs and desires and expectations, to simply wait on God and trust in God when God for whatever reason feels absent or when God doesn't seem to do exactly what we want God to do. This is a faith that understands that we have a few responsibilities of our own; that there are some things we have to do for ourselves if we want to claim a faith that's mature.
No doubt life is a lot simpler if there's someone there who can take care of our every need. But those days pass, and there comes a point when we're expected to be able to look out for ourselves just a bit. A mature faith accepts the presence of trouble and is actually refined and strengthened by that trouble. A mature faith is a beautiful thing. It frees us from worry and it frees us from fear. It frees us to face the future, and it assures us that God is, indeed, there – maybe sometimes encouraging us and strengthening us to see the problems in the world around us, and to face them head on, rather than simply waiting for God to set it all right. That's what faith calls us to do. That's what grace empowers us to do. That's what God expects us to do.
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