The Waters of Meribah

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and happy Sunday to you. Thank you for joining us here in person or online. If you’re visiting us for the first time today, there should be a visitor’s card tucked into the chair right in front of you. Please fill that out and drop it in the offering plate to let us know you were here.

I’d like to call your attention to a few items in your bulletin. The men’s ministry will be meeting tonight at 6:00 at the pavilion. There will also be a men’s prayer breakfast next Sunday morning and a men’s cookout on November 7. The men are going to be doing a lot of eating in the next few weeks.

Our Operation Christmas Child packing party will be on November 6. Please see Della or Joanne with any questions.

Also, please head on back to the fellowship hall after services today and vote on your favorite carved pumpkin. The winner will be announced on Sunday the 31st.

Thanks to everyone who gave to our Alma Hunt Offering for Virginia Missions. We met and exceeded our goal for this year, which is great.

And also, if you’re interested in how to avoid the corrosive effects of aging on the brain, please see Harvey about a new upcoming class. I need to do that, but I know I’m gonna forget.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Merciful God, you heal the broken-hearted, and turn the sadness of the sorrowful to joy. Let your goodness be upon all you have made. Remember all those who are suffering this day. Lift up those who are cast down. Cheer with hope all who are discouraged and downcast.

Father on this day we ask that you come into this place and dwell with us, giving us your mercy and your grace and your abounding love. Grant this, O Lord, for the love of him who for our sakes became poor, your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sermon

I’m going to be honest right off the bat this morning and say there are some parts of the Bible that I just don’t understand. Well, let me say that another way. There are some parts of the Bible that I really don’t understand what God is doing. Sometimes God just doesn’t make any sense.

Which should be the case, really. If you think about it, do we really want a God that we can always figure out? Is a God that always makes sense to you a God that’s worth worshipping? I don’t think so.

To me, the only sort of God that’s worth putting all of your faith and trust into is a God who knows a whole lot more than I do. A God who sees farther and deeper than I ever could. A God who has his own reasons for doing things, reasons that are always good but sometimes very tough for us to live with. A God that we don’t always understand.

Of all the stories in the Bible that people tend to not understand, there’s one that usually stands out. That’s the story of Moses striking the rock at Meribah and the punishment that God handed down to him.

That’s what we’re going to look at today—not just to try and understand why God did what He did, but to also try and understand what Moses did to warrant such a punishment, and how we can work to avoid doing those same things.

Turn with me to the book of Numbers, chapter 20. We’ll be starting in verse 2 and go through verse 12:

Now there was no water for the congregation. And they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron. And the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Would that we had perished when our brothers perished before the LORD! Why have you brought the assembly of the LORD into this wilderness, that we should die here, both we and our cattle? And why have you made us come up out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place? It is no place for grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink.”

Then Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly to the entrance of the tent of meeting and fell on their faces.

And the glory of the LORD appeared to them, and the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and tell the rock before their eyes to yield its water. So you shall bring water out of the rock for them and give drink to the congregation and their cattle.” And Moses took the staff from before the LORD, as he commanded him.

Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, “Hear now, you rebels: shall we bring water for you out of this rock?”

And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, and water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their livestock.

And the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”

And this is God’s word.

Look at that first sentence up there in verse 2. That tells you everything that starts this whole mess. There’s no water. The Israelites have been wandering the desert between Egypt and the Promised Land for about 40 years now. They’ve been through just about every kind of trial you can think of. Most of them they’d brought on themselves.

They’d had quail and manna from heaven when they were hungry. They had a cloud and a pillar of fire to guide them when they were lost. They had commandments given to them when their hearts turned away from God.

But never once in all this walking over hills and through valleys and sleeping on dirt and basically being homeless had the Israelites ever ran out of water for this long. Until now.

Now, why did God allow this to happen? Two reasons. First, water in some form had followed them all through their long journey, but the Israelites were now coming near Canaan, to a place called Meribah. This isn’t land that’s wilderness so much anymore. There are settlements not too far ahead.

Towns and cities and settlements don’t just pop up, do they? There’s a lot of planning that happens beforehand. If you’re going to sustain at least several families, you have to make sure there’s plenty of food nearby. You have to make sure you have access to building materials. And you have to have a strong water source nearby.

See? Out there in the wilderness, water was scarce. But God always made sure to lead the Israelites toward water, and in the big desert regions where there wasn’t water, He provided it.

But now they’re getting awfully close to civilization and the Promised Land. Water’s hard to get, but it’s still available. It’s a lot more common than out there in the desert. And that’s the first reason why this happened.

The Israelites could now get water from ordinary means—mostly and simply by just looking for it—and so God wouldn’t have to give them a miracle. Because sometimes God provides directly from His hand, and other times He provides through your own hard work, doesn’t He?

We’re not called to just sit back and do nothing. We can’t say, “Well this part of my life is on me, and this part is on God.” Remember, our lives aren’t a 50/50 split between what we’re responsible for and what God’s responsible for. It’s not even 70/30 or 80/20.

It’s us giving 100 percent, and God giving 100 percent. It’s a total commitment on our part to go out there and live our best lives, and a total commitment on God’s part to help us along the way.

But the Israelites don’t seem to be doing that, are they? They’re just looking for another miracle.

Second, and more importantly, God was testing them. The Israelites hadn’t gone through their trial of being in the wilderness very well. Every step of the way, God had said, “Trust me.” He’d said, “Have faith in Me. Love Me. Wait on Me.” But they hadn’t, so God left them out there to wander.

You see, He might give you a Promised Land. He might say, “I have this thing for you to do, or this place for you to be, and it’s going to be great, but you’re going to have to grow on the way there. That’s why I can’t just make it happen right now, because you’re not ready for that yet. You’re going to have to become better versions of yourselves first.”

They Israelites hadn’t become better versions of themselves. That’s why they’re still out there going in circles. If God would have led them into the Promised Land the way they were, they would have failed.

They’d been out there so long that the people telling Moses that they need water weren’t the same people who left Egypt. They were the sons and daughters of the people who left Egypt, a whole new generation. So God was going to test them to see if they’d act any better than their parents.

This isn’t the first time that the Israelites had cried out for water, and we’re going to look at that more closely in a little bit. The first time, they grumbled and fought. Guess what the next generation does this time?

Look at the end of verse 20 and the first part of verse 21:

And they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and the people quarreled with Moses.

Just like their parents had done. They hadn’t learned a thing. “We wish we would have died like our brothers,” they say.

“Brothers,” that’s a telling word. They call the ones who had died before “brothers” not just because they were fellow Israelites, not just because they were related to those people, but because they had the same temper, the same terrible attitude, and the same sin.

Those people, their brothers, how did they die? Some by fire. Some by punishment. Fourteen thousand of them had died from disease. Terrible ways to go, aren’t they? But these Israelites would have rather died like that, because dying of thirst was a lot worse.

They even use the same words in verse 4 that their parents had used before. “You brought us all the way out here to die, Moses? Is that it? We’ve come all this long way just to die of thirst right here? Why did you do that? Why did God allow this to happen to us?”

They say in verse 5, “We’d be better off back in Egypt, because this place is evil. We can’t grow food here. We can’t live here, because there’s no water to drink.”

It’s funny, isn’t it, that these people say they’d be better off back in Egypt when none of them had grown up in Egypt. These were people of the wilderness. The wilderness was the only home they’d ever known.

The lives of the Israelites were terrible in Egypt. They were slaves who had nothing and who were being worked to death. The Israelites cried out to God to save them from their lives in Egypt, but now they’re acting like Moses and Aaron forced them to leave.

So where did they get all this stuff about Egypt? And how did the truth of the previous generations’ lives in Egypt get so twisted?

All of that had to come from their parents, didn’t it? These Israelites had all grown up as children hearing their parents grumble and complain. They’d been right there watching their parents lose their faith and trust in God, and so it made it that much easier for them to grumble and complain and lose their faith too.

It’s always the few who put words into the mouths of the many, isn’t it? A few bad apples always spoil the whole bunch. That’s what’s happened here.

They’re miserable because of their circumstances, and in a lot of ways, their misery has caused their circumstances.

Now, how do you think Moses is feeling right about now? That’s an important thing to consider, because it plays right into what’s getting ready to happen. The Israelites have been walking around the desert for a generation now, which is terrible, but Moses has had to lead them and listen to all that griping, which is even worse.

So in verse 6, what do Moses and Aaron do? They did what we’d probably do. They got out of there. Nobody wants to be around someone who gripes and complains all the time. Imagine being around a whole nation.

That’s often the best thing to do when you’re surrounded by people who complain: just get away. Because that’s the kind of people who crush your spirit. Those are the people who rob you of joy.

In this case, those are the people who ruined an entire generation, all because of an attitude that refused to look at the blessings God had given them, refused to see how far God had brought them and where God was taking them, and focused only on how rotten things were in that particular moment.

But putting some space between yourself and people like that is only half of it. Moses and Aaron did more than separate themselves from people who were bringing them down, they went straight to the one person who would lift them up. They went straight to God, and fell on their faces.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the Israelites. It’s easy to read through all of this and shake your head and say, “What’s wrong with those people? Why can’t they learn? Don’t they see that God’s taking care of them, and has always taken care of them?”

But that’s us too, isn’t it? Whatever bad thing is happening in our lives right now tends to be the only thing we see. It takes effort to look past that into how far God has brought us and where God is leading us.

It’s human nature to cry out. It’s human nature to grumble and gripe. The important thing is who you cry out to and in what way. The Israelites cried out to Moses and Aaron in anger. But Moses and Aaron cried out to God in a plea for help.

And that makes all the difference, because when we cry out to God, He always answers, even if it’s in a way we can’t understand in the moment.

God answers Moses and Aaron in verse 8. “Take the staff,” He says. This could be Aaron’s rod, the one he threw down and was turned into a snake when Pharaoh demanded a miracle and was kept in the tabernacle.

Or it could be Moses’s staff, the one he’d used during all those miracles in Egypt. For us, it doesn’t really matter which one. That staff wasn’t going to do anything, God was.

And God said, “Get all the people together and go the rock”—we don’t know what rock it was or how big, but it must have been close by—and God said, “Tell that rock to bring forth water. And I promise there will be plenty for them and for all the animals.”

So Moses and Aaron do what God said. They bring the people together around that rock, and he’s just had it. Moses is done, right here.

He’s led these people—God’s people—from Egypt to the Promised Land, a trip that normally would have taken a few weeks at the most but instead had taken 40 years because the people just wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t trust God. They wouldn’t keep faith. The couldn’t get along with one another.

Forty years of complaining. Forty years of dealing with a whole nation of negative Nellies. So he stands up there at that rock and he says, “You think you deserve a miracle? Think you’re worthy of water coming out of this rock after the way you’ve been acting? Because I don’t think so.”

What’s he doing here? Moses is frustrated. And because he’s frustrated he’s kind of wavering, isn’t he? His heart isn’t in this. He doesn’t know if he wants to go through with what God’s told him to do or not.

Because he’s basically dealing with a nation of children, and they all need a good spanking. Let them stay thirsty a little while longer, maybe then they’ll learn.

And then he lifts up his hand and hits that rock with his staff, and out comes that water. Out comes more water than the Israelites know what to do with. It’s more than enough for everybody and everything. They can drink and cook and even take a bath if they want to.

All that grumbling, all that complaining, is gone. Now comes happiness. Now comes relief. Where there was once doubt, there’s faith again. God really is there. God really is taking care of us. God really is leading us to a better place, leading us to a home. Aren’t we so glad to be out of Egypt? That place was awful. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

They’re all happy, but Moses is still a little fed up. More than that, at this point Moses is just plain tired. He’s an old man now. He was an old man when he led the Israelites out of Egypt, but all those years in the wilderness has aged him twice over.

Him and Aaron are probably standing there watching all that water flowing out. They’re listening to all the happy shouts of joy, and they’re probably thinking, “I wonder how long that sound will last this time? A month? A week? A day? Then it’ll all happen again.”

And yes, it actually pretty much does all happen again. Because these Israelites are human beings, aren’t they? And all human beings are the same. We’re just grumpy Guses, aren’t we? That’s what’s in our hearts.

But it doesn’t end there for Moses. His bad day is about to get a whole lot worse. In fact, in a lifetime of bad days, this one might turn out to be the worst one Moses ever had. Because no sooner do him and Aaron get settled than God speaks to them both, and what God says is heartbreaking.

Verse 12: “Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”

Now I want you to take a minute and think about that. Think about what God just said and what Moses must feel. Because here’s this man who had murdered an Egyptian and ran into the desert so he wouldn’t get caught. He’d become a shepherd.

And then God goes to him in the form of a burning bush and says, “You, Moses, are going to be the one to lead my people out of slavery to the Promised Land.”

Moses didn’t want to go. Remember that? He thought he was the last person in the world qualified to do something like that. But God said, “No, I’ve chosen you.” And so Moses went.

He stood up to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the world at that time. Through Moses, God performed miracles that freed his people. And now for all these long years, Moses has been leading the Israelites. Leading an entire nation toward a new home, a land flowing with milk and honey.

And now after all that time, after all that hard work, after decades of feeling the weight of leadership every single day, Moses isn’t going to see it. All these other people, all the ones who have griped and groaned and complained, they’ll see the Promised Land. But not Moses.

And what did Moses do to deserve this awful punishment? God states the charges right there in verse 12: “You’re guilty for not believing in me, Moses. And you’re guilty of not upholding me as holy to the people.”

But wait, how in the world does what Moses did show that he didn’t believe in God? And how does what Moses did show God as not holy to the people? What in the world did Moses actually do that made him so guilty that he wouldn’t be allowed to follow his people into the Promised Land?

He struck that rock.

But now wait, you might say. Didn’t something like this happen before? As a matter of fact, it did.

Way back in Exodus 17, back in the early days when Moses was leading the parents of the people he’s leading now, the Israelites camped at a place called Rephidim. And there was no water. The people argued with Moses, they said, “Why’d you bring us out of Egypt to kill with thirst here?”

So Moses went to God, and God said, “Take the staff you used to strike the Nile, and I’ll stand before you on the rock at Horeb. Then you take that staff and strike the rock, and water will flow out of it for the people to drink.

So what in the world did Moses do so wrong this time? He struck the rock way back at Rephidim and suddenly there was water and everything was fine. Then all these years later he strikes the rock at Meribah and there’s water and God punishes him. Why?

There are two parts to that answer. The first one is maybe the more obvious one: This second time here, God tells Moses to speak to the rock. Look at verse 8: “...tell the rock before their eyes to yield its water.” See there? Don’t hit it, speak to it. So first and foremost, that’s direct disobedience, isn’t it?

But then here’s the second part, and it’s a little more involved. Moses got into trouble for the physical act of striking that rock. But before we can perform a physical act, there has to be a decision made in the mind and the heart. Right? That’s how the human body works. The heart wants it, the mind figures out how to accomplish it, then the body reacts.

Everything that went into the choice Moses made to strike the rock was actually the real problem. That’s what got him into trouble, because that’s what convinced him to strike that rock.

So what made Moses choose disobedience? And that’s what disobedience to God always is—it’s a choice.

First and foremost, it was anger wasn’t it? Look at verse 11. God said speak to the rock, Moses hits it. But he doesn’t just hit it once, does he? He hits it twice. BAM BAM. What is that? It’s anger, isn’t it?

Moses was mad at the Israelites, and all through the Bible there is warning after warning about keeping your anger in check.

Terrible things can happen when our anger takes over. We do all sorts of stupid things when we’re mad, things that we end up regretting and some things that we end up regretting for the rest of our lives.

And if you study the life of Moses, what you’ll see is that he had some anger issues. Moses lost his temper quite a bit, and in this instance he lost it one too many times.

Now we can say his anger here and elsewhere is justified. There’s a good reason for Moses to be angry.

But God expects us all to learn how to control our anger not because it’s a sin—anger itself isn’t a sin, and sometimes our faith even calls us to be angry—but it is a gateway to a lot of sin. Psalm 37:8 – “Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it only leads to evil.”

Here’s the second reason Moses chose to disobey: complaining. That’s the reason behind a lot of his anger, isn’t it? All that constant griping from the Israelites. Even after all these miracles, they still complain. Nothing is ever good enough. They still refuse to believe that God can help them through the problems they face.

How can anyone really be happy when all they do is complain? How can anyone really love when all they do is complain?

If you follow the path of the Israelites from Egypt all the way to the promised land, here’s the pattern you’ll find. Constant complaining, which leads to a rebellious heart, which leads to frustration, which leads to anger, which leads to sin.

They’re all links in one heavy chain that too many of us wear right around our necks, and it all keeps us from enjoying the blessings that God has given us. It all keeps us from helping others. It all keeps us from growing in our faith.

So you have all that complaining Moses had to constantly hear, and all that complaining led to him lashing out in anger and striking that rock twice. That was the disobedience.

Okay, fine. We get that. Moses screwed up. He disobeyed. But why was that cause enough for God to say he would never step foot in the Promised Land?

If the punishment is supposed to fit the crime, that seems like a huge punishment for a crime that every single person in history has committed except for Christ himself.

Oh, but there it is. Christ.

Listen to 1 Corinthians 10:3-4, where Paul is talking about Moses and those Israelites in the wilderness:

“They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.”

Did you catch that? “For they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.” The rock was Jesus. God didn’t intend this to be a just miracle to satisfy a physical need. He intended it to be a teaching moment too — a symbol that pointed to Christ. People needed to be saved from thirst, what came out of that rock is more than water, it was spiritual water.

These two times that God caused water to flow from a rock were more than just miracles, they were lessons of what was to come.

The first time at Rephidim, God said strike the rock and the water will flow. That’s a direct metaphor for the first stage of salvation, the death of Christ.

The second time at Meribah, God tells Moses to speak to the rock. Moses has his staff there, and it’s the staff that he’s used to perform one miracle after another, but God says, “Don’t use that staff, just speak.”

God wants to show Moses a new way of doing things. He wants Moses to increase his faith. “All you have to do is talk,” he says. But Moses doesn’t talk at all. He strikes.

The water coming from the rock symbolizes two things, Christ’s blood and the living waters. “Whoever believes in me, as scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

That’s what God wanted from Moses—to show the Israelites that. Instead, Moses turned it into a temper tantrum.

He didn’t act like someone who is a leader. He didn’t act like someone who fully trusts in God. He let his emotions get the better of him and followed his own way instead of God’s way.

And God is a God of love, yes. He’s a God of mercy and patience. But He can’t abide something like that, because God is holy.

And what does He say to Moses in verse 12? “You didn’t uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people.”

But even as bad as that is, it’s not the worst of it. I want you to look at one more thing. Look at verse 10. Moses brings everybody together and starts yelling at them. Calls the people, “Rebels.” “You think you deserve a miracle, you rebels?”

And does he say next, “Shall God bring water for you out of this rock”? No. Look what Moses says: “Shall WE bring water for you out of this rock?”

Oh boy. Oh no. WE, Moses? Do you really think you and God are bringing water out of that rock, or you and Aaron and God, and not God and God alone? What’s Moses doing here? He’s claiming partial glory for God’s actions. And as we see all through the Bible, when people do that, things never end well.

So Moses is punished. As is Aaron. And we can say, “Wait a minute, Aaron didn’t do anything.”

Yeah, that’s right. Aaron didn’t do anything. Didn’t speak up when Moses was losing his temper, didn’t stop Moses when he started taking credit for God’s miracles. Aaron didn’t do a single thing, and that’s why he’s punished too. As a matter of fact, Aaron dies about ten verses later.

What do we learn in this story? A couple things. First, God still provides even when we disobey him. Moses screwed up, the Israelites screwed up, but that water still flowed, didn’t it?

But second and most importantly, this story also shows us that sin has bigger consequences that we can often see. All of this started because of complaining. Grumbling. And all of that led to anger. And that anger led to sin.

All of that could have been avoided if the people and Moses had just taken a minute to calm down and remember how far God had brought them. All the things that God had done for them. If they would have just paused long enough to trust. His anger cost him the Promised Land.

That’s a lesson for us today, isn’t it? The Israelites had gotten so lost in their wilderness that they’d lost sight of the most important thing—God was still in control. God was still there. God still loved them. And once we forget those three things, we’re left wandering in our own wilderness too.

And here’s another lesson: there is always mercy. In Deuteronomy 34, Moses climbs Mount Nebo, and there God shows him the Promised Land. Moses can’t go there because of what he’s done, but God still lets him glimpse it. It’s Moses’s, “Well done, my good and faithful servant” moment, isn’t it? It’s a blessing. And there Moses dies.

He doesn’t get to the Promised Land, but he does get to a land far better than that, doesn’t he? Not heaven, because at that time Jesus hadn’t come into the world and died yet, but something like heaven. Something close.

Sometimes God saves you from death, sometimes He saves you through it. He saved Moses through it. Moses got the punishment he deserved, and the grace he didn’t. We just get the grace.

Let’s pray:

Father it’s no wonder why we struggle so much, what with having your spirit alive inside these frail and worn bodies. We long for heaven but still tend to screw up things here on earth. We gripe. We complain. We grow angry. Help us remember, Father, to always take a breath before we speak and act. Help us not to give in to anger. In our sufferings, grant us rest. In our sin, grant us forgiveness. In our doubts, grant us hope. And in all things, father, give us the sight that settles upon eternity rather than the moment. Give us eyes to see your work even in our darkest moments, for we know that in our darkest moments, you are present with us more than ever. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.