Sermon Tone Analysis

Repeating the Mistakes of the Past

Numbers 20:2-13

Open your Bibles to Numbers chapter 20.

An old saying tells us, “Those who don’t remember the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.”

Along similar lines some define expert as someone who recognizes his mistakes when he makes them again.

Many of us can relate to this idea: we don’t remember the mistakes of our past well enough to avoid making them again, but they start looking awful familiar after we’ve made them for the second or third or hundredth time.

Whether it’s not measuring twice before we start cutting or failing to be consistent in disciplining our children, we all have areas in our lives where we live out the saying, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

In that, we have a great deal in common with ancient Israel.

They consistently failed to learn from their experience.

We pick up their story at the end of their wilderness wanderings, forty years after they were liberated from slavery in Egypt.

What had they learned in the course of those forty years?

The sad answer, at least for the older generation, was, virtually nothing.

This failure to learn is highlighted by the fact that the event in Numbers 20, the miraculous provision of water from a rock, was a mirror image of a similar event that had taken place in the very first year of their wandering in Exodus 17.

At that first occasion in the wilderness of Sin, the people quarreled with Moses and put the Lord to the test because there was no water for them to drink.

They accused Moses of bringing the people out of Egypt simply to make them die of thirst.

That time, the Lord told Moses to bring the people to the rock at Horeb and to strike the rock there; water would flow from the rock for the people to drink.

Moses did exactly what the Lord told him to do, and the needs of the people were met.

This helps us to see what was still the same and what was new forty years later.

The people’s problem with Moses was the same on the surface, but now it was amplified by all of their other grumbles.

Even though the problem for the people was again the lack of water, their complaint was far more wide-ranging than that.

In counseling, this is called gunnysacking.

It’s when a husband makes his wife angry by not picking up his sock when she has been asking him to do it every single day for the past ten years.

Or maybe the wife forgot to pick up something for her husband like she promised while she was out shopping.

Once the argument starts, though, instead of focusing on the socks or the forgotten item, all kinds of unresolved complaints emerge.

One spouse floods the other with every single one of his or her failings that he or she has carefully been saving up over the last six months, from the time she backed into the garage door, to his habit of not putting the lid back on the milk.

The result is that instead of a limited argument over a minor issue, the couple ends up with a full-scale war because now they are dealing with six months’ worth of issues all at once.

In this case the Israelites’ real problem was that they had nothing to drink, but once the Complaints Department was open for business, everything and anything became fair game.

They repeated the complaint they had made when Moses had first brought them and their livestock into the wilderness—that he had led them there to die, but now with an added edge.

Now it was directed at Moses and Aaron together:

Let’s pray and we’ll work through our text together this morning.

Pray!

First, there is:

The complaint of the people

That complaint has a familiar ring to it because it is very similar to a complaint that was made in Numbers 16.

A couple of ringleaders and 250 men questioned how well Moses was leading the people.

Moses told them to come before God the next morning to see who was supposed to be leading the people and this is how they answered:

Numbers 16:12-14 (The Message)

“We’re not coming.

Isn’t it enough that you yanked us out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness?

And now you keep trying to boss us around!

Face it, you haven’t produced: You haven’t brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey, you haven’t given us the promised inheritance of fields and vineyards.

You’d have to poke our eyes out to keep us from seeing what’s going on.

Forget it, we’re not coming.”

Well, God made a major point about this mini rebellion.

The leaders were swallowed up by the earth and the remaining 250 dissenters were burnt up by lightning.

In our passage, in spite of the Lord’s grace to them, they declared that they would rather have died with those who had rebelled against the Lord.

The people also blamed Moses and Aaron for the consequences of their own choices.

In chapter 14 they chose to believe the spies’ “bad” report concerning the Promised Land and refused to enter it, despite the positive evidence that the spies had brought back.

Now, however, they charged Moses and Aaron with bringing them out of Egypt to an “evil place,” the same word that the spies had used to characterize the Promised Land.

They were frustrated because the wilderness had no grain or vines or fig trees or pomegranates—the very fruit the spies brought back with them from Canaan.

Basically, the people were blaming Moses and Aaron because the wilderness was not like the Promised Land that the people had refused to enter!

Two familiar patterns of sin in their complaint are problems for us as well: catastrophizing and blame-shifting.

Catastrophizing means that we present our situation as far worse than it really is.

Was their situation in the wilderness really a fate worse than death by fire?

They may have been thirsty and missing some of their favorite foods, but the Lord had supplied those needs before, and he could do it again.

They weren’t really as bad off as they were making it out to be, and often neither are we.

Isn’t it amazing how full of anguish we can be while we’re still healthy, surrounded by a family that loves us, with a roof over our heads?

If we lack anything, is it too hard for the Lord to supply what we need?

Instead of catastrophizing and anticipating the worst, we need to take our concerns to the Lord and trust in his goodness and power to provide for us in the situation.

Yet if the Lord is able to provide for our need, why doesn’t he keep us out of difficulty in the first place?

One answer that we often do not want to face up to is that we may be there as a result of our own wrong choices.

The consequences of our choices

God is in control of all things and sometimes he chooses to let us suffer the consequences of our sinfulness so that we might learn something of their true impact.

When that happens, though, instead of repenting and accepting responsibility for our actions, we often exhibit the fact that our hearts have a blame-retardant coating.

Never mind what I did, this problem must surely be someone else’s fault.

“Lord, how could you let me end up in this terrible situation?”

even though “this situation” is exactly where my own decisions and actions have logically brought me.

This is a trend that started all the way back in the Garden of Eden, with the woman blaming the serpent and the man blaming the woman and also God for giving her to him (Genesis 3:12, 13).

Instead of blame-shifting, we need to take responsibility for our own actions and recognize that whatever our present situation, the Lord has always been far more gracious and merciful to us than we could possibly deserve.

He never allows us to suffer in full measure the fate we truly deserve, and he always has good purposes for us in our trials, whatever our present difficulties may be.

The response of Moses and Aaron

However, unlike Exodus 17, the main focus of Numbers 20 is not the sin of the people in grumbling against the Lord, serious though that is.

The main focus here is the response of Moses and Aaron to that complaint.

It started well:

In response to their intercession:

These instructions are clear enough, and the first two steps were carried out correctly: Moses took the staff from before the Lord, and he and Aaron gathered the people together, just as the Lord had commanded him.

But this is where the obedience stops.

Instead of bringing water from the rock by speaking to it, as he had been commanded, Moses launched into an impromptu speech to the people and then struck the rock, not once but twice.

Both of these acts were problematic, and together they show us that Moses too had been caught up in the people’s sinful mind-set, even while he was seemingly doing what the Lord told him to do.

…and he said to them, “Hear now, you rebels: shall we bring water for you out of this rock?”

There were two problems in this brief sentence.

On the one hand, he called the people “rebels.”

You might say, “Well, that’s what they were.”

That’s true.

However, the problem is that Moses was putting himself in the place of judge to make that declaration though the Lord had not authorized him to do so.

The Lord told him to extend his mercy and grace to the people in giving them water in a way that demonstrated clearly that the source was God; instead, Moses set himself up as their judge.

Not only did Moses set himself up as the people’s judge, he also set himself (and Aaron) up as their deliverers.

He said, “shall we bring water for you out of this rock?”

Then he struck the rock twice, as if it were his action that brought forth the water.

Who provided water from the rock for the people?

It was the Lord, of course.

In his frustration with the people, Moses was drawn into the same mind-set they had, forgetting the Lord’s presence and power and acting as if everything were up to him.

Moses presented himself as if he were a pagan magician with the ability to manipulate the gods to do his bidding.

In setting himself up as judge and deliverer of the people, Moses was demonstrating that he too had failed to learn from the past.

That same self-exalting attitude was exactly what he had demonstrated when he first recognized the plight of his people when he was living in Pharaoh’s court.

At that time, Moses saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite, and he intervened and killed the Egyptian.

The next day he saw two of his fellow Israelites fighting and tried to rebuke the one who was in the wrong.

The man’s response was, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?” (Exodus 2:14).

Basically, as a youth in Egypt Moses had been trying to judge and deliver his people in his own strength without a commission from the Lord.

That attempt had ended in abject failure.