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Christ, the Rock Exodus 17: 1 – 7 Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 24 Aug, 2008 |
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“ON CHRIST, the solid rock I stand: all other ground is sinking sand.” We know that song. But there is another sense in which Jesus is our rock in a thirsty land. He is our needed provision. The prophet Isaiah wrote, ISA 55:1 “Come, all you who are thirsty, ISA 55:2 Why spend money on what is not bread, Jesus is water for the thirsty, food for the hungry; he is what satisfies and delights our soul. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, 1COR 10:1 For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. 2 They were all baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. 3 They all ate the same spiritual food 4 and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Israel may have wandered in desert disobedience, but the water of life was always with them, as they drank from the rock where thirsts were quenched. This story is another of the types of Christ that we find throughout the Old Testament; stories which point us towards what Jesus would accomplish for us on the cross. It is a story of deprivation and loss, because Israel was dying of thirst in the desert. It is a story of how what was hidden through the ages is revealed through injury. And it is a story of life in the barren places.
DEPRIVATION AND LOSS The Israelites were under threat. You can live a long time without food. Your body has fat resources which it can consume. If the fat runs out, it can even consume muscle tissue to feed itself. You probably saw news items just this week about the man lost in the Laotian jungle, and how he survived 11 days there. If you have water, you will make it for three or four weeks, sometimes even six weeks. People have lived ten weeks without any food, and some have even lived longer. But what if you have no water? If you had all your water cut off today, no water, no coffee, no Coke, and you lived in Sydney, you might get to see September, though you would be very, very sick by the end of that time. In the Sinai desert, you might see Tuesday if you went without water from this moment, and if you were very fit and could keep out of direct sun. Without water to drink, you do best in a cool, damp environment. Not too cool, but certainly not hot. The thing is that you don't want to perspire and lose water that way. You don't want to have your mouth and nose and eyes drying out with each breath you take. Those things can be enormously influential on how long you will last. And Israel was running out of water, and they were afraid, very afraid, because death was staring them in the face. You can understand the way the Israelites were grumbling. They were afraid, and fearful people are often angry people. If someone gets angry with you, perhaps it is worth asking what they are afraid of. They were afraid for themselves, they were afraid for their children, they were afraid for their livestock. They were all under threat, because the only water they had was what they had taken with them. They felt deprived. They weren't going to die on the spot. It wasn’t like snakebite. But they knew that death was looking them in the face. I had a discussion a little while ago with an atheist who claimed to know the Bible and thought the God revealed in the Bible is a pretty unpleasant being. He also said that he had a party trick of blaspheming and calling on God to strike him dead. I said he must be older than I thought, because that was a party trick when I was a teenager, and it didn't work, because he didn’t really know the Bible at all. The Bible says The soul that sins will die. But it also says 2Pet 3:9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. Such a God is not likely to blast people into oblivion for being arrogant, is he? But that doesn’t mean that he will tolerate rebellion forever. We can be just like those Israelites: surviving for now, but faced with eventual death unless there is a dramatic turn–around. It would be easy for us to read this story and assume that the Israelites were facing this disaster because of their sins. When we read the story of the snakes in the desert, it was very much because they had sinned against God and Moses, by virtually demanding that Moses should take them back. But that is not the case here. Yes, they are grumbling, but for a very good reason. So what does this story say to us? It does not point to a specific sin, so what is the spiritual lesson? The problem is their emptiness. They are without life–giving water. St Augustine said to God, Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and will not rest until they rest in Thee. The French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, said Within each one of us there is a God-shaped vacuum that only God can fill. The emptiness that the Israelites experienced parallels that emptiness which every human experiences apart from the life of Christ within. Jesus stood up on the final day of the Feast, and declared, (7:37) ...“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” John tells us, 39 By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. For the person filled with the Spirit of God, for the person filled with the life of Christ, there is water and enough to share. And, apart from Christ, we are dying of thirst, even though we may not recognise it immediately.
REVEALED THROUGH INJURY Here we come to the really fascinating part of the story. Moses is upset and irritated. This is a sign of dehydration, actually. But it is also a very normal reaction to stress and unrealistic demands. I suppose that there must have been times when Moses wanted to give up, but he kept going. There’s something here for us Christians. Moses could have sent people out to scout for water, but they weren’t desert people. They’d lived in one of the most fertile parts of Egypt for over 400 years. They didn’t know where to find water in desert. Moses could have sought advice, and that is a very worthwhile thing to do. Sometimes we need another person’s perspective on a situation. During the week, our Admin manager received a request to change some back–up tapes, and, when I saw what he was doing, I said, “Are you sure that is what they wanted you to do?” He said he was, but he was prepared to let me check, so I did. I asked the backup manager for advice on what should be done, and he confirmed one of the options. That’s advice. Moses could have asked for counselling, where the counsellor might have asked Moses, “If there was nothing else to consider, what would you really want to do?” He might even have done what many leaders do when the stress gets to great or the grumbling gets to loud. He could have sent scouts out to see if they could find another group of wanderers in the desert who needed an unemployed leader. But he did the thing we often forget to do, which is to ask God. And God told him to take his staff — the one he had struck the waters of the Nile with — and strike a certain rock at Horeb with it. In other words, God is saying to Moses, and to Israel, that what began at the Nile is going on with the provision of water in the desert. Jesus releases us from captivity and he provides life to the freed captives. But where did that water come from? It was from the rock which Moses had to strike with his staff. This might sounds entirely improbable, that you can get water from a rock by striking it, but the fact is that it is possible. There are rocks in the Arabian desert which have a hardened exterior and a soft, porous interior. The desert winds blow sand and dirt and organic material over the surface of the rock and form a kind of crusty varnish, so water that gets in through cracks on the upper side can’t get out lower down. So, when Moses struck the rock — the Hebrew suggests that he gave it a pretty hard bash with his stick — when he did that, the crust broke and water gushed out. And isn’t that just like when Jesus was killed? Isn’t it like when the spear pierced his side, and blood and water flowed out? Isn’t it like what we read in Isaiah: ISA 53:4 Surely he took up our infirmities That word, smitten, means, struck hard, beaten. Jesus was beaten and bashed. He was whipped and spiked, and he did it for us. It is too easy to think of God’s salvation as being free, without realising the price that was paid to make it ours. You know what it is like when we have kids, who would quite generously share their coloured pencils with us, but expect that we will equally freely share the car with them. Sometimes we treat God that way, not realising the value of what Jesus really did for us. Philippians 2 puts it so well: PHILIP 2:5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 2:8 And being found in appearance as a man, He was stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. He was the rock, struck so that life giving water could flow out.
LIFE IN BARREN PLACES So the outcome was an end to the threat of death. The outcome was that the controversy with God was brought to an end. What God promised was fulfilled. Now the Israelites could continue their journey. They might not have reached the borders of Canaan, but they were going there some day. The threat was turned away, and they could head to where they were going. Their need was satisfied, their emptiness was filled, and they knew that Yahweh-yireh had seen and provided once more. There have been times in our history over the past 25 years, when we have been running on empty. We needed cash, we needed resources, and there was no sign anywhere of a solution. We prayed, and I can tell you that we had no flashes of light, no one fell to the floor or spoke in tongues. But, at the last minute, God provided. There was an envelope in the post office box when nothing was expected. There was the person we needed, the answer we had to have. God provided. There is a living God who provides for our needs.
CONCLUSION As I said earlier, there is a God–shaped vacuum within each of us which only God can fill. Even atheists admit that people have a religious tendency; what they fail to recognise or allow for is that, if we are made with such a drive in us, it is there for a purpose. I argue that it is a drive to fill that God–shaped emptiness. As the creation was formless and empty and had to be shaped and filled by God, so we are formed, but empty, and that emptiness, formed to contain God, needs to be filled, filled to the top with God. That is why people search everywhere for something to fill their spiritual emptiness. Some go to Scientology with its pop–psychology and up–market spiritual abuse. Some go to Mormonism or Islam, with their fake religious books alongside the Bible. Some go to crystals or to ouija boards. Sometimes it seems that there are almost as many spiritualities as there are people! G.K Chesterton pointed out that people who cease to believe in God will believe anything. But there is only one way to fill that emptiness, and that is with Jesus Christ himself, the spiritual rock who provides living water to all to come to him. However, many people think they can have Jesus as a leader or as a good man, or as a great teacher, something easy to accept not confronting. But that’s never the way to find him. He is confronting. He is as confronting as death on a cross. He is as confronting as a solid rock pouring out the water that gives life. Perhaps you are aware of that inner emptiness and know that you need Jesus, the one who gave himself for you. Why not come to him by faith today? He died for you. AMEN |
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© Peter R. Green 2008. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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