Transcript
From Exodus: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.’” I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Hebrew slaves rescued from bondage to Pharaoh are in the wilderness. Things aren’t going the way they’d like, and the people let Moses know about it. Their complaining has progressed from grumbling when they went three days in the desert of Shur without water to more grumbling with respect to the manna and quail.
But here at Rephidim, when the people are about to die of thirst, they escalate. And “the people quarreled with Moses.”
Moses responds to them saying, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” Moses can’t possibly meet the needs of all these people and he recognizes that their quarrel isn’t with him anyway but with God.They’re doing more than grumbling now.
Their complaint has escalated into a legal action. The word ‘quarrel’ (vayyarev) is the Hebrew word for ‘lodging a legal complaint’. Moses is saying, “Why do you put the Lord on trial?” Moses being God’s man, that’s what they’re doing.
Israel wants a trial. They’ve charged Moses with a capital offense. That’s why he says, “They’re about to stone me.” When people are stoned in the Bible it isn’t a mob action, it’s a judicial execution.
So the question hanging in the air is this. “What’s God going to do with Israel putting him on trial?” And God answers by saying, in effect, “You want a trial? I’ll give you a trial.”
God sets up a court. “And the Lord answered Moses, ‘Walk ahead of the people, take some of the elders of Israel.’” Why elders? God’s calling a jury; the elders will assume the role of witnesses at the trial.
“And take in your hand the staff.” Why the staff? Like a judge’s gavel, it’s a symbol of authority. In ancient Israel you could tell who the judge is in a trial by seeing who’s holding the staff. The staff will be used, in some cases, as the implement of smiting, the judge not just hearing the evidence and pronouncing the verdict but also executing the sentence straightaway. So there Moses is holding the staff (see Isaiah 10, “the rod of my anger, staff of my fury”).
Then God says, “And I will stand before you on the rock at Horeb.” What’s this stand before business? With the one exception of Jesus standing before Pilate, this is the only passage in the Bible where God stands before someone at a trial. In all other passages, people stand before God.
Those other courtroom scenes include the daughters of Zelophehad standing before Moses because they had a problem about their inheritance rights (Numbers 27). In 1 Kings (3) two prostitutes came to Solomon — remember the ones debating about whose baby it was? — and the Bible says, “they stood before Solomon.”
The accused stand before the judge. In the New Testament, John the evangelist (8) writes, “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery and they made her stand before the group.”
So who’s on trial in Exodus 17? God. Who’s acting out the part of the judge? Moses. Now let’s say you and I are these elders. What do we expect? Here is God in a theophany possessing the rock. ‘Rock’ is one of Moses’ favorite names for God. Don’t think in terms of a little stone. The word translated ‘rock’ (tzur) is used to refer to all of Mount Sinai. So here’s Yahweh who in the glory cloud has localized himself on the rock. There’s Moses with the staff, the rod of judgement. Israel, represented by her elders, witnesses the case.
As elders, what do we expect will happen now that we have put God on trial? We expect God will say to Moses, “You see that staff by which you smote the Nile and caused it to divide, the instrument by which you brought plagues against Egypt?” We expect God will say, “Lift the staff and point it at the elders so that they get what they deserve.”
That is what we expect. It is not what happens. God says, “Lift the staff. I’ll stand before you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock... and water will come out of it so that the people can drink.”
This is nearly impossible to imagine. Here’s God’s awesome pillar of glory cloud resting there on the rock. Moses lifts the staff. When Moses strikes the rock, we expect that everybody will go up in smoke. Instead, when God’s glory cloud and the rock possessing it are struck, God takes the blow, and water flows out of the rock. God receives the judgement that the people would receive the blessing. God the rock takes upon himself the judgement that Israel deserved. And she gets to have a drink “on the house.”
How can Yahweh be the object of judicial execution? How can God receive the judgement that we would receive the blessing? Those are the questions we bring with us to the Good Samaritan altar. This is why we sing “rock of ages, cleft for me.” Jesus identified that rock with himself.
In John’s gospel, when Israel celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles whereby she remembered these events, in that eight-day celebration they would take water, and the priest would pour out water on the ground. And everyone imagined that somehow it would run out of the Temple and go all the way down to the Jordan and ultimately into the Dead Sea, figuratively giving life or blessing to it and causing it to sweeten.
They had this rite that they would perform whereby God’s people would remember how God took care of their thirst in the wilderness. They would do that for seven days. But on the eighth day, the priest wouldn’t do that.
John tells us that on the eighth day of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus stood up in the midst of everybody and identified himself as that rock. He writes, “Jesus stood up and said in a loud voice, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and let him drink who comes to me. Whoever believes in me as the scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within’” (John 7. 37).
Jesus lays claim to that old miracle, and transposes it to a higher key, to recognize that in his flesh and blood he gives us life most deeply apprehended. For that reason the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 said that, “Israel drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.” As John tells the story, “everyone who heard Jesus on that day said, ‘No one ever spoke the way this man does.’”
Let’s pray. O Lord, most precious lamb of God, most tender priest of man, who feedest thine own with the bread which cometh down from heaven, in whose hands is a cup and the wine is red; we pray thee with this food and drink so to satisfy our hunger that we hunger yet more and our thirst that it never be quenched. For thine is the power and the glory unto endless ages of ages. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
