“Why?” More often than not, it is an unanswerable question: “Why?” From a three-year old’s incessant refrain, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” to the more substantive and troubled inquiry of an adult: “Why?”
That's Rebekkah’s question in Genesis 25:22 during a difficult pregnancy: “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” I’ve heard a woman or two speak that way. It was Moses’s question to God in Numbers 11:11: “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me?” That’s the perennial question of pastors and preachers when they go into their closet to pray. The prophet Jeremiah laments, “Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” (Jeremiah 20:18). I’ve heard that voice of depression and despair a time or two, have you? The Psalms are full of “Why?’s”. Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” That’s Psalm Ps 10:1. And then there’s the famous beginning of Psalm 22, that Jesus quotes from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” More often than not, it is an unanswerable question: “Why?”
The Israelites ask, “Why?” in the wilderness in verse 3 of this morning’s Old Testament Lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock by thirst?” This is not the only time the Israelites ask “Why?” on their journey in the wilderness. They ask it again in Numbers 11:20: “Why did we ever leave Egypt?” And in Numbers 14:3: “Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword?” And in Numbers 20:5: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to this wretched place?”
Professors and preachers alike routinely ridicule and even condemn the Israelites on their journey when they ask “Why?” My friend and mentor, John Durham, in his commentary on Exodus, calls this passage a story of a “rebellion born of doubt” (WBC, Exodus, p. 232) as the Israelites engage in “doubting . . . what should be undoubtable” (p. 230): the presence and provision of God on their journey. A momentary exposure to thirst—a short-term shortfall—causes them to become disaffected and to grumble about Moses leadership and the Lord’s provision. So the name of the place is remembered in v 7 as “Massah (Testing) and Meribah (Dissatisfaction)” (p. 228). “Is the Lord present with us or not?” the Israelites ask when they get thirsty.
Durham says that to ask that question at all is scandalous. It is as though God’s mighty acts in Egypt had never occurred; as though the Israelites’ deliverance from bondage and slavery had not happened; as though their rescue at the sea was forgotten; as though their guidance in the wilderness by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night had gone unnoticed; as though the manna—bread from heaven—that they were eating daily counted for nothing. It is as though the very fact that they were alive and free, they and their children and their livestock, were not in itself evidence enough that the Lord is present with them. A little thirst, a short-term shortfall, an anxiety or uncertainty or fear of any sort causes them—and us—to doubt the undoubtable: God’s presence and provision.
The larger biblical tradition remembers this incident of quarreling and complaining in the wilderness as a turning point—a breaking point of a sort—in the Lord’s relationship with Israel. Listen to the ancient call to worship in Psalm 95, part of which served as our opening sentences for worship here this morning: “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker! For the Lord is our God, and we are the people of God’s pasture, and the sheep of God’s hand. O that today you would listen to the Lord’s voice! Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah, in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.’ Therefore in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest’” (Psalm 95:6-11). The shortfall may be short-term, the anxiety or uncertainty or fear may be passing; but the relational consequences of dissatisfaction and testing can be far-reaching, according to Psalm 95.
It is surely not a coincidence that Psalm 95:8 says, “Do not harden your hearts,” exactly the expression that was used repeatedly of the recalcitrant Pharaoh of Egypt in the book of Exodus whose “heart was hardened” again and again, and we all know how that turned out, in the words of the old spiritual: “Pharaoh’s army got drownded.” The consequences of hardness of heart are far-reaching. For forty years I loathed that complaining and grumbling generation and “Therefore in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’” said the Lord.
They are easy targets, these Israelites, and so are you and I. Our grumbling and complaining are incessant, as are our disaffection toward our leaders and our doubting of God. To be sure, the priests in the Jerusalem temple in their call to worship in Psalm 95 want none of it; and so they instruct the people, “Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah, in the wilderness.” The priests know what is at stake here. After all, Psalm 106 says that Meribah was Moses’ downfall. Psalm 106 says that the people “angered the Lord at the waters of Meribah, and it went ill with Moses on their account; for they made his spirit bitter” (vv 32-33).
That’s a reflection of the Meribah story as it is told in the book of Numbers, where “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron, and command the rock before their eyes to yield its water. Thus you shall bring water out of the rock for them; thus you shall provide drink for the congregation and their livestock. So Moses took the staff from before the Lord, as he had commanded him. Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, ‘Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?’ Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank. But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.’ These are the waters of Meribah, where the people of Israel quarreled with the Lord, and by which he showed his holiness” (Numbers 20:7-13).
Instead of simply commanding the rock to yield its water to show God’s holiness, in a fit of anger, Moses berated the people and struck the rock, and in so doing ruptured his relationship with God. In this version of the Meribah story in Numbers, Aaron the brother of Moses and the ancestor of the priests in Jerusalem is also present and is also excluded from God’s rest on account of what happened there; and Aaron’s successors who are calling the people to worship in Psalm 95 want no part of that kind of trouble on their own time and place.
But let’s look again at what happens in Exodus 17:1-7. What typically gets overlooked by the priests and preachers and professors alike in their ridicule and condemnation of these Israelites is the very fact that in Exodus 17:1-7, in spite of their dissatisfaction and testing, in spite of their quarreling and complaining, in spite of their “doubting what should be undoubtable,” God still provides for the people. When the people complained against Moses, “Why did you put us in this situation of scarcity and discontent?” “Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.’ 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, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and the water will come out of it, so that the people may drink’” (Exodus 17:4-6). What usually goes curiously unnoticed in this story is that God provides exactly what the people need and ask for. After all, v 1 says, “There was no water for the people to drink”; and v 3 says, “The people thirsted there for water.” And God responded to the people’s cry by giving them exactly what they asked for: water where there was no water. There is in Exodus 17:1-7 a legitimate situation of need; there is a short-term shortfall, a condition of scarcity.
According to the late Brevard Childs, a leading American Old Testament scholar of the twentieth century (who, by the way, was born in Columbia, S.C.), there is a pattern to this story that shows up throughout the wilderness journey of the Israelites. It is a pattern of need, of complaint, of intercession, and of God’s miraculous meeting of that need. That pattern expresses gospel in a nutshell: the Lord provides even for testy and unsatisfiable, quarreling and complaining and doubting people. And when we read this story, instead ridiculing and condemning those Israelites, we should all say together, “Thanks be to God!” “Thanks be to God!”
You see, a fascinating thing about God and about our journey with God is that our disaffection and discontent and doubt does not result in God’s abandonment of us on the journey. God still provides, as God provided in Exodus 17 at Meribah and Massah. What happens, though, is that by allowing ourselves to become over-reactive and to be overcome by our disaffection and discontent and doubt, consumed by anxiety and uncertainty and fear in the face of shortfalls and scarcities, we remove ourselves, we cut ourselves off from “God’s rest.” God had promised the Israelites rest, and they cut themselves off from it and Meribah and Massah.
Jesus calls us to reconnect to God this way: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Jesus calls us to quench our deepest thirst with the “living water” (John 4:10) this way: “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water I will give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Our Lenten journey is a coming to Christ in our weariness with our heavy burdens. Our Lenten journey is a coming to Christ in our deepest thirst. Our Lenten journey is a coming to Christ to lay down our disaffection and discontent and doubt, our anxiety and uncertainty and fear that makes us testy and unsatisfiable, quarreling and complaining.
So that even when we are beset by thirst, shortfall, scarcity, uncertainty, and fear, instead of arriving at “Massah (Discontent) and Meribah (Testing)” asking, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” and asking, “Is the Lord present with us or not?” we arrive instead at a place where we sing, “Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see; All I have needed Thy hand hath provided—“Great is Thy faithfulness,” Lord, unto me!”
Photo from St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, England, by Lawrence OP, used under license of Creative Common.
This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.
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