WATER FROM ROCK

Reading: Psalm 78, 1-4,12-16,, Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32, Exodus 17:1-7
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY, on September 25th 2011

A printable PDF file can be found here

The Israelites are complaining. Here we go again. Déjà vu. Last time it was a lack of meat and bread and God provided them with quails and manna. This time it’s about water. “Give us something to drink, Moses... or else”.

Now Moses hasn’t got as much patience as he had the last time they started to complain. Everybody is getting a little on edge. Moses is afraid the people will stone him if water doesn’t turn up. He doesn’t calm things down any by reprimanding the people, for criticizing him, and in the process testing God.

So when Moses goes to ask God for help, there is a very personal element involved. He doesn’t ask God for water. He asks Him for protection. He’s afraid the people will attack him. “What shall I do with this people?” he asks God “They’re threatening to throw rocks at me!”

God, being God, has everything under control. What appeared to be a major crisis was about to be turned into a blessing. The Israelites were about to be given yet another sign that the Lord their God was with them, and a reminder that they didn’t need to moan and groan and quarrel, but rather trust in God.

As with the Quails that came and the manna that fell from heaven, it’s an unusual sign that they are offered. At first glance it seems to involve the sort of ‘trickery’ that would make Harry Potter proud. Moses is to take his staff, strike a rock that was at a place called Horeb, and ‘Hey Presto’ water would come flowing out from it. Lest there be any doubt that this was a genuine miracle, Moses is to take the elders along with him, so they get to examine the rock, observe the events and testify to the people. Picture the scene…

“I’d like to invite one of the audience here tonight to come and examine this rock. As you can see, ladies and gentleman, this is just a normal rock, solid granite through and through. You can check around the edges, on the top, underneath, there are no secret catches, latches or hatches, this rock is just rock. And now, prepared to be in awe. I take this staff and I smash it on the rock, and “Voila” water from the Rock!”

In one of those beautiful turn around moments that appear quite frequently in the Hebrew narratives, the people are turned from seeing rock as something they could use to hurt with Moses with, to the rock as a sign of God’s presence in a thirsty land.

The bringing forth of water in such a way answered for the people a question that had been troubling them for some time. “Was God still with them?” Yes, God had been there in Egypt getting them ready for deliverance. Yes, God had led them through the waters to freedom. Yes, God had fed them upon meat and bread from heaven. But was that it? Were they now on their own? Had Moses led them all this way, only to abandon them?

It turns out that Moses had very little to do with it. After all, he had gone to God to save his own skin, not to intercede for the people. The people weren’t the only ones who needed a sign that God was still with them!

In this account there are two wonderful pictures of the faithfulness of God.
Firstly… God is a God who is always ahead of us.
Secondly… God is a God of transformation

God is always ahead of us.

The words of Exodus17:6 are important in understanding this event. The Lord says to Moses, “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb”. You may remember that at the burning bush God had revealed himself to Moses, as “I am who I am”, as a God who could not be contained by words or formulas.

This was not a case of Moses manipulating God into performing a miracle so the people would give up on the idea of stoning him. On the contrary the whole event, was an action of God, to remind the people that as they journeyed through the wilderness, He was their God and they were God’s people. Even though they complained and quarreled and fretted and worried God wasn’t about to give up on them!

We are not that different to those wanderers in the wilderness. When trouble comes our way, people start asking, “Where’s God?” and look for somebody in leadership to blame. As though tragedy and need, thirst and hunger were somehow a result of God leaving the building or a failure on the part of the administration. We trust God for the good times, but in the hard times are tempted to assume that any lack of blessing is due to either a failure in leadership or a lack of God’s Presence.

“I will” declares God, “Be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb”. God is here described as not being alongside you, or above you, or behind you, but “in front of you”. The God who goes ahead and prepares the way. The God who knows what is around the next corner and is in the business of preparing us. The God who is always ahead of us.

It is hard to look forward when the troubles of the day cause our heads to hang low. It is hard to think of future blessings when present troubles fill our agenda. When the sky turns black, and the thunder rolls and the rain starts to fall, we are not thinking about the sunny days that may be in the future, we’re just trying to stay dry and stay safe in the storm. Scripture tells us that God was not in the rock, but on the rock. God was going ahead of them. They hadn’t been abandoned. They could move on in faith.

So for ourselves, when we face the many trying circumstances that come our way, here is a reminder that the way forward is not to look for somebody to blame, nor is it to assume that the presence of problems equates to an absence of God’s activity. Rather here is a call to trust that God’s love is there for us, leading us and guiding us… always way ahead of us!
A second thing we see in this story is that…

God is a God of transformation.

The most powerful imagery in this chapter is the contrast between the rock of the desert and the water that flows to bring life. Under the touch of God stone is transformed into refreshment. It speaks of how the hard and bitter and dry places of our lives can become places where we experience God’s life and love.

In John 4:14 Jesus meets a women by a well in Samaria. The woman is between a rock and a hard place. She needs a transformation. Jesus tells her; “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." Through her encounter with Jesus Christ she truly is changed and her life would never be the same again.

Time and time again the experience of faithful people has been that when they thought there was no way forward, the love of God came through for them. God takes situations that outwardly seemed hopeless and somehow everything was turned around as they put their faith in God’s ability to transform situations of desperation into opportunities for new life.

For was there ever a harder place than the cross? The cross of Calvary, upon which Jesus was crucified, has become for the church a symbol of faith. God took the hard place and used it as a means of blessing. God took that dreadful hour (that was the result of us having hearts of stone that could not recognize the Presence of God even as He walked before us) and transformed it through resurrection. God took that bitter hour, and bathed it in glorious light as the stone rolled away from the tomb and the church ever since has declared Jesus Christ as the ‘Rock of Ages’ from whom love and grace now flow freely.

Now notice, that Moses had to strike the rock before any water came out. I don’t intend suggesting that we go around hitting each other with sticks in order to release the blessings of God. That we become some weird cult. “So what church do you belong to?” “Oh, First Presbyterian of ‘Hit ‘em with a stick’ Baldwin.”

But, is it not true, that the hard knocks that life throws at us, refine our faith in ways the good times fail to do? It is the storms that we travel through that make us appreciate the daily blessings that surround our lives.

For sure wilderness times will come our way. In the wilderness the Israelites wanted to know, “Moses, Is God still with us? Or are we going to die of thirst out here?” Moses himself was fearful that God had only bought them so far and now had left them to work it all out for themselves.

Through this strange miracle of bringing water from the rock, the people received the assurance that God was still on their case. Through this account we are offered two wonderful pictures of the faithfulness of God.

Firstly… God is always ahead of us. Whatever our present circumstances we are called trust that God is the One who knows exactly where we are and has a way forward that Jesus calls us to follow.

Secondly… God is a God of transformation. Wherever we are right now, is not where God would have us stay. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to transform and renew, to bring blessings to the hard places and extract from the stony places the living water of life.

Just as the Hebrews were turned from seeing rocks as something they could use to hurt Moses with, to the rock as a sign of God’s presence in a thirsty land, may our hard places be turned to opportunities, and our hearts of stone be transformed to thanksgiving and generosity.

And all this to the glory of God. AMEN.


Rev Adrian Pratt