The mob had grown quiet. All that could be heard was the desert wind. The blowing sand burned in their eyes, but they could see the anger in his face. His hands were still shaking and his heart pounding as he walked away from the rock. The water rushing from the rock flowed like the contempt he felt toward his own people that day. They were back at the spot where it all began. At this place nearly forty years before, God had told Israel to go in and take the Promised Land (Num 14). Out of fear and lack of faith they had refused. That rebellious generation had been cursed to live out their days in the desert. Their descendants were no different from their parents. They had learned nothing in those miserable years.
He had barely buried his sister when they came at him grumbling about his leadership and demanding water. They would not even give him time to grieve. This same litany of demands and complains he had heard forty years ago. Once more he humbled himself before God asking what he should do. His answer was simple and lacking drama. “Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water” was all he said. For Moses their whining and self-pity was more than he could stand. All the accumulated anger, exasperation, and frustration of those years boiled to the surface as he stood before those rebels and twice struck the rock with his staff.
God was so disappointed in Moses. By his disobedience, he demonstrated a lack of trust in God and his word and he had dishonored God before Israel. As a result his leadership of Israel would end at the edge of the Promised Land (Num 20:1-3). Such is the power of the sin of anger.
It had to have been a bitter pill for Moses to swallow. For forty years he had led the children of Israel in the desert to get them into the Promised Land. Now that they were finally ready to enter this good land, he would not be able to go with them. How could this be? How could this man who was “more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (Num 12:3) and to whom God had spoken “face to face” (Num 12:8) not be permitted into the Promised Land?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Rollie, you asked for feedback. Just one thing in this section - you might explain the exact action of his disobedience more clearly, that God had told him only to speak to the rock, and he struck it. That's what we've always been taught was his sin here, but looking at it now, I can see that's only a part of it.
ReplyDeleteThe anger and disobedience are expressed in his words. Instead of saying, God is going to provide you with water, he said, "Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?" If he was yielding to the anger, as you're saying, the action of striking the rock would be an expression of the anger, not the specific act of disobedience we've been taught it was.
God says that Moses didn't trust "enough to honor me as holy." You say that Moses "dishonored God," which of course he did, but mostly by failing to honor him. The only way the people would have known that God had promised water from the rock at Moses' command was if Moses told them. And in his anger and frustration, he takes the credit on himself instead of giving it to God.
Anyway, a little bit more analysis there would be good, I think.