LEANING UPON OUR OWN UNDERSTANDING

Is the God of the Bible too severe? Even if it appears that way, we might be placing too much emphasis upon our own thinking. We can only perceive a very limited spectrum of reality, a narrow band of visual and auditory wavelengths. To illustrate our limitations, we can see the second hand moving but not the hour hand, and if the second hand was moving a thousand times faster, we wouldn’t be able to see it at all.

What we perceive of our physical world is very limited. This principle pertains especially to God’s ways:

•    “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Consequently, God had severely punished His faithful servant Moses by terminating his life, preventing him from entering the promised land.

Why? Israel had once again rebelled against their faithful God because He hadn’t yet provided them with water. Consequently, He instructed Moses to merely speak to a rock so that water would come forth. However, Moses had lost patience with his rebellious people and struck the rock in anger! However, in God’s eyes, this was a weighty sin:

•    And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”(Numbers 20:12)

How did Moses fail to uphold the holiness of the Lord? By striking the rock instead of speaking to it! However, approximately 39 years earlier, God had ordered Moses to strike a rock so that water would come forth.

Why is this difference so important? It seems that the revelation of God’s holiness was at stake. How? In much of the OT,  God communicated through symbols or shadows, especially regarding the Gospel of the Messiah:

•    Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. (Colossians 2:16-17)

The reality or substance casting the shadows is Jesus, the Father’s hidden plan to restore His creation. Jesus had also claimed that the OT is about Him:

•    “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me,” (John 5:39)

These two verses, among many others, invite us to seek Jesus within the OT Scriptures. How then did these two accounts of God bringing forth water from the most unlikely place—a rock—present a portrait of Jesus. In the first account, the Messiah had to be struck down, while the second account only required that He be petitioned to receive blessing.

In both accounts, Israel angrily rebelled because they hadn’t yet received water. Consequently, in the first instance, the humble Moses sought Gods guidance:

•    So Moses cried to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” And the Lord said to Moses, “Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.” And Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. (Exodus 17:4-6)

Israel had brought indictments against their God. Therefore, God had Moses orchestrate a symbolic trial. He had Moses call the elders, as witnesses, and to bring his staff, which had been repeatedly equated with God’s judgments. God then curiously assumed the role of the defendant and stood in the defendant’s box. Then Moses brought his staff down where the Defendant stood awaiting judgment.

Instead of a curse falling upon Israel, it fell upon their Savior. Consequently, Israel received the greatest blessing, water, from the most unlikely source, a rock, a shadow of the Cross! (This is confirmed by 1 Corinthians 10:4).

In the second account, in his anger, Moses didn’t believe that God’s distinction was critical and instead struck the rock, failing to faithfully present the shadows of the Messiah and His holiness, His absolute hatred of sin and how His wrath had to be absorbed by His beloved Son:

•    [We] are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness [holiness], because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. (Romans 3:24–25)

Since the Messiah had already been struck down (Exodus 17) to satisfy God’s holy nature, now we only need to make our requests known to Him.

•    He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. (Hebrews 9:12)

If this interpretation is correct, it once again demonstrates that we must not modify God’s Word according to our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5-6). His ways are above our own.