Striking the Rock

Today, we are going to take a look at a time when Moses wasn’t content to let God do His work. Moses felt the need to do it for Him.

We are the same way. We are like Moses in this respect. We feel the need to do for God what we feel He is trying to do. However, we need to realize that God has His own plans and that He asks us to allow Him to work through us.

That doesn’t mean we have nothing to do – God calls us to Spiritual maturity:

• not following the rules
• having a relationship with Jesus
• spiritual disciplines – prayer and bible study, reaching out
• living according to the Bible
• concern for others
• worship
• teaching others
• scripture reference to spiritual maturity

1Cor.10:1-5 - For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert.

The setting for this section of scripture is that Paul has just finished telling the Corinthians that not everyone who runs the race is a winner. He has told them that they need to run the race to win. He follows that with this passage. Notice that he ends this passage with the point that God was not pleased with most of them and that they ended up dying in the desert.

As we run our race, some of us are at the end of the race, some of us are just beginning. Some haven’t even started and some are somewhere in between – myself included. We need to run this race to win. I’ve said many times that it’s easy to start strong but much harder to finish strong. We NEED to finish strong. It is then that God is pleased.

So as we read this passage, we recognize that God led the Israelites through the Red Sea and then through the desert as a cloud by day and fire by night. They followed Moses as their leader. God gave them Manna for food. These are the first three verses that Paul gives us. However, then he gives us a fourth verse that needs some understanding. He says that they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them and that rock was Christ. What is Paul talking about here?

Exodus 17:1-7

In this passage we see that Moses is confronted by the Israelites. They are thirsty and they are blaming Moses. It gets so bad that they actually think that they are going to die in the desert. Moses gets upset with them. He knows God is in control. He has just seen all these miracles that God has performed to get them out of Egypt. He’s seen the 10 Plagues, the cloud that surrounded the Egyptian army as they tried to pursue the Israelites, the parting of the Red Sea, the pillars of cloud leading them by day and fire leading them by night, the falling of the Manna. He knows that they will get where they need to get because God would take care of them in His way. But the Israelites are so concerned that they threaten to stone him.

God tells Moses to go ahead of them with the elders and to go to the rock at Mt Horeb and to strike it. Moses does as instructed and water comes out of it and the entire nation of Israel drinks from it.

Next we need to go to Numbers 20:1-13.

This time, 40 years have passed. The Israelites are about to enter into the Promised Land. The people are still giving Moses the same grief. This time Moses takes Aaron before the people. God tells Moses to speak to the rock and that it will pour its water out for the people to drink. However, Moses doesn’t do as God commands. Instead, he takes his rod and strikes the rock twice. Water does pour out, but God is displeased with Moses, so much so that He doesn’t allow Moses to enter into the Promised Land.

So what happened? Why was God so displeased with Moses that He wouldn’t let him enter into the Promised Land? After all that Moses had done, wasn’t this a tiny little thing that shouldn’t have resulted in such a drastic punishment?

What happened is that God had provided a perfect type for Christ. When we say that something is a type of Christ, it means that something happened or existed in the Old Testament that points to the way Jesus would interact with the people in the New Testament. In this case, Paul tells us that Jesus was the rock that spewed forth the water. The first time, Moses struck the rock with his rod. This was to show how Jesus was going to be struck down when he came to give his living water to the people. And certainly, we see this in the crucifixion of Jesus. He came to give water to all but the people didn’t accept his offer and so they struck him down and crucified him.

However, after Jesus died, he rose again. He died once to shed his blood for the forgiveness of sin. Because he shed his blood, the sins that we all have committed were forgiven. But what sin have we committed? How often have we broken the commandments of God? How often have we lied, stolen, hated? How often have our thoughts entertained evil things? God calls all of these sins. If we’re really good and have only 3 bad thoughts a day, we will have sinned over 1000 times in a year! In 75 years, that’s a lot of sin! But Jesus’ death paid the price for those sins. We no longer have to worry about whether our sinfulness will cause us to end up in the lake of fire because Jesus has paid the price for those sins and so those sins are forgiven. All we have to do is repent of our sinfulness and trust in Jesus to provide salvation. And this is what is displayed in the first Rock at Horeb. The rock was struck and in being struck, it brought forth life giving water so that all who drank from it were saved.

But in the second case, God very specifically told Moses to speak to the rock, not to strike it. This is because after Jesus died for us, we no longer have to crucify him again. He does not need to be struck again for us to be saved. Jesus will come back again to bring judgment on the world, but before that happens, we can have salvation by speaking to Jesus to accept the gift of salvation that he has already provided. However, Moses destroyed this type by striking the rock again. To God, this was saying that man has to crucify Jesus again to be saved. But this is incorrect. Jesus died once and for all. He does not need to be crucified over and over. That is why our cross is empty. Jesus has died and he has risen. There is no need to put him back on the cross for our sins.

But over and over again, people think that they need to DO something. It isn’t enough to trust in Jesus for our salvation. “There has to be something else we need to do.” So we try to earn our own salvation by DOING something. Anything. We try to earn God’s favor by doing good things. We think that by doing good things that God will forget our sins. It would be as if you killed the child of the family living next door. Do you think that sending $100 to the family that you killed their child is going to get you forgiveness? How about $1,000? One million dollars? Any amount of money? Maybe if you wash their car every week? Do their laundry? Is there anything you can do to earn the forgiveness of the people who you’ve hurt? There is nothing you can do to earn their forgiveness because there is nothing you can do that will be enough to make up for what you have done. If this is true with people, why do we think this will work with God? God is a perfect judge. He is a good judge. A good judge doesn’t let guilty people go free. We are all guilty and we should all be punished. If we think we can bribe the judge, we are insulting him and will end up in worse shape than we started.

The only way we can be forgiven is if someone pays the price for the sins we committed. Jesus did that already. To think that we can add something to that is insulting to God and implies that Jesus didn’t complete his work when he died on the cross. When Moses struck the rock when God said to speak to it, he did the same thing. He implied that God needed his help to complete the work and that the rock needed to be struck again for it to be efficacious. God was not pleased.

So he punished Moses so that he was not able to enter into the Promised Land. In the typology, the Promised Land represents heaven. It shows us that when we try to add to the gospel message by adding works to God’s wonderful grace, that we show a lack of trust in God and Jesus. This lack of trust in Jesus’ sacrifice keeps us from heaven. If we think that Jesus’ death was not enough to get us in, then we will never get in. All we need to do is speak to Jesus and trust that he will give us the living water that allows us to enter into the Promised Land. By doing anything more than this, we are showing a lack of trust in Him and we will find ourselves locked out of heaven.

This doesn’t mean that there is nothing we should do. It simply means there is nothing we need to do to enter into heaven. Jesus has already done it all. We simply need to drink from the living waters that he has provided. This means we simply need to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior – trust him to be sufficient for our entrance into heaven. However, if it was only about entering into the Promised Land, then the Israelites would not have needed to spend 40 years in the desert. In the same way, we would not need to continue our life on Earth. However, God has left us on Earth because there are things He wants us to do while we are still here. It has nothing to do with salvation – it has to do with sanctification, which means growing to be more like Jesus. To do this, God wants us to become spiritually mature. It isn’t enough to be saved. We need to do some other things as well.

It doesn’t mean following the rules. God has given us the rules but He already knows that we are incapable of following them. That is why Jesus came in the first place. He wants us to have a relationship with Jesus. Not just know who he is and that he exists. Not even just knowing what he did for us. We need to have a real relationship. This means really knowing his heart and letting him know yours. The only way that is going to happen is through bible study and prayer. If we aren’t doing these things, we will not know him enough to grow our relationship with him.

He also wants us to reach out to others with the truth of salvation – the Great Commission - remembering that Jesus is the resurrection and the life and that all who believe in him shall never die. God wants us to live according to the Bible. Of course, you won’t know what that is if you never read it. And you can’t depend on others to read it for you. That is not growing a relationship – that is faking a relationship. YOU need to read the Bible so that you can grow YOUR relationship with Jesus.

He wants us to have concern for others – the Great Commandment – loving God as we love ourselves but also loving others as well. He wants us to worship Him and to dedicate our lives to that. He wants us to teach others what we know about Him. In all these things, we do them not to earn salvation or to be good people, but to grow our relationship with Him. By doing this we are pleasing to Him.

Let us not strike the rock anymore. He has been struck already. Let us instead speak to the rock and drink from the living waters that flow from him. When we do, we receive eternal life. Then we can grow our relationship with him and become the people He is calling us to be.

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Last modified: July 26, 2009