Man's Anger - God's Righteousness

I think about the Inner City kids and their attitudes toward the police. For many of them the only things they hear about the police are bad and scary things. They see the police come in and arrest their dads and moms and cousins and they learn to hate the police and see them as their enemies instead of their protectors. That is a difficult matter to overcome!

Moses has a lot to overcome with this second generation of Israel. Only by the grace of God will it happen. Here in Numbers 20 we hear echoes of the past and see how a generation brought up under complaining parents learned to do the same.

Notice Moses and Aaron’s response to the people and the Lord’s instructions to them:

6 Then Moses and Aaron came in from the presence of the assembly to the doorway of the tent of meeting, and fell on their faces. Then the glory of the LORD appeared to them;

7 and the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,

8 "Take the rod; and you and your brother Aaron assemble the congregation and speak to the rock before their eyes, that it may yield its water. You shall thus bring forth water for them out of the rock and let the congregation and their beasts drink."

The first thing I notice here is how calm God is about this. What God sees here is not the same thing that he has seen in the past. The people’s response here may have been almost verbatim to that of their parents when God was very angry with them, but something has changed, and you can be sure it wasn’t God. In fact, God treats them with gracious gentleness and instructs Moses to take three specific steps: Take the rod, gather the people, and speak to the rock. Simple. So Moses and Aaron take the rod, (good job so far), they gather the people at the rock, (again, so far so good). But then something happens. It’s like Moses sort of snapped. He speaks, but not to the rock. He speaks to the people. He calls them a bad name. Then he takes the rod, the one he struck the rock with when their parents complained about water 40 years ago. Perhaps Moses is thinking about all the years of their misery in the desert, I don’t know. It’s like he’s back at the beginning with the original group that complained against him for water and God told Moses:

Exodus 17: 6 "Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb; and you shall strike the rock, and water will come out of it, that the people may drink." And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel.

7 And he named the place Massah and Meribah because of the quarrel of the sons of Israel, and because they tested the LORD, saying, "Is the LORD among us, or not?"

But this is different. There is a different spirit among this complaining group. They know the Lord is among them! They see themselves as the Lord’s assembly. They may be complaining, but there’s something different here that the Lord sees, something that requires not punishment, but provision. God provides water for them and proves himself holy among them. But Moses is mad. He disobeys God. He shares credit for the miracle. God says he did not believe. Later God says he rebelled. And it will cost him his leading the people into Canaan. Look at what happened: