What makes you really mad?
What do you do when you get upset and angry?
Moses learned a hard lesson about anger in Numbers 20. Anger can make it easier to do wrong. Did you see our bulletin this week? Did you read the verse in Words to live by?
James 1:19-20
Open you Bible to that passage and read it with me. This is a very informative passage about our anger.
Today’s world is full of angry people! Even whole nations that are angry with one another today. We’ve got war going on all over. In some places there are people angry enough to strap bombs around themselves and walk into a crowd and detonate. In Chattanooga there are people who will swear at you and make obscene gestures at you if you aren’t driving fast enough or slow enough to suit them. There are angry words of hate and destruction all around us. It is popular to be mad today, and even used for entertainment! As I go back and forth to Nashville for my graduate classes I sometimes turn on the radio and scan through the stations. Music doesn’t keep me awake and I don’t care for much secular music anyway, so I tend to search for Christian stations for messages or talk shows or news programs. It is amazing to me when you scan out of the Christian stations and hear the secular talk shows, how some of the conservative show hosts bash the liberals with such a vengeance. I hear the political polemics guys going at it against some candidate or governing official. They dig up stuff and present it by strong emotion and irritation stirring up anger and ill will against them, or by mockery with comical caricatures that belittle and berate the object of their focus. Vacillating between laughter and horror, they rant and rave and mock. Some of you know what I’m talking about. I must admit, it does keep one awake. Yet it is an attitude I certainly do not wish to imitate. Some of their points are valid too, but the way they harass and belly ache about it almost makes me want to defend the victims of their venom. Personally I can’t agree with either side! What disturbs me most is that the love of God is completely missing. The message of Jesus Christ which drives a wedge between the sin and the sinner is gone! No one weeps for the lost. Humanity is stripped away from humans. Something is wrong. I don’t have all the answers but I know enough to tell the difference between God’s righteous wrath against sin and man’s godless wrath that serves himself.
Now I believe in a time and place for righteous indignation. God’s word shows us Jesus himself was stirred with zeal for the Temple so that he turned over the money changers’ tables and drove out those who were buying and selling. I want to be like Jesus in my anger, but that takes a lot more strength and maturity than it looks like. Jesus could keep a clear head and walk in the Holy Spirit in his anger, I’m not so sure about me. In fact, I need to remember what James 1:19-20 says about the anger of man and God’s righteousness.
As we turn to Numbers 20 today to see anger’s effects on Moses leadership there are some very important lessons to learn.
This is not the first time Moses got mad, but it is the first time that the Bible records that it was connected with unbelief and rebellion in Moses and Aaron. Open your Bibles to Numbers 20 and look at this passage with me.
This is near the end of the wilderness wandering. Moses has led Israel for almost 40 years. The people have complained and rebelled over and over. Miriam, Moses sister has just died. Now a new generation of Israelites is on the verge of the Promised Land and once again, water is scarce.
What follows is a “like parents-like children” experience. Just as their parents complained at the bumps in the road, so do the sons and daughters.
2 And there was no water for the congregation; and they assembled themselves against Moses and Aaron.
3 The people thus contended with Moses and spoke, saying, "If only we had perished when our brothers perished before the LORD!
4 "Why then have you brought the LORD’S assembly into this wilderness, for us and our beasts to die here?
5 "And why have you made us come up from Egypt, to bring us in to this wretched place? It is not a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, nor is there water to drink."
Take a lesson here Parents. What your kids hear you say will likely be repeated. They will probably follow your lead. They will also pick up on your attitudes. Parents that talk positively about church and the membership and leadership of church around their kids will more than likely raise up kids that talk and feel that way. Parents that openly put down church leaders in front of their kids will create a sense of mistrust in the hearts of their children toward them.
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:
10 and Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly before the rock. And he said to them, "Listen now, you rebels; shall we bring forth water for you out of this rock?"
11 Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod; and water came forth abundantly, and the congregation and their beasts drank.
What does Moses call them? Rebels! Then he says, “Shall we bring forth water for you out of this rock?” What is going on with Moses here? In a moment of madness Moses does something he’s never done before. He shares credit with God for the miracle of bringing water out of the rock. He’s angry at Israel and he crosses a line that he will regret until he dies. Moses and Aaron do this together.
Anger is dangerous stuff. When we are angry we can say and do things we would not think of doing when we are not angry. Anger is a powerful motivator. So powerful, in fact, the Bible is constantly warning us about its dangers. Look at the next two verses.
12 But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, "Because you have not believed Me, to treat Me as holy in the sight of the sons of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them."
Listen to verse 24 "Aaron shall be gathered to his people; for he shall not enter the land which I have given to the sons of Israel, because you (plural) rebelled against My command at the waters of Meribah.
Moses and Aaron forfeited leadership because they did not believe God here but rebelled against his command.
