The sign in the parking lot said: “Crystal Lake – 5 miles.” So you shoulder your pack and begin hiking to Crystal Lake. It’s fun at first … being in the woods … beautiful clear day … the fresh air … the sounds … seeing all the nature … but after a few hours your backpack starts to get a little bit heavier and you start to wonder how far you’ve gone. It feels like you’ve gone four miles … at least. Every time that you round a bend in the trail you expect to see the refreshing blue waters of Crystal Lake … but once you get around the bend all you see are more trees and more trail. “Maybe around the next bend,” you hope. Nope! Only more trees and another bend in the trail. Maybe around the next bend … and the next bend … or the next one … only to get around the bend and see [pause] … more trees, more trail … no Crystal Lake.
By now your backpack feels like it weighs a ton and you just want to get there so that you can set up camp and relax, maybe catch a refreshing swim before dinner. Man, that water’s gonna feel s-o-o-o good … if you ever get there. But it seems like the trail’s never gonna end … every turn just reveals another turn. As you become more and more tired and more and more frustrated, you also start to become more and more concerned … maybe this isn’t the right trail to Crystal Lake … maybe we missed a turn or a trail sign along the way! You start to feel a little panic …
The same thing can happen in life with our finances, our work, our problems. You hit a rough patch but you take it in stride. “Hey,” you think, “life happens, right? I’m gonna get through this. Yeah … I’m not gonna let this get me down.” But days turn into weeks … weeks turn into months … possibly years … and things stay the same or they keep getting worse … and you begin to wonder, “What’s going on?”
So you pray harder … you pray more … and still things don’t change … and then you reach that point … you know that point, am I right? The point where you’re at the end of your rope … your back’s against the wall … you’re tired … you’re frustrated … frightened. You start to wonder, “Is God mad at me? Has God forsaken me, turned His back on me?” Like David, you begin to cry out: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but You do not answer, by night, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:1-2).
When things don’t change, you start to become angry and bitter. Job never cursed God but he sure got angry and bitter at times, amen? He tells his so-called friends: “Like a slave who longs for death, and like laborers who look for their wages, so I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me. I will not restrain my mouth. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:2-3, 11).
Sometimes it seems like your trouble … or troubles … are never gonna end. Sometimes it feels like God has turned His back on you or turned a deaf ear or a blind eye to your plight. If you’ve ever reached that point … or you’re at that point right now … then you can begin to imagine what the Hebrew people were feeling in the wilderness of Shur.
Imagine, if you can, that you and your people have been enslaved to a powerful nation for over 400 years … forced to do the hard, dirty work so that your captors and masters can live in relative ease and comfort. For 400 years, your people have prayed to the LORD … and for 400 years … nothing … silence and never-ending suffering and disappointed hope. After a lifetime of prayer on your part, it seems to you that God has turned a deaf ear and blind eye to your plight and the plight of your fellow slaves. And then, from out of the desert … the wilderness … wander in two old men … brothers … one of them so old and feeble that he appears to need a cane … a walking stick … and they tell you that they have been sent by YHWH … Yahweh … the God of your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob … who has heard your prayers … and that they are God’s answer for 400 years of prayer. Yeah, right!
And yet … these two unlikely saviors go right up to Pharaoh and demand that the Pharaoh let his whole Hebrew labor force go … just like that. It’s all Pharaoh can do to keep from laughing. “Get out of here, you crazy old fools, before I begin to think you’re serious and have you thrown in jail … or worse!”
Wow!
What nerve. What hutzpah! They keep going back … demanding that Pharaoh let the Hebrew people go … and each time that Pharaoh refuses, Moses raises his walking stick and great and terrible things happen. You begin to wonder if these guys might actually be Yahweh’s answer to your prayers after all … and you experience something that you’ve never felt in your lifetime … a glimmer of hope that God has not forgotten His people … that He hasn’t turn His back on you … or turned a deaf ear or a blind eye to the suffering of your people.
And then Pharaoh digs in. He issues orders that increase you and your peoples’ suffering. Now you have to collect your own straw for making bricks, but the Pharaoh expects you to keep making the same number of bricks as when he provided you with the straw. Failure results in even more beatings and more suffering. Your cries and the cry of your people are music to the Pharaoh’s ears.
And yet, over and over and over again, Moses and Aaron go back to the palace and demand that Pharaoh let the Hebrew people go … and each time that Pharaoh refuses, Moses raises his walking stick, calls out to Yahweh … and stunning, amazing, incredible things happen. The Nile River turns into blood and frogs come streaming out of the Nile and fill the streets and homes of the Egyptians. Dust turns into huge swarms of gnats. Flies and locusts darken the sky and eat every green plant and strip the fruit trees and vines bare … causing famine throughout the land. Hail the size of a person’s fist come raining down from Heaven, killing livestock and Egyptians but not harming a single hair on any of the Hebrew slaves’ heads. The Egyptians are tormented with painful boils all over their bodies and disease kills all of their livestock. Egypt is enveloped in a darkness so thick and so black that they can’t see the sun or the moon or each other for three days.
And then [pause] … the final showdown. Moses and Aaron demand that the Pharaoh let God’s people go and when Pharaoh vehemently denies God’s request … Moses raise his staff … and the Angel of Death passes through Egypt and kills the first born of both the Egyptian people … including Pharaoh … and their livestock.
And then, four centuries of prayers get answered. Standing over the dead body of his oldest son, Pharaoh screams at Moses and Aaron: “Rise up … rise up and go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go … worship your God if you wish … take everything with you. Leave and stop cursing us with your presence. Your exodus will be a blessing to me and the people of Egypt … so go!” Not so once the Pharaoh realizes that he has nobody to do the hard labor and the dirty work of his empire.
The exodus is an unbelievable, incomprehensible blessing, however, to the Israelites. They are free! This crazy old guy with his wonderful walking stick has done the impossible and forced Pharaoh to let them just walk out of Egypt … free! How sweet those words must have sounded to them … “Go … leave!” Leave this endless misery behind and go start a new life in a new land.
I don’t think there are any words in English or in Hebrew that could possibly describe the joy and elation that must of washed over them and filled their hearts when they realized that they were absolutely, truly free to leave. Their long, dark night of bondage in Egypt was finally over. God did hear their prayers and answered them in truly dramatic and divine fashion. Now they had hope … now they had a future.
But … as so often happens in life … their happiness, their hope is short lived. As they head west … out into the wilderness … their minds struggling to embrace and accept their new reality … they run into a wall … well, in their case, a sea … the Red or Reed Sea.
They hear the sounds of the Egyptian army coming up behind them hard and fast. Pharaoh is in a blood rage … determined to capture and re-enslave every last Hebrew man, woman, and child. There’s no way for us to imagine how cruel and horrible and oppressive going back to being slaves in Egypt would have been for these Hebrew slaves … the depression and the despair they would have felt after having only the briefest taste of freedom while suffering the anger and retribution of the Pharaoh and the Egyptian people. Many of the fleeing Israelites, I’m sure, would have felt that it was better to die on the shores of the Red Sea than be taken back to Egypt as slaves. And then …
That crazy old man and his amazing walking stick climb up to a ridge over-looking the Red sea … he prays to God … he raises his walking stick … and a way appears where none was expected in a way that no one expected … a way right through the Red Sea. The very obstacle that spelled their doom becomes their salvation and spells doom for their pursuers. Safely on the other side, Moses lowers his walking stick and the sea closes in on Pharaoh’s army and drowns them.
How can you not dance and sing God’s praises after something like that? Safely on the other side of the Red Sea, thanks to God, Moses and the Israelites began singing: “I will sing to the LORD, for He has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider He has thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and my might and He has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise Him, my father’s God, and I will exalt Him …. Who is like You, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like You, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:1-2, 11).
Their praises go on for 21 verses … but only last for a few days. Three days later their praises turn into protest and whining. When you’re pumped up, when you’re on an emotional high, everything seems great but what do you do when there’s that inevitable let down?
After rescuing them at the Red Sea, God takes them on a three-day journey through the wilderness of Shur … where they hit a physical, emotional, and psychological wall. Ironically enough, the name “Shur” means “a wall.”
Imagine, if you can, that you’re one of the thousands of Hebrew slaves who are now wandering in the desert to a new land to start a new life. You’re spirits are high … as is everyone else’s. Remember, you had to leave in a hurry in the middle of the night, so you couldn’t take much food and water with you. You’re out of water by the end of the second day … and so is everyone else. Your feeling of thirst is turning to deep concern. You hear your children complaining about being thirsty and it rips at your heart because you don’t have any water to give them and all of you may die out here for lack of water.
You and a group of men head out in the morning in search of water. As every dry, agonizing hour passes, the sun continues to beat down on you. You hope and pray that you find water soon or you are all doomed. You can feel your hope sinking with every step … and then someone up ahead shouts: “Water!” You quicken your pace. Praise God! You and your family are saved. You get down on your knees with the other men, scoop up a handful of cool, clear water, and thank God as you anticipate the feeling of delicious water passing over your dry, cracked lips and parched tongue. You take that first big gulp [pause] … and then you immediately gag and spit it out! As desperate and as thirsty as you and the other men are, the water is too bitter to drink. Your heart sinks in despair. Talk about disappointment! All of this beautiful water and none of it is fit to drink. How could God be so cruel? The water is not only bitter but their disappointment leaves a bitter taste in their mouths. Maybe some of you feel that way this morning. You’ve gone from desperation to incredible joy only to find yourself in the desert of desperation … again. We need to do what Moses did. The people turned to Moses for help … and Moses turns to God.
How does God answer Moses’ prayer? With a stick. The Bible says that when Moses finished praying God showed him a stick. Moses threw the stick into the bitter waters of the pool of Mar’ah and the water immediately became sweet and the people of Israel were saved because they could now drink the water.
You see, God had brought them to the pool of Mar’ah … which literally means “the pool of Bitterness” in Arabic … to teach them a valuable lesson … one that would keep them alive until they reached the Promised Land and could begin their new lives. “If you listen carefully to the voice of Yahweh Elohim … the LORD your God … and do what is right in His sight, and give heed to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians; for I am ‘Jehovah Rapha’ … the LORD who heals you” (Exodus 15:26).
The word “rapha” literally means “to repair.” God saved the people at the pool of Mar’ah by repairing it … by changing it from bitter to sweet so that they could drink it and be saved. When God “repaired” the water at Mar’ah, He was also trying to “heal” or “repair” the people who been praying to Him for four centuries and whose faith and trust in Him needed to be repaired or healed.
God reveals Himself as Jehovah Rapha when we are in need of emotional healing. Some of you may be in need of emotional healing right now. Your emotional pain is overwhelming. Some of you have experienced an intense hurt or loss recently that I can’t begin to relate to. Maybe it’s something that happened to you when you were younger … or perhaps it was something that just happened yesterday or last week or last year. In the midst of your pain and tears, cry out to Jehovah Rapha … ask Him to “repair” you.
God reveals Himself as Jehovah Rapha when we’re in need of physical healing. Some of you are having a tough time right now trying to process and live with the pain and discouragement that comes from physical difficulties. Maybe it’s personal pain … or maybe you’ve been devastated by some news that you’ve received about a family member or a friend. Whatever the case, when our bodies don’t work right, we can end up feeling tired, stressed, and uptight. At times like this, we need to ask Jehovah Rapha to do His healing work in our lives. The Bible is filled with literally hundreds … if not thousands … of examples of God’s healing touch and Jesus is the perfect example of the healing power and compassion of Jehovah Rapha, amen?
God reveals Himself as Jehovah Rapha when we are in need of spiritual healing. This is by far the most important of the three realms or areas where we need healing. You can travel the four corners of the earth … hire the best doctors and psychologists … but there is only one person who can heal a broken spirit … Jehovah Rapha, amen? “The human heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, who can understand it?” asks the prophet Jeremiah. Jehovah Rapha can. Jehovah Rapha not only understands the human heart, He alone can cure or heal a broken or sinful heart, amen?
Sometimes the physical, emotional, and spiritual realms over-lap or can affect each other. Not taking care of these amazing physical bodies is a sin in my opinion. In my case, not eating right … making poor food choices based on what I like or what tastes good rather than based on what’s good for me … and that affects me emotionally and spiritually. Maybe yours is smoking or not exercising … indulging in copious amounts of alcohol or drugs … over work … lack of the proper amount of quality sleep. All of these and more can affect our bodies.
Sometimes our physical illness can bring about emotional and spiritual sickness or brokenness. As I mentioned earlier, the stress and strain of constant physical pain can bring about depression. We can blame our physical brokenness on God, causing us to pull away from God. If our pain is chronic, it can feel like God is not listening to our prayers and appears indifferent to our pain and suffering. The fact that we feel like God has turned His back on us can cause us to turn our backs on Him, amen?
I want to share a few principles with you that I hope will help you understand the healing power of Jehovah Rapha better. The first principle is this: Trials and troubles can get us back on track. As I pointed out earlier, the bitter water at Mar’ah was a way for God to teach the Israelites to put their trust in Him. I talked to someone recently who told me that their difficulty led them to read the Bible more and get closer to God. Another friend of mine told me that this past year was extremely difficult for them but it turned out to be a blessing because they surrendered themselves to Christ as a result of their experience. We all have “empty places” in our lives and dissatisfaction can turn into a “spiritual abyss” for many of us. We can either blame God for them or we can turn to Jehovah Rapha to repair them. When we’re hurting, we must turn to Jehovah Rapha and resist the urge to fill our emptiness and our spiritual abysses with things that don’t satisfy in the long run and can eventually harm us.
The second principle is that we need a community of faith. When you’re hurting, you need the help of others. In James 5:14-16, the Bible tells us what to do: ”Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” You would be well-advised to seek out the help of professionals … like doctors and therapists … but shouldn’t you also seek out the healing and advice of the Great Physician as well, amen?
The next principle has to do with the healing power of faith. On one end of the faith spectrum, there are people who believe that we can be healed of everything if we have enough faith. At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe that God doesn’t heal anybody … and if God doesn’t heal anybody, then there’s no reason to pray to Jehovah Rapha. The proper Biblical perspective is this: Pray earnestly to Jehovah Rapha for healing … have faith that He has the power to heal you … but be careful about demanding that He answer your prayers according to your will.
Some of you are familiar with Christian author and inspirational speaker Joni Eareckson Tada, who is confined to a wheelchair as the result of a diving accident. Ms. Tada explains it this way: “God certainly can, and sometimes does, heal people in miraculous ways today,” she writes in her book A Step Further, “but the Bible does not teach that He will always heal those who come to Him in faith. He sovereignly reserves the right to heal or not to heal as He sees fit” (1980; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan) … and you can be sure that she is speaking out of her own personal experience.
Tom Hansel was a high school teacher who started “Summit Expedition,” one of the earliest wilderness-based ministries in the United States. Hansel lived in constant pain as the result of an accident during one of his mountain expeditions. The pain was relentless and would come to define the remainder of Hansel’s life. This lifelong athlete, champion of backcountry travel, and intrepid mountaineer would be forced to leave the ministry that he started and loved because of the accident. In his book, You Have to Keep Dancing, he wrote: “I have prayed hundreds, if not thousands of times, for the Lord to heal me … and He finally healed me of the need to be healed” (https://filatore.blogspot.com/2010/01/tim-hansel-1941-2009.html).
My final principle is this: Sometimes healing takes place in unusual ways. Pastor and author Tony Campolo likes to tell a story about being at a church where he was asked to pray for a man who had cancer. He laid hands on the man and prayed boldly for his healing. A week later he got a phone call from the man’s wife. “You prayed for my husband who had cancer,” she told him as a way to jog his memory. When Campolo heard her say that her husband “had” cancer, he assumed that she was about to tell him that his prayer had healed her husband. Not so. “I called to tell you that he died,” said the woman on the phone. Campolo felt terrible. “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “When you saw him he was filled with anger. He knew that he was going to be dead in a short period of time … and he hated God. He was 58 years old and wanted to see his children and grandchildren grow up. He was angry that this ‘all-powerful God’ didn’t take away his sickness and heal him. He would lie in bed and curse God. The more his anger grew towards God, the more miserable he was to everybody around him. It was an awful thing to be in his presence,” the woman confessed.
By now, Campolo was more than a little confused as to why this woman had called and was telling him all this. “After you prayed for him,” she continued, “a peace came over him and a joy had come into him. Tony … the last three days have been the best days of our lives. We’ve sung … we’ve laughed … we’ve read scripture … we prayed. Oh, they’ve been wonderful days … and I called to thank you for laying your hands on him and praying for healing.” And then she said something incredibly profound: “Tony … he wasn’t cured but he was healed.”
Brothers and sisters … the Jehovah Rapha who heals in the Old Testament is the same Jesus who healed in the New Testament, amen? Don’t miss the significance behind the wood in our scripture lesson today. God used a piece of wood to demonstrate His power over Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt. He used a piece of wood to open a way to safety through the Red Sea. He used another piece of wood to turn bitter water into sweet life-saving water. All of our problems began at a tree in the Garden of Eden … and our spiritual sickness was healed because of another tree on which Jehovah Rapha was crucified to make a way for us to heal our broken relationship with Him. As the Apostle Peter reminds us: “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed” (1st Peter 2:24).
After Jehovah Rapha rescued His chosen and made the bitter waters at Mar’ah sweet, He led them to a place called “Elim.” We read in verse 27 that Elim was place of plenty … an oasis that had 12 springs and 70 palm trees. So … if you’re stuck at the pool of Mar’ah right now … if it seems like Crystal Lake is always just around the next bend … don’t give up because you will eventually arrive at Elim, where you will encounter Jesus … who will turn your bitterness into sweet streams of living water. “If anyone is thirsty,” Jesus promises, “let them come to me and drink” (John 7:37). The only way to go from Mar’ah to Elim is to turn to Jesus … who is Jehovah Rapha … the One who heals … the One who repairs.
Perhaps your world has caved in recently. Maybe the bottom has dropped out of your life. Whether you are hurting physically, emotionally, or spiritually, join with me now as we pray to Jehovah Rapha …
