Water from the Rock

The instruction Moses receives is oddly specific. Take the staff, God tells him — "the staff with which you struck the Nile" (Exodus 17:5). It is the same rod that once turned a river to blood, an instrument of judgment. Now it is lifted again, this time over a rock, this time to bring water rather than take it away.

Israel is barely three months out of Egypt, and already the wonder has worn thin. The people are camped at Rephidim, and there is no water — the same wilderness that had lately rained down the manna now holds nothing to drink. Thirst does to a redeemed people what it does to anyone: it makes them forget. They quarrel with Moses and put God himself on trial, and the place is named for the charge — Massah and Meribah, testing and quarreling — recording the bitter feelings unbelief prompts as it begs the question: "Is the LORD among us or not?" (Exodus 17:7).

Then comes a verdict no court would draft. When a people accuse God to his face, we brace for the bench to turn on them. Instead he says, "Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock" (Exodus 17:6). God steps into the dock. He takes his place on the stone, in full view of the elders, and has Moses bring the rod of judgment down — on the rock where he is standing, while the grumblers go free. The blow lands once, and the desert fills with the sound of water flowing.

We know this thirst, bitterness or doubt. Thirst, at least, is honest. It is the body's plain form of the ache that no well here has ever fully answered. Keller notes that we are all drinking from some well that cannot hold water — hoping romance, achievement, or approval will do for us what only God can do — and returning again and again because the thirst always comes back.[2] Our own unbelief usually phrases itself as a question — is God really here, is he really for us — and we tend to ask it at the very spot where he has been carrying us. The mercy of Meribah is this: the faithlessness that deserved wrath receives life giving water instead — the only water can satisfy us.

Tim Keller, preaching on Massah, presses the reversal in it: the rock is struck so that judgment falls on the stone, not the guilty crowd — the place of judgment becoming the very spring of grace.[1] Israel's testing runs headlong into God's own faithfulness; his faithfulness has the last word.

Centuries later, a man would stand at a well and claim, astonishingly, to be "living water". If we look closely, we see that long before he was struck down — long before the rod of judgment (that had already fallen on a stone at Rephidim) would fall on him — the Rock was already offering himself. At a well in Samaria, he meets a woman who has been drawing from every source but the right one, and rather than shaming her thirst he offers to end it: "whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again... it will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (John 4:14). The offer was real, but the bill for it had not yet come due.

Paul, looking back on that wilderness, tells us what the rock had always been — Israel "drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:4). The stone struck at Rephidim, then, was never merely a shadow of things to come; it was a preview written in advance, and the bill for the offer made at the well came due outside another city. The true Rock stood where the guilty should have stood, and a real rod of judgment came down: "stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted" (Isaiah 53:4). He was struck so that we would not be. And when the soldier's spear opened his side, "at once there came out blood and water" (John 19:34) — the stream still running from a smitten Rock, poured out for the very people who had put him on trial. What flows from the verdict is not our punishment but his life.

So the old question is answered for good. Is the LORD among us or not? He came among us far enough to be struck in our place, and the water has not stopped since. We do not have to reach the spring on our own, or be clean before we drink. We come thirsty, cup our hands beneath a wound, and find that the Rock was there the whole time — and meant, all along, to give.

[1] Tim Keller, "The Water of Grace," sermon, Gospel in Life. ↩ [2] Tim Keller, "The Living Water," sermon, Gospel in Life. ↩