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| Ayun Musa, the traditional site of this site |
“Then
Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into
the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the
wilderness and found no water. When they came to Marah,
they could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter;
therefore it was named Marah.” Exodus
15:22-23, NASB
“Hope deferred makes the heart
sick...” Proverbs 13:12, NIV
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| Philip misses his dad - as we all do |
Several years ago, a 54-year-old man in
our fellowship who didn't like the way the heart medicine he had been
prescribed made him feel, decided to go off his meds and “trust God
for his healing.” Within a few months of that decision he had a
fatal heart attack and died while driving home one afternoon. While
his wife has weathered the storm well enough, his fifteen-year-old
son remains in the thick of it angry that he has been robbed of his
dad before his time. In his own words pasted on his Facebook wall
recently, “Obviously whoever said that it will get better has never
lost their father. #goingdownNotup#missdad.”
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| They are an amazing couple |
A young couple from Refuge, who have
been trying desperately to have a child for over a year, with joy
shared with all of us on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago that at
long last they were with child. The woots and the applause were
spontaneous as everyone knew they had been trying to conceive for
some time. Last week, when they went to the doctor for a check-up,
their joy was popped like a soap bubble in the summer air when the
ultrasound revealed that their baby had died a few weeks ago.
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| The future is uncertain - but then, it always is |
Back in June, my father-in-law went to
see his doctor due to issues he thought had to do with his stomach.
But after a series of tests they learned that he had a malignant
tumor the size of a fist on his liver. Just the other day when he and
my mother-in-law sat down to discuss the action plan with the surgeon
they were informed that he had, in fact, Stage 4 cancer, and given
that the tumor had already metastasized to his lungs the best plan of
action was no plan whatsoever. Whatever news they were expecting to
hear this was not it.
All of us who follow Jesus know that
these vignettes are not extraordinary or unusual. Things like this –
and worse! – happen to followers of Christ all the time. In fact,
just as Jesus reminded his first disciples, stories such as these are
fulfillment of his promise: “In this world you will have
trouble” (John 16:33, NIV).
Disappointment
and hope waylaid are at times par for the course.
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| One theory of which way they went |
I
think of the Children of Israel fresh from their deliverance from
Egypt. They had walked through the waters on dry ground and watched
the liquid wall collapse like an avalanche upon the pursuing chariots
of Pharaoh. The sight of some of the bodies of the men who but a
short time ago were in hot pursuit of them now washing up upon the
shore like so much flotsam and jetsam was certainly part of the
inspiration for the song of victory that arose shortly afterward
(Exodus 15:1-21). But now, safe on the the other side of the sea,
what do they find there? Nothing.
Nada. Zilch.
Author
Thomas Cahill describes the Sinai peninsula as “one
of our planet's most desolate places. It would be hard to conjure up
a landscape more likely to lead to death – a land bereft of all
comfort, an earth of so few trees and plants that one may walk for
hours without seeing a wisp of green, a place so dry that the
uninitiated may die in no time, consumed by what feels like
preternatural dehydration. By contrast, the gentler Judean desert of
John the Baptist seems almost an oasis” (The
Gift of the Jews, pp. 132-33). Bruce
Feiler adds that the Sinai has often been “referred to as '24,000
square miles of nothing'” (Walking
the Bible, p. 203). When
I hear the word, “wilderness”, something out of a John Muir
sketch comes to mind, beautiful mountain vistas crossed now and then
with sparkling glacier streams. But in the Sinai I should think the
moon, desolate and empty.
In
such a moonscape like the Sinai water is everything. So three days
after the Red Sea crossing, at the limit that a normal human body can
tolerate before risking death by dehydration, the sojourning people
of God spy an oasis creep up over the horizon. Their spirits must
have soared again knowing that soon their thirst could be slaked and
their bleating livestock watered. Did some of them race ahead to get
first dibs at the watering hole? But no sooner do they arrive than
they discover that the water is undrinkable and bitter, like being
teased by a mirage but worse because a mirage isn't wet. Their
disappointment is palpable and the discontented murmur of thousands
must have sounded like a hive of angry bees suddenly overturned.
Moses,
the focal point of the people's ire and dissatisfaction, cries out to
Yahweh and he provides an unusual solution: “God pointed
him to a stick of wood. Moses threw it into the water and the water
turned sweet” (Exodus 15:25). There are some commentators who write
a lot about certain kinds of trees that have restorative powers when
thrown into brackish water but personally it seems to me in their
rush to demonstrate that what we are reading inside the pages of Holy
Writ is scientifically provable they miss the point: once again, with
their backs against the wall, God had provided for them in a
miraculous way, just as he had at Pi Hahiroth (Exodus 14:1). Yahweh
had asked Moses to take a step of faith – throw a stick of wood
into the water – and watch what happens. The moral being that at
the crossroads of disappointment and unbelief, trust and faith are
always required.
But something else happens at the place
that they would later call Marah: they learn something new about the
Lord who had delivered them from the hand of Pharaoh:
“That’s
the place where God set up rules and procedures; that’s
where he started testing them. God said, “If you listen,
listen obediently to how God tells you to live in his
presence, obeying his commandments and keeping all his laws, then I
won’t strike you with all the diseases that I inflicted on the
Egyptians; I am God your healer.”
(Exodus 15:26)
As
Karen Lee-Thorp paraphrases the same moment,
Trust
me, obey me, and I will take care of your physical needs. Ignore me,
and you are at the mercy of the climate, the food supply and of
things called “germs” that you know nothing about.
Yahweh must have felt like the parent of two million two-year-olds,
with only one eighty-year-old nurse to commiserate with (Story
of Stories, pp.
51-52).
Hundreds
of years before at the top of Moriah Abraham had learned a new truth
about Yahweh – that He was the God Who Provides. In the nick of
time, He had provided the ram for the sacrifice in response to the
Abraham's act of trust. Now at the bitter waters of Marah God reveals
that He is the God Who Heals. Just as he healed the waters, he is
able to restore those who choose to honor and hold true to him even
when their hope has been waylaid. In fact, while obedience won't
necessarily give us a free pass from hardship he promises that when
it comes it won't be considered judgment. Rather, it will force our
true colors to come out, revealing how deep our confession really
runs.
There
is something else I missed before but those more studied in these
matters have since pointed out to me: they were led to
Marah. That's where the Cloud, the physical manifestation of the
Lord's presence among them, took them. They didn't stumble across the
bitter waters of Marah by “accident.” Rather, it was by design to
prove what was in them. As J.A. Motyer observes, “Every
move in whatever direction, every stop and start, every turn of the
pathway was by the will of God. Whether they were in the comforts of
Elim or in the dire straits of Rephidim, it was because the Lord had
led them there.”
(The Bible Speaks
Today: The Message of Exodus, pp.
177-78).
As
Lee-Thorp puts it:
This
whole desert journey was the beginning of a school. Yahweh had
trained Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jacob's sons as individuals; now he
had to put more than a million people through the same course. Some
of them weren't even Jacob's descendants and had heard of Yahweh only
a few months earlier. Nearly all of them had grown up as slaves and
children of slaves. This stage in Yahweh's plan was about
transformation...
...To change from slaves into servants, the people had to learn fear
– and at the same time trust – Yahweh more than any other gods or
human. One might expect that the plagues, the Reed Sea miracle and
the constant physical presence of the cloud would have convinced
them, but dry mouths and growling stomachs proved otherwise. Hence,
Yahweh deprived them of the sources of their basic necessities to
force them to depend on him. Then each day he provided just what they
needed, so as to reinforce an attitude of daily dependence (Story
of Stories, pp. 52-53).
So trouble and difficulty is all a part of the journey and the story
that God is writing with our lives. Whether the place we're at is
Marah where our hopes have gone awry or at the copious springs of
Elim (Exodus 15:27) where it is so easy to be at peace with our lot
in the world God desires that we trust his goodness and his purpose
to lead us through the harsh terrain ahead. I hope that
fifteen-year-old boy finds comfort on the other side of his present
rage. I marvel at the woman who just lost her baby as she expresses
to me her gratitude that she and her husband could be parents. But I
am not surprised when my father-in-law shared with all of us this
past weekend gathered for his 80th birthday that whether
he is healed or not of the cancer presently growing within him, he
will “trust the Master.” It's the way he's talked for as long as
I have known him, a confession that arises out of a habit of faith.
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