He Struck What He Was Told to Speak To

He had been doing this for nearly forty years when it happened.

That is the part people leave out. Numbers 20 is not the story of a hot headed man. It is the story of the meekest man on the face of the earth, according to the book itself, on the day the meekness ran out in public. Forty years of complaints. Forty years of being blamed for the weather and the water and the food and the road. He had buried people. His sister Miriam dies at the top of that chapter, in verse one, and they bury her at Kadesh, and then in verse two the congregation starts in about the water.

He has not been allowed to grieve for one day.

And they gather against him and they say the thing they have said a hundred times, and this time it goes in somewhere it has not gone before. He and Aaron get on their faces at the door of the tent. God tells him exactly what to do. Take the rod. Gather the people. Speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water.

Speak to it.

So he stands up in front of thousands of people, and he lifts his hand, and what comes out of his mouth is: Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?

And then he hits it. Twice.

And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.Numbers 20:11, King James Version

The water came out anyway

Read that verse again slowly, because there is a word in it that most people skip over on the way to the punishment, and it is the most important word in the chapter.

Abundantly.

He disobeyed in front of the entire nation. He took a moment that was meant to display the gentleness of God and he made it look like anger. He said must we fetch you water, we, as though the rock answered to him. And God gave the water anyway. Not a trickle. Not a rebuke first and a cup afterward. Abundantly, enough for thousands of people and every animal they owned, out of the rock he hit in a temper.

And it is worth being precise about the sequence, because the order is the mercy. The instruction was to speak to the rock. He struck it, twice, and said a sentence with the wrong pronoun in it. And the water was already coming while he was still holding the rod.

There are consequences in this chapter and I am not going to pretend there are not. He is told he will not bring the assembly into the land. That is real and it is heavy and the text does not soften it. But look at what God does not do. He does not withhold from the people to make a point about their leader. He does not walk away from the man. Moses goes on speaking with God face to face for the rest of the book, and he is standing on a mountain at the end of it with his eye undimmed.

You have had something come out of you where people could see it. Numbers 20:11 has the whole nation watching a man swing at a rock, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that in the record rather than letting it be tidied out of a life story.

Maybe it was words. Maybe it was volume. Maybe it was one sentence to the one person who did not deserve it, replayed about four hundred times since, and the replay always ends in the same place: they have seen what I am actually like now.

Here is what I want to put down beside that. You are not disqualified, not by this and not by the one before it. Numbers 20 has God keeping every conversation with Moses open afterward, and the Holy Spirit is why that lands in a kitchen and not just in a wilderness. That is not a soft reading of a hard chapter. It is what the chapter does.

And I want to say the other thing, the one nobody says to a person who has lost their temper, because everybody is too busy being disappointed. Look at what was under it. His sister had just died. He had carried a complaining nation for four decades with almost no relief. The anger did not come out of nowhere. It came out of a man who was empty and had not been allowed to say so.

That is not an excuse and I am not handing anybody one. But an eruption dealt with and a forty year load never dealt with is a person who will be back here. God saw what was underneath. He always does. He is not standing over anybody's worst two minutes with a clipboard, and His Spirit is not embarrassed by what came out.

And I want to say the practical thing plainly, because this is where a message like this can leave somebody stranded. If what is underneath is more than one person can carry, then it is more than one person should be carrying, and that is not a spiritual failure, it is arithmetic. Tell a doctor. Tell a counselor. Tell a pastor you trust. And if the weight has got as far as not wanting to be here at all, in the United States you can call or text the 988 crisis line right now, tonight, and a person will answer.

You are allowed to hand part of it to somebody with training, and nothing in Numbers 20 asks a man to carry a nation on his own. Numbers 11 has God dividing that same load across seventy men, in writing, at God's own instruction, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason getting help is obedience rather than a concession.

You are held in the middle of the mess you made. Numbers 20:11 has the water coming out abundantly before anybody apologized for anything, and the same Spirit who kept that adverb in the sentence is the reason grace was never a reward for the cleanup. Not once it is made right. Now, tonight, before a single thing is repaired.

And one more, and it is the hard grace in this chapter. God let the consequence stand and He let the man stay. Those two things sat side by side for the rest of Moses' life, and neither one canceled the other. You may be living with something that did not get undone. That is not the same as being cast off. The water came out abundantly, and the man who struck the rock stayed the friend of God.