Theological Function of the Wilderness
In our journey with Israel in the book of Exodus, we’re with them in the wilderness. They’ve been saved from death in Egypt by the blood of a spotless lamb and delivered from the floodwaters of judgment at the Red Sea and are following Moses into the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.
We’ll arrive at Mount Sinai in chapter 19 and be there for the remainder of the book. In between Egypt and Sinai are a few chapters (15:22-18:27) that span a few months journey through the wilderness.
What happens out there is very important. The Lord takes them into the wilderness in order to teach them that he’s able to deliver and sustain them. The same Lord who parted the Red Sea can also turn bitter water sweet and make bread rain down from heaven.
The Lord taking Israel into the wilderness was like taking them to school. Deuteronomy 8 tells us what their curriculum was (vv. 2-5). The Lord brought difficulty into their lives, not to punish them, but to discipline or train them. The Lord’s purpose in the wilderness was education, not transportation. Just as we train our bodies to learn a new sport or train our minds to learn a new subject, so the Lord must train his people to be who he wants them to be.
The problem is that we’re slow learners! We understand the curriculum cognitively. We know we’re supposed to trust and obey the Lord, but our hearts are quickly captured by fear and unbelief. We know we’re supposed to trust the Lord, but we don’t want to.
God knows this about us yet responds with patience and daily manna. At great cost to himself, he gives his undeserving people everything they need. This is what we see in Exodus 17. The people of Israel are slow learners yet the Lord is a substitutionary lover.
Slow Learners
In the previous two chapters, Israel was tested by the Lord (15:25, 16:4). Here they test the Lord (vv. 2, 7). It says they “grumbled against Moses” in verse 3 and relapsed again into the slave mentality. The wilderness was full of struggles and in the midst of such struggles, bondage started to look more attractive. Life is hard, so to escape we often run to things to cope that numb us from the pain but end up making life even harder. Israel wondered whether slavery in Egypt was better than freedom in the wilderness.
Their grumbling revealed their discontent hearts, but their discontentment spiraled into a contentious spirit, even reaching the level of wanting to stone Moses (v. 4). Their problem, as Moses pointed out, wasn’t with him but with the Lord (v. 2).
A Ridiculous Question
What was the root problem of their grumbling and quarreling? Verse 7 summarizes it like this: “They tested the Lord by saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’”
Do you see how ridiculous that statement is? His presence is obviously with them at all times in the pillar of cloud and fire. Their question isn’t because they wonder where the Lord is. He’s obviously with them, they just don’t like what he’s doing. Their question is contempt of his leadership over them.
It’d be like me walking into your workplace and asking you, “You gonna do any work today?” Or like a coach asking his players in the middle of a game, “You gonna start playing today?” Or like asking someone cooking dinner, “Are we gonna have any food tonight?” Or like asking me during this sermon, “You gonna start preaching anytime soon?”
These questions are insulting because it looks at the obvious and says, “It’s no good.” It’s saying, “I see you’re preaching or cooking or playing or working, but I don’t like it.” Israel is insulting the Lord by questioning his presence with them because they don’t like what’s happening.
Hard Hearts
Psalm 95 provides some commentary that helps us see what’s really happening here. It says in verses 7-9, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.” It says in verse 10 that they went “astray in their heart.”
The psalmist uses language to describe Israel that was used to describe Pharaoh. Their hearts were “hard,” or unresponsive and inflexible. The greatness of God’s presence and provision was right in front of them and they refused to see it. They’d repeatedly seen his provision but tested him as soon as they were thirsty again.
They’d been redeemed by the blood of the lamb, set free, saved from the flood, and were headed to the Promised Land, but they still hadn’t come to terms with what they’d become. They were the people of the Lord, yet they wondered if the Lord was really with them.
The heart of God’s covenant with his people is, “I will be their God and they will be my people.” In other words, fellowship with God is the central goal of his relationship with his people. But this is what they’re denying. Even worse, they’re saying that God broke covenant with them. They’re accusing him of infidelity, of injustice, of breaking his relationship with them. As one commentator says, “Their stance was unbelievable.”[1]
Israel was challenging the Lord in a way he couldn’t ignore, in a way that deserved judgment. How would the Lord respond?
Substitutionary Love
The way the Lord responds is amazing. There’s substitutionary love here for God’s grumbling and contentious people.
To see this love, we need to understand what some of these words mean that Moses is using. “Quarreled” and “tested” are legal words, and they’re the root words for Massah or Meribah. The word for “quarreled” in verse 2 is a legal term that describes initiating a lawsuit. It means, “they lodged a complaint,” or “filed a suit.” The prophets use this word to talk about the lawsuit the Lord brought against Israel when they broke his covenant (Jer. 25:31; Mic. 6:1-2). The word used in verse 2 for “test” means “to try or test,” implying in this context that they’re putting God on trial.
Israel is accusing God of bringing them into the wilderness to kill them and they want justice. Since God isn’t available to stand trial, they start with Moses. They’re ready to stone him, not as an act of mob violence, but as a judicial execution by the community. In protest, Moses told them that they were putting God on trial, not him (vv. 2, 7).
Do you see what’s happening? God is with them but they’re hurting and angry. They assume that he’s broken faith with them and they want answers. They’re doing what many of us do when we see the misery of the world and in our lives. We call God to account, and who wouldn’t call God into account for the miseries of the world? The Bible says that the one who lives by faith wouldn’t. These charges, says the writer of Hebrews, show that Israel had “a sinful, unbelieving heart” (Heb. 3:12). Trusting that God knows what he’s doing even if we don’t is Christianity 101, part of the basic curriculum of our faith.
The Trial Begins
Understanding the judicial nature of this passage helps us understand what happens next and brings great drama to the scene. In verse 5, the Lord tells Moses to take some of the elders and his staff and go before the people. “Pass on before the people” suggests that the people were aware of Moses’ going. He goes ahead as the judge of Israel, bearing in his hand the rod of judgment, the same rod that turned the Nile River to blood as an act of judgment on Egypt’s gods. He takes the elders as witnesses. Their presence is necessary because of the legal nature of the case.
Moses was Israel’s judge and he was going before them with the staff of judgment and with witnesses to convene a public trial. He’ll raise his staff of judgment and bring down justice on the guilty. What would happen if he lifted his staff against them?
God is in the Dock
Israel is guilty but Moses is told in verse 6 not to raise his staff against them. Rather, in what Ed Clowney calls “one of the most astonishing statements in the Bible,”[2] God says, “Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock.” This is the only time in the Old Testament where it says that the Lord stands before someone. God doesn’t stand before men, men stand before God.
Picture the scene. The trial has begun and God stands in the dock and Moses stands over him with the rod of judgment in his hand. And then God commands him to “strike the rock.” In the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, the rock is identified with God, “For I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God! The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice” (vv. 3-4).
God identifies himself with the rock at Horeb by standing on it: “the Rock on a rock.”[3] Israel put God on trial, accusing him of breaking covenant with them. He stands in the place of the accused, and the penalty is discharged. Moses strikes the rock. The rod of judgment falls on the Lord.
Is God guilty? No, the people are guilty. They’ve refused to trust the faithfulness of God. Yet, God the judge bears their judgment. He receives the blow that their rebellion deserves. If God’s people are to be spared, the law must be satisfied. So God bears their punishment for them. The Judge is judged.
Yahweh not only delivers his people from slavery, saves them from their enemies at the Red Sea, leads them and provides for them through the wilderness, he also stands in their place and takes their judgment. The Lord saves them by bearing their judgment.
Rivers of Living Water
When Moses struck the rock, the water of life flowed into the deadly wilderness. Paul understood what this incident in Exodus 17 meant. He says in 1 Corinthians 10 that Israel “drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (v. 4). And John tells us that Jesus stood up in the Temple and said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (7:37-38). Then John says, “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive” (v. 39).
Those who trust the Rock of Christ are given the living water of the Holy Spirit, the very life of God to keep them alive in the wilderness. This water of life only comes through Jesus’ death. When Jesus was crucified, John tells us that blood and water flowed out of his side (Jn. 19:34). Jesus’ death is what opens the way to the waters of life, or life in the Spirit. He saves our lives and gives us life.
The people back in Exodus 17 said, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (v. 7) The Lord’s answer is, “Yes, I’m with you in ways you can’t even imagine. I’m not only with you, I’m standing in your place.” This is substitutionary love.
“The Lord Is My Banner”
There’s another pointer to this love at the end of the chapter. After Israel defeats the Amalekites, Moses builds an altar and names it “The Lord is My Banner” (v. 15).
The word for “banner” can also mean “pole” or “signal.” In Exodus 17, we have water from the rock followed by the raising of a pole. In Numbers 20, there’s another water from the rock incident, followed by the raising of a pole with a bronze serpent on it (21:8).
Then in Isaiah 11:10, it says, “In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal (or “banner/pole”) for the peoples – of him the nations shall inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.” And then it says that, in that day, “the Lord…will raise a signal for the nations,” gathering together the people of God from all over the earth (vv. 11-12).
Then Jesus says in John 12, “‘When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die” (vv. 32-33). Jesus says in John 3, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (vv. 14-15).
Do you see what’s happening with Jesus? He’s lifted up on a pole or banner, struck with the rod of judgment, and water flows from him. He’s put on a banner and becomes a banner for all peoples. His death becomes the banner for life for whoever believes in him.
A Love that Changes People
This is what makes the God of the Bible so radically different from every other God. As Moses sings, “Their rock is not as our Rock” (Deut. 32:31), meaning that the gods of the nations are nothing like Israel’s God. Other nations and religions understand the wrath and justice of God, the idea that we owe a debt to God and that there will be a necessary punishment if we don’t pay it. But they have no concept of a God who’d come pay the debt himself.
There’s nothing in the world like the substitutionary love of God. Love that really changes people always involves a substitutionary sacrifice. When someone lays down their life for your good, you notice it, you pay attention, you want to know why, and you want to be close to that person. The self-substituting love of God is the only real love that will change your life.
Do you understand what Jesus did for you? Despite your grumbling and contending and accusing him of injustice, he stood on the rock and absorbed the blow that you deserve and then gives you springs of the freshest, cleanest, purest water imaginable. He gives up his life for you and then gives you his life, the Holy Spirit. He saves your life and gives you life.
Jesus is the Banner who was lifted up and struck down so that his people could live in the wilderness of this world. God never promises to take us out of the wilderness. Why would he? How could he? It’s his classroom. It’s where we learn who he is and how much we need him.
He may not take us out of the wilderness, but he can change us while we live there. The sacrifice of God is the only love that’ll change you in the wilderness, the only love that’ll give you water in the desert. Every other love will leave you thirsty. Have you drunk from the Rock of Christ?
[1]John L. Mackay, Exodus: A Mentor Commentary (Ross-shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2001), 312.
[2]Edmund P. Clowney, Preaching Christ in All of Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003), 29; cf. Edmund P. Clowney, The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2013), 127.
[3]Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 264.