Exodus: Here I Am, Send Someone Else
Part 9
“The Bitter Water of Marah”
Exodus 15: 22-27
If you have got your Bible I am going to read to you from the book of Exodus and Chapter 15, the second book of the Old Testament.
Let me read to you from Exodus and Chapter 15. If you have been with us on recent weeks you will know that we have been looking into these early chapters of the book of Exodus and seeing the truth that is applicable to us today that we learn from this journey of the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, ultimately on through to Canaan, the land described as a land flowing with milk and honey.
And last time we looked at this, they had just crossed the Red Sea. God had miraculously opened the waters, taken them across. They had a great celebration in the first part of Chapter 15. And then Verse 22 says this:
“Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they travelled in the desert without finding water.
“When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.)
“So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What are we to drink?’
“Then Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.
“There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them.
“He said, ‘If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.’
“Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.”
Keep your Bible open there.
Most of you probably know the word gospel literally means good news, because that of course is what it is. But we can mistake the meaning of good; we can associate with good the idea that it is nice, that it is pleasant, that it is always agreeable.
When I was a kid, if I got sick and I had to take some medicine (which happened from time to time), in my day we didn’t have flavoured medicine. You couldn’t choose banana, strawberry or chocolate flavour; you got the original flavour. The original flavour was something between boot polish and gasoline.
And when as a kid you would get a couple of big spoons of this stuff and you would try your best to swallow without gagging, my mother would always say, “It’s good for you. Open up.”
When she said, “It’s good for you,” it had nothing to do with it being nice or tasty or pleasant or chocolaty. It had everything to do with fixing whatever the sickness was.
And I want to talk to you this morning about something that is good, something which comes from God. And because God is Himself good, everything, which derives from Him, is good. But it is good while it’s at the same time being bitter.
God led the Israelites, as I pointed out last time, by a pillar of cloud, which represented His presence in front of the people during the day. And if they travelled by night He represented Himself by a pillar of fire, which they followed.
And now having crossed the Red Sea, which is the first time they have Egypt behind them (because until they cross the Red Sea, they are still within the boundaries of Egypt), God then leads them, it says, into the Desert of Shur. And they travelled for three days without water.
Now three days is a long time without water. Now I am sure, of course, they had taken some water. I doubt they had collected water at the Red Sea because that is salt water and that is no good for drinking. But no doubt they had their water skins and they had topped up not knowing what lay ahead.
But going into the desert for three days, they discover that there is no water. They looked for it along the way, and I imagine that the water they were carrying got warm and tepid, if not very warm, which made it un-quenching. And before long they would begin to ration it and maybe ultimately run out of it.
And you find in this passage that the triumph of the Red Sea, which they had celebrated and sang that great song about (Sing to the Lord, for He is mighty. The horse and the rider He has thrown into the Sea, and so on) – they sing that song with great gusto with Miriam and the women banging with their tambourines.
“Okay, that’s that. Let’s move on now.”
They run from the triumph of that into the trial of being in a desert with no water. And this opens up a pattern that follows in the next few chapters. And the pattern is triumph followed by trial followed by triumph followed by trial followed by triumph followed by trial followed by triumph followed by trial.
In Chapter 14 they are delivered from Egypt and they run into the banks of the Red Sea, which they cannot cross - triumph of their delivery to the trial of not knowing what to do. We talked about that last time.
And then God opened the Red Sea. And they went in Chapter 15 from the triumph of God opening the Red Sea into the trial of finding themselves in a desert without water.
And then God gives them water, so they have the triumph of finding the water. And in Chapter 16 they move from that triumph into the trial of not having any food. And they begin to grumble and complain, and God gave them food; He gave them manna.
And so in Chapter 17 you have them moving from the triumph of the manna to the trial of discovering there are enemies on the journey – the Amalakites came and attacked them in Chapter 17. And this pattern goes on and on and on.
Triumph leads to trial. Three days before they had water over their heads as they walked through the path in the Red Sea. Now they are in the desert with no water at all.
You know life has as many deserts as it has green pastures. We all love Psalm 23, which is about a sheep, talking about the shepherd. And one of the things the sheep says in that psalm is, “He makes me lie down in green pastures.” And for a sheep, when a sheep lies down, it is satisfied. You see a sheep lying down; you know it is satisfied. “He satisfies me in the green pastures.”
But don’t take that as the defining statement of the Christian life (it’s all about green pastures) because a couple of verses later in the same psalm, he then says, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” There is a feast and there is a fight all in the same sentence.
And the feast and the fight co-exist. The desert and the green pastures are on the same journey. The mountains and the valleys are in the same landscape. When God gives a rainbow, which is a picture of His promise to us, the rainbow is always against a backdrop of clouds and storms.
Now we will save ourselves a lot of grief if we recognize that the Christian life contains both – green pastures and deserts, feasts and fights, mountaintops and valleys, light and times of darkness.
And the Israelites are being led by the Spirit of God by giving them this pillar of cloud to follow. They are not just wandering around aimlessly at this point. They did a little bit of that later but at this point they are fresh on the journey and they are following the guidance of God and they are getting drier and drier and more thirsty and more thirsty and more thirsty, and there is no sign of water.
Now I don’t know much about deserts myself. I have actually travelled through the Sinai Desert many years ago, through the northern part, from Egypt through to Israel. But I travelled on an air-conditioned bus and we had plenty of bottles of water and looking through the window you would say, “Oh, look at that, oh, it’s dry isn’t it?” You know, and we were having a good time.
I have never been in the desert but I have spent three days on one occasion out in the African bush in the Central African Republic where I spent three months when I was 21, staying with some missionaries there.
And we were 300 miles from the nearest town, which was actually a seven-day journey there and back. And there were only four shops in the town anyway when you got there. So we went once a month mainly to get diesel and stuff like that that we needed. But our food had to be locally grown or we had to go and hunt for it.
And every once in a while we would go and hunt for some meat. We were allowed one elephant a year, which was a great idea until you had to carry it home. But anyway there were bits on it that were quite nice. You can make doughnuts out of the trunk (actually you didn’t).
But one morning when I was there we got up at 4 o’clock in the morning and just walked out of this mission station just south of Sudan, just north of Congo, in a very remote area, and we just walked out into the bush looking for some meat. And we were away for three days on that occasion. And at the end of the first day we did shoot two animals but we didn’t shoot them well; they stayed alive and kept running and we lost them. We did get something eventually.
But as we went on that first day, having left at 4 o’clock in the morning, we were getting towards evening and we found no fresh supply of water. And we got very dry. We did carry water with us, but we drank it very quickly because the hot African sun was beating down.
And eventually that evening we found a river that was quite dirty but we boiled the water and then we boiled it again, just to make sure everything in it was killed. And we put the dirty water in everybody’s mug and then we poured instant coffee on top of that to give it some flavour, but I will never forget all my life – it’s the best cup of coffee I ever had in my life. We sat around a campfire to keep the animals away; we had the fire burning all night; but we sat around that campfire and we drank this coffee. And I know coffee normally isn’t thirst quenching but this was because we were really hot and thirsty.
And so I know a little bit about that and I imagine these Israelites, after three days, whatever water they were carrying, beginning to run out, when suddenly on the third day, they look up and they see something glistening in the distance. Is it a mirage or is this real? Is it actually an oasis? And it is, and they run to it and they took the water to drink but it was bitter.
Verse 23:
“When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter.”
Now I want to talk about this. This is God leading people into a bitter place.
And I want to talk about two things that I think we can learn from this. I want to talk about what I am going to call bitter blessings, and then secondly, how the bitter blessings lead to bigger blessings.
So let me talk about bitter blessings first. Why does God allow trials? I mean this is God leading them. And as Jeremiah 32:21 says (it’s a summary of the experience of Israel’s release),
“You brought your people out of Egypt with signs and wonders, by a mighty hand and an outstretched hand [arm].”
God did this. God did this by signs and wonders. There is no other explanation for the ten plagues, which broke the spirit and the will of Pharaoh and the people in Egypt. There is no other explanation for the opening of the Red Sea than that God intervened and God did it.
Why then in the world did He lead them into a period of barrenness and when they find water, the water is bitter?
Now this need not have taken them by surprise. Do you remember the Passover they celebrated the night that they were delivered, when God sent the angel of death to every Egyptian home? But every Israelite home took a lamb and they slew the lamb, put the blood on the doorposts of their homes and they ate the meat of the lamb.
We talked about that two or three weeks ago and I didn’t talk about the menu for that meal that night because it wasn’t appropriate to the point. But I will just remind you that God specified what they should eat that night. And they should eat, with the lamb, unleavened bread (that is bread without yeast – and there was a reason for that, which is not explained at the time but you learn later and we won’t talk about that) but also they were to eat bitter herbs.
“When you eat this lamb, I want you to enjoy the nourishment of this lamb, but,” says God, “I want you to eat with it some things that are bitter.”
Why?
Because bitterness again and again is God’s means of blessing, and blessings, whatever they are, are mingled with bitterness and often the bitterness is the means by which God does things that are deep and are lasting.
Now let me just qualify that. I am not talking about bitterness of heart. That is a destructive thing. It eats away inside and it’s powerful in its effects and Scripture warns about that in the book of Hebrews Chapter 12:15. It says,
“See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.”
That there are going to be situations in life when you have a choice: you either draw on the grace of God, and if you don’t, the situation itself will create a bitterness, which will cause trouble and defile many.
That is not what we are talking about here – the bitter heart – that is another thing altogether. We are talking about the bitter experience that often we go through.
I was in Hong Kong this last week and I saw part of a documentary on the growth of the church in China over the last century. The title of the documentary was “The Bitter Cup.” It wasn’t just talking about the post 1949, which was the year of the Revolution, the Communist Revolution and the oppression of Christians and the cultural revolution where many, many were put to death. But way back at the beginning of the Century, the Boxer Rebellion in which thousands of Christians died in that time as well.
But I was intrigued by the title of the film, The Bitter Cup, because the Chinese church has drunk from a bitter cup.
And some of you may be experiencing something that is bitter in your life at the moment and you say, “You know, I have looked to God; I have acknowledged Him in all my ways, I am trusting Him to direct my paths yet I have found myself in a situation that is bitter, that is uncomfortable.”
Bitter experience can do two things, we learn from these verses here. It can cause you to turn to grumbling or (that’s in Verse 24) it can cause you to turn to God (that’s in Verse 24). Let me talk about those two things.
In Verse 24 it says,
“So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What are we to drink?’”
This grumbling became a bad habit. If you read on a little bit in Chapter 16 and Verse 2,
“In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.”
Down in Verse 11,
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites.’”
If you count carefully you will find in Chapter 16 alone that there are seven times that they grumble. This became a bad habit. Grumbling is trying to find somebody else to blame for the situation. And of course they grumbled not to Moses; they grumbled against Moses.
But what they failed to understand – and this will lead to grumbling – that there is a purpose in these trials. In Deuteronomy Chapter 8 and Verse 2 it says,
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years” (listen) “to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart.”
Now during those forty years Moses says to them in Deuteronomy 8 (and this was stated in the last year there in the wilderness), that as the Lord led you through the wilderness, there have been many things that have humbled you and have tested you, and what they have done is expose what is in your heart.
In Deuteronomy 13:3,
“The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
Because trials and testing reveal the heart, what is really going on inside a person, what is a person really like? If you are not sure, wait until they are in trouble and then you find out.
Watchman Nee, whose books many of you may know, said Christians should be like China tea - when they get into hot water, all the goodness should come out.”
But the sad thing is, says Watchman Nee, when Christians get into hot water, often the badness comes out.
But what comes out is what is in the heart. You know it is possible to be fair-weather believers. When things are okay, we are okay. When the sky is blue and the sun is shining we are having a good time. But when things are not okay, we are not okay.
Martin Luther, the great reformer in Germany, said, “When our supply is gone, our faith soon fails” - our faith is gone very often.
But sometimes God does lead us into trouble and He leads us into trouble sometimes in such a way that we do not know what the answer is. And that is when you can either grumble – go to grumbling or go to God.
A flight from Toronto to Hong Kong is fifteen and a half hours – that’s a long time so I watched a couple of movies on the journey last week. And one of the films I saw was the film “Defiance.” I don’t know if any of you have seen it; it’s a recent film. It’s a story about how three brothers led a Jewish resistant movement in the forests of Byelorussia during World War II. They started with just a few of them in Poland on the run from Warsaw. Then they were joined by others and then they bumped into other Jews who were fleeing as well and they crossed the border into Byelorussia and it grew into hundreds of people.
And at one stage in this film, amidst all the tragedy and all the pain and all the sadness they were enduring, there was a Rabbi who conducts a funeral of a young person who has died. And as they stand around and he stands by the graveside they have just dug in the forest, in a very moving lament, he complains to God about the fact that “we are the chosen people.”
And he says this to God - he says, “We have no more prayers, no more tears. We have run out of blood. Choose another people. We have paid for each of your commandments; we have covered every stone in every field with ashes. Sanctify another land. Choose another people. Teach them your deeds and your prophecies but grant us one more blessing – please take back the gift of Your holiness.”
That is a man speaking for a people who are in desperate trouble and they say, “Our biggest problem is that we are the chosen people of God. We have known only trouble.”
Maybe this is how the Israelites were feeling back here in Exodus Chapter 15. Maybe it is how some of you are feeling in your walk with God, because you have gone right into trouble that you think, “Why doesn’t God liberate me from this? Why didn’t God deliver me from this?”
And so the people grumbled against Moses, says Verse 24. But Verse 25 says,
“Then Moses cried out to the LORD.”
One of the options is to turn to grumbling; the other option is to turn to God. Moses cried out to the Lord.
The people looked for a quick way out of the problem (“Moses, get a solution; get us out of this”).
Moses looked for God and to God. And if you are doing business directly with God, which is the prerogative of every Christian because every Christian has the same access to God as any other Christian. There are no Christians who have any special access or greater access because our access is purely on the basis of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have access to God.
And when Moses turned to God, God spoke to him.
Before I look at what God said to him, may I just remind you of something that is very important here?
If you were to ask any Israelite, “What is the reason why God has liberated you?” They might give you an array of answers. Somebody might say, “Well, God has liberated us so that we are no longer slaves back in Egypt. He has liberated us to get the slave drivers off our backs so they are no longer driving us every day.”
Well all of that, of course, is wonderfully true.
Somebody else might say, “You know, God liberated us to take us back to the land He gave to Abraham, back to the land of Canaan.”
Somebody else says, “Yes, it’s a land flowing with milk and honey. Everything you need is going to be there. God has brought us out to bring us in.”
And that would be true. But those truths are secondary to God’s reason and He explains it in Exodus 19:4 when He says to them,
“You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”
You see the ultimate objective says God, is not about geography (you are better in Canaan than you were in Egypt, though that is true); the ultimate objective of your deliverance is about bringing you to Myself, that you be My people, I will be your God and we will live in relationship together. I have brought you to Myself.”
And this of course is God’s ultimate purpose in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now you go to any Christian and say, “Why are you a Christian”, they might give you all kinds of reasons.
“Well I am a Christian because I was so bowed down with guilt that when I came to Christ and I confessed my sin, He forgave me and liberated me and I’m free.”
Wonderful! That is a wonderful part of the gospel.
Somebody else might say, “Well, you know I am a Christian because I want to be sure that when I die I go to heaven.”
That’s a wonderful part of the gospel.
What is God’s purpose in the gospel? It is to bring you to Himself, into relationship with Himself. In John 17 Verse 3 Jesus defined eternal life when He said this:
“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
This is eternal life, says Jesus, knowing God, experiencing God Himself, knowing Christ.
John 14:6 Jesus said,
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
And when it says, “No one comes to the Father,” it doesn’t mean no one comes to heaven but by Me, though that is true, but that’s not the point.
The point is no one comes to the Father – it’s coming into relationship with the Father because the very next verse says,
“If you had known me, you would know my Father as well.”
In other words, says Jesus, “I am the way, the truth and the life for what purpose? That you may know God, you might come to God and come into experience with God.”
Now if we think of – if the Israelites thought of the object in their deliverance as being to get them into Canaan, then the expectancy is, “We’ll get to Canaan with the least amount of trouble, with the least amount of obstacle and we’ll get there smoothly and quickly and we’ll follow the most comfortable route.”
But that is not the purpose. “It’s to bring you to Myself. Canaan; you’ll get there, but it’s to bring you to Myself. And in order to bring you to Myself, there are going to be lots of things along the road, lots of bumps, lots of difficulties along the road that will do one of two things – they will either take you from God or they will bring you to God in a deepening of your relationship with Him.”
And when you and I experience rough, tough things in life, as we do; we are not exempt from these; these things are designed in order to expose what is in our heart and either bring us into a deeper relationship with God or if our heart is not right towards God, they will take us away from God – we’ll end up with that bitterness of spirit, not just the bitter experiences.
At the end of the first service this morning a couple came to talk to me who are visiting Toronto. And they came to say, in the light of what I had said this morning, that “two years ago our son was killed.” He was ten weeks off graduating as a medical student and he was killed in an accident, the result of which he drowned. And the father said to me, and his eyes welled up with tears, he said, “this event brought us closer to God than we had ever known in our lives before.”
Of course that event could have taken them from God. They could have responded with anger (and I am sure they had anger in their hearts and I am sure they had to work through all those emotions) but “it was two years ago and it has brought us closer to God.”
Let me read again Deuteronomy 8 and Verse 2:
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert for these forty years, to humble you and to test you…to know what is in your heart.”
Deuteronomy 8:3
“He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known.”
Notice the language there – “He caused you to hunger.” It wasn’t just an accident. That’s an event we will look at next week in Chapter 16. He caused you to hunger. It was by intent. Why?
Because if God’s ultimate purpose for His people was “to bring you out of Egypt, to bring you to Myself; the geography is secondary; it is to bring you to Myself,” then sometimes what brings you to Myself is dealing with your heart. And dealing with your hearts often requires putting you into situations where I test your heart and what is in your heart comes to the surface, and if it’s junk we can clean it up and if it’s good, we can purify it.”
And that’s why it says of this event at the end of Verse 25 of Exodus 15,
“There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them.”
The divine purpose in the bitter water is that it was testing them.
How do you respond to the difficult situations you face in life? And some of us are possibly facing particular difficulties right now in the climate in which we are living, the economic climate, the uncertainties that are blowing around our heads at the moment.
Do you become angry and lash out, whatever the equivalent of grumbling against Moses might be for you?
Do you simply resign yourself to them and shrug your shoulder and say, “Well que sera sera, whatever will be will be?”
Or do you embrace them in such a way that you recognize this may be an agent of God, even though it may not be a good thing, and I am going to embrace it and I am going to take it to God and say, “God, what are You doing in this situation?”
You see the test of how much we trust God comes when we don’t actually know what is going on. When you know what is going on it is easy to trust God; it’s when you don’t know what’s going on that you find you have to put your trust in God.
So for your God and mine, though the medicine is not nice, sometimes it is very good. God leads us into a situation when we don’t know what is going on. Do you really trust Him?
Notice in Verse 26 where after they came to Marah – and I am going to talk in a moment just briefly about the piece of wood it talks about that he threw into the water – but let me just read you at the end of Verse 26 where God says about the experience at Marah with the bitter water,
“I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”
Now He associates the bitter water of Marah with “healing you.”
Jamie Buckingham, who many of you may know his name and read some of his books; he has written a book called “A Way Through the Wilderness” and he talks about the Israelites in the wilderness here. And Jamie Buckingham himself has spent quite a bit of time in the Sinai Desert. He has taken people on trips there and he got to know the desert well.
But he writes interestingly about this passage. And he says,
“What did God want the Israelites to do? Obviously He wanted them to drink the water of Marah for it was filled with magnesium.”
(Now earlier he has explained that this is what made it bitter. And he has explained that from his own research and experience there.) He says,
“It was filled with magnesium and it is true that even Moses could not have known about the medicinal qualities of calcium and magnesium. For one thing, magnesium is a powerful laxative. It was God’s way of cleaning out their systems. Had they drunk the bitter water and continued to drink it despite the effects on their intestines, they would have expelled mostly amoeba, parasites and death-dealing germs that they brought with them from Egypt” (referring back to the fact that He says, “I will not bring on you the diseases that I brought on the Egyptians,” that some of these diseases latent within their systems would be cleaned out by drinking this bitter water.)
And then he says,
“There is another medicinal quality about the water of Marah. Calcium and Magnesium form the basis of a drug called Dolomite. Dolomite pills are used by professional athletes who perform in the hot sun. It is basically a muscle control drug to be used in extremely hot weather. Joggers, tennis players, those who exert themselves in a hot weather take Dolomite to control muscle spasms. It is also used by patients with heart problems to control the heart muscle and keep it from going into fibrillation, which is the muscle beating out of control. God had provided just the right medicine, not only to clean out the systems of the former slaves and clean out the Egyptian diseases, but to prepare their bodies for the long and arduous journey through the desert. Thus their first stop in the wilderness journey was not a place of despair but a place where God provided medicinal water. Over and over we are reminded that the reason for wilderness experiences is purification and preparation.”
And Jamie Buckingham goes on to say later that the whole diet of the nation had to be changed, and you find that later in Exodus. You find the dietary laws that we now know as kosher laws. And he says,
“To accomplish this, God started with a purge ridding them of all their perverse yearnings and desires.”
God leads us to bitter waters often for purposes of purging and cleansing. “There” says Verse 25, “at Marah he tested them.” And the testing was for their good.
Charles Spurgeon was the greatest - probably greatest - 19th Century preacher and he put it like this. I quote from one of his sermons:
“I have always looked back to times of trial with a kind of longing, not to have them return, but to feel the strength of God as I felt it then, to feel the power of faith as I felt it then, to hang on to God’s powerful arm as I hung on to it then, and to see God at work as I saw Him then.”
That’s a wonderful retrospective view of the bitter waters, the trials, the difficulties – you look back not for the bitter water but for the experience of God that you find in the midst of that.
We can resist the trials and we turn to grumbling or we can embrace the trial and turn to God.
A friend of mine, Chris Thomas is his name; he is the son of Major Ian Thomas, whose name some of you are familiar with. And Chris sent me an e-mail recently in which he said this, talking about the present crisis around us:
“Material loss and spiritual gain so often seem to be served on the same plate.”
There’s brilliant insight there.
“Material loss and spiritual gain so often are served to us on the same plate.”
And so my first point is that there are bitter blessings. And these bitter blessings can turn you to grumbling and that will drain you of your energy and you won’t find any solution – you just pass the buck on whoever it is you are grumbling to.
Or you can turn to God. And in turning to God, these bitter blessings lead to my second point, bigger blessings.
Remember Psalm 50 [30] and Verse 5? It is a great verse.
“Weeping may remain for a night but rejoicing comes in the morning.”
And God led Moses to bigger blessings when he cried out in Verse 25,
“Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.”
Beside the bitter water was an antidote and it is intriguing: it is a piece of wood.
I have looked at what the various commentators have to say about this verse and this piece of wood. It seems there is no wood that is known to neutralize this kind of bitter water that you sometimes find in the Sinai Desert. And therefore it seems to me that this wood, as so often is true of events in Scripture, are foreshadowings of something of significance to us.
Most of the commentators would associate it with the cross of Christ. Now we may think that is a big jump and a big leap.
But there is that association of the cross of Christ being the means of healing. In 1 Peter 2 Verse 24 it says,
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.”
He uses – Peter there uses the word tree.
“…that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”
And we may, as many have done, apply Biblical typology – that is where something in one passage is a type of something else, or biblical metaphor, but I am not going to fight if you come and say, “I don’t think that’s what it means” because it doesn’t state and therefore we have to be very careful.
But we do know this (and this adds to this being a picture of applying the cross of Christ to our situations of bitterness) that the antidote to all our need is found in the work and the person of Jesus Christ. We know that to be true. And maybe this is just a glimpse, just a glimpse of that.
But it is interesting that associated with this, it goes on to say in Verse 25, second part of Verse 25, that,
“There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them.
“He said, ‘If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”
Notice the qualifications there. “If you listen, if you pay attention, if you do what is right, if you take My decrees; if you turn to Me (is the implication of all that), then I will not bring on you the diseases.
I think there are three stages here. There is a testing of the people, which is designed to lead to a turning to the Lord, which is designed to lead to a treating of the bitterness.
Testing – that’s God’s doing; turning – that’s our response. The people turned to grumbling; Moses turned to the Lord.
When Moses turned to the Lord, there was treatment to their bitter water.
But then He took them beyond Marah in Verse 27, to a place called Elim.
“Then they came to Elim, where there twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.”
There are more Elims than there are Marahs. There were twelve springs at Elim; that means there was water – and enough. There were twelve tribes – twelve springs – enough water.
Not only that, there were seventy palm trees. Now of course the value of a palm tree in the desert is it shows you where the water is because palms are long roots that go way, way down. If you see a palm tree generally you know one thing: there’s water there. Or if you see a cactus, there is water there somewhere.
But the trees provide shade – water from the springs and shade from the trees. And notice that they camped there near the water. They visited the bitter waters of Marah but they camped by the springs of Elim.
We visit the bitter waters; that is part of life. We visit and experience bitter experiences. We are not exempt from them.
But we camp by the water, by the spring, by Elim.
I can’t help but draw an association with this and the conversation Jesus had with the woman of Samaria in John Chapter 4. She had come to draw water, you remember, and Jesus was sitting there and engaged her in conversation. And He said to her,
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again.”
“You drink this water; you fill up your bucket, you take it home; you are going to drink it all; you will be back tomorrow for more; you take it home until the end of your life you will constantly be getting new water because it’ll constantly be drained of it.
But, He says,
“Whoever drinks the water I give him” (moving now from the physical water from the well to what He had talked to her about – that spiritual water)…
“Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
You see if you have a bucketful of water, when the bucket is empty, the bucket is empty; go back and fill it up again. But if you know I am offering, you will discover that right in the heart of your own life there is a spring of water that doesn’t run dry. And you always have enough.
Now you know it’s possible that in the Christian life our mentality is that we come maybe to this church on Sunday morning and we basically come carrying our bucket, hoping we will get something in the bucket this week I can take home and drink during the week, but I run out by Tuesday, so I am really drained. And then I come back for another bucket and I hope you will fill it up for me. And sometimes you get half a bucket; sometimes you will get just a cup full in the bottom of the bucket. Sometimes you will go home saying, “I didn’t get any water this morning.”
But do you know something? You are not going to live the Christian life that way. You are going to live the Christian life when you realize that there is a spring of water within your own heart when Jesus Christ is living in your heart.
And although we may visit the bitter waters of Marah –and we do when we go through the bitter experiences of life – we every day camp by the spring.
And every day we have in Jesus Christ all that we need. That’s why in Lamentations Chapter 3 and Verse 22, when Jeremiah walks through the rubble of a destroyed Jerusalem and everything around him is rubble, he says,
“But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’S great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
He says, “Everything around me is rubble, everything around me is bitter.” And it is called Lamentations because Jeremiah is walking through the destroyed city of Jerusalem weeping. That’s what Lamentations means – weeping.
“But this I call to mind, and then I have hope.”
Although the city is gone, the city is rubble, the people are taken off into exile; one thing I know is that His mercies are new every morning. I live everyday on the fresh daily supply from God. His mercies are new every morning.
Let me ask you: do you know that experientially, that Jesus Christ is as fresh to you on a Monday morning as He is on a Sunday morning? That you go to the well on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and you drink at the well, you camp at Elim where the water is good?
But you have to make time for that. I read a story of a man visiting America many years ago from another country. And he saw a water fountain in a park for the very first time. And he was thirsty so he went up to it but he couldn’t see how to make it work. It had no tap; it had no buttons to press.
And he was about to turn away, when somebody seeing him looking around for something to poke and press and turn, and somebody pointed out to him a little notice on the side of the fountain. It said, “Stoop and drink.”
And when the man stooped down to where the water supply was, an electronic eye detected his presence and the water came flowing out.
I think that’s a beautiful picture. We stoop and drink. We bow the knee to Jesus Christ and find in Him we have all that we need that is fresh.
There is a song – I finish with this – that we sing. It’s a new song but it’s a wonderful song.
In Christ alone my hope is found
He is my light, my strength, my song.
This Cornerstone, this solid ground
Firm (listen) through the fiercest drought and storm.
(Firm in the desert)
What heights of love, what depths of peace
What fears are stilled, when strivings cease
My comforter, my all in all
Here in the love of Christ I stand.
Is that just a song or is that your experience of Jesus Christ? Firm through the fiercest drought or the wildest storm, He is my source and my strength.
Let’s pray together…
Part 9
“The Bitter Water of Marah”
Exodus 15: 22-27
If you have got your Bible I am going to read to you from the book of Exodus and Chapter 15, the second book of the Old Testament.
Let me read to you from Exodus and Chapter 15. If you have been with us on recent weeks you will know that we have been looking into these early chapters of the book of Exodus and seeing the truth that is applicable to us today that we learn from this journey of the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, ultimately on through to Canaan, the land described as a land flowing with milk and honey.
And last time we looked at this, they had just crossed the Red Sea. God had miraculously opened the waters, taken them across. They had a great celebration in the first part of Chapter 15. And then Verse 22 says this:
“Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they travelled in the desert without finding water.
“When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.)
“So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What are we to drink?’
“Then Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.
“There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them.
“He said, ‘If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.’
“Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.”
Keep your Bible open there.
Most of you probably know the word gospel literally means good news, because that of course is what it is. But we can mistake the meaning of good; we can associate with good the idea that it is nice, that it is pleasant, that it is always agreeable.
When I was a kid, if I got sick and I had to take some medicine (which happened from time to time), in my day we didn’t have flavoured medicine. You couldn’t choose banana, strawberry or chocolate flavour; you got the original flavour. The original flavour was something between boot polish and gasoline.
And when as a kid you would get a couple of big spoons of this stuff and you would try your best to swallow without gagging, my mother would always say, “It’s good for you. Open up.”
When she said, “It’s good for you,” it had nothing to do with it being nice or tasty or pleasant or chocolaty. It had everything to do with fixing whatever the sickness was.
And I want to talk to you this morning about something that is good, something which comes from God. And because God is Himself good, everything, which derives from Him, is good. But it is good while it’s at the same time being bitter.
God led the Israelites, as I pointed out last time, by a pillar of cloud, which represented His presence in front of the people during the day. And if they travelled by night He represented Himself by a pillar of fire, which they followed.
And now having crossed the Red Sea, which is the first time they have Egypt behind them (because until they cross the Red Sea, they are still within the boundaries of Egypt), God then leads them, it says, into the Desert of Shur. And they travelled for three days without water.
Now three days is a long time without water. Now I am sure, of course, they had taken some water. I doubt they had collected water at the Red Sea because that is salt water and that is no good for drinking. But no doubt they had their water skins and they had topped up not knowing what lay ahead.
But going into the desert for three days, they discover that there is no water. They looked for it along the way, and I imagine that the water they were carrying got warm and tepid, if not very warm, which made it un-quenching. And before long they would begin to ration it and maybe ultimately run out of it.
And you find in this passage that the triumph of the Red Sea, which they had celebrated and sang that great song about (Sing to the Lord, for He is mighty. The horse and the rider He has thrown into the Sea, and so on) – they sing that song with great gusto with Miriam and the women banging with their tambourines.
“Okay, that’s that. Let’s move on now.”
They run from the triumph of that into the trial of being in a desert with no water. And this opens up a pattern that follows in the next few chapters. And the pattern is triumph followed by trial followed by triumph followed by trial followed by triumph followed by trial followed by triumph followed by trial.
In Chapter 14 they are delivered from Egypt and they run into the banks of the Red Sea, which they cannot cross - triumph of their delivery to the trial of not knowing what to do. We talked about that last time.
And then God opened the Red Sea. And they went in Chapter 15 from the triumph of God opening the Red Sea into the trial of finding themselves in a desert without water.
And then God gives them water, so they have the triumph of finding the water. And in Chapter 16 they move from that triumph into the trial of not having any food. And they begin to grumble and complain, and God gave them food; He gave them manna.
And so in Chapter 17 you have them moving from the triumph of the manna to the trial of discovering there are enemies on the journey – the Amalakites came and attacked them in Chapter 17. And this pattern goes on and on and on.
Triumph leads to trial. Three days before they had water over their heads as they walked through the path in the Red Sea. Now they are in the desert with no water at all.
You know life has as many deserts as it has green pastures. We all love Psalm 23, which is about a sheep, talking about the shepherd. And one of the things the sheep says in that psalm is, “He makes me lie down in green pastures.” And for a sheep, when a sheep lies down, it is satisfied. You see a sheep lying down; you know it is satisfied. “He satisfies me in the green pastures.”
But don’t take that as the defining statement of the Christian life (it’s all about green pastures) because a couple of verses later in the same psalm, he then says, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” There is a feast and there is a fight all in the same sentence.
And the feast and the fight co-exist. The desert and the green pastures are on the same journey. The mountains and the valleys are in the same landscape. When God gives a rainbow, which is a picture of His promise to us, the rainbow is always against a backdrop of clouds and storms.
Now we will save ourselves a lot of grief if we recognize that the Christian life contains both – green pastures and deserts, feasts and fights, mountaintops and valleys, light and times of darkness.
And the Israelites are being led by the Spirit of God by giving them this pillar of cloud to follow. They are not just wandering around aimlessly at this point. They did a little bit of that later but at this point they are fresh on the journey and they are following the guidance of God and they are getting drier and drier and more thirsty and more thirsty and more thirsty, and there is no sign of water.
Now I don’t know much about deserts myself. I have actually travelled through the Sinai Desert many years ago, through the northern part, from Egypt through to Israel. But I travelled on an air-conditioned bus and we had plenty of bottles of water and looking through the window you would say, “Oh, look at that, oh, it’s dry isn’t it?” You know, and we were having a good time.
I have never been in the desert but I have spent three days on one occasion out in the African bush in the Central African Republic where I spent three months when I was 21, staying with some missionaries there.
And we were 300 miles from the nearest town, which was actually a seven-day journey there and back. And there were only four shops in the town anyway when you got there. So we went once a month mainly to get diesel and stuff like that that we needed. But our food had to be locally grown or we had to go and hunt for it.
And every once in a while we would go and hunt for some meat. We were allowed one elephant a year, which was a great idea until you had to carry it home. But anyway there were bits on it that were quite nice. You can make doughnuts out of the trunk (actually you didn’t).
But one morning when I was there we got up at 4 o’clock in the morning and just walked out of this mission station just south of Sudan, just north of Congo, in a very remote area, and we just walked out into the bush looking for some meat. And we were away for three days on that occasion. And at the end of the first day we did shoot two animals but we didn’t shoot them well; they stayed alive and kept running and we lost them. We did get something eventually.
But as we went on that first day, having left at 4 o’clock in the morning, we were getting towards evening and we found no fresh supply of water. And we got very dry. We did carry water with us, but we drank it very quickly because the hot African sun was beating down.
And eventually that evening we found a river that was quite dirty but we boiled the water and then we boiled it again, just to make sure everything in it was killed. And we put the dirty water in everybody’s mug and then we poured instant coffee on top of that to give it some flavour, but I will never forget all my life – it’s the best cup of coffee I ever had in my life. We sat around a campfire to keep the animals away; we had the fire burning all night; but we sat around that campfire and we drank this coffee. And I know coffee normally isn’t thirst quenching but this was because we were really hot and thirsty.
And so I know a little bit about that and I imagine these Israelites, after three days, whatever water they were carrying, beginning to run out, when suddenly on the third day, they look up and they see something glistening in the distance. Is it a mirage or is this real? Is it actually an oasis? And it is, and they run to it and they took the water to drink but it was bitter.
Verse 23:
“When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter.”
Now I want to talk about this. This is God leading people into a bitter place.
And I want to talk about two things that I think we can learn from this. I want to talk about what I am going to call bitter blessings, and then secondly, how the bitter blessings lead to bigger blessings.
So let me talk about bitter blessings first. Why does God allow trials? I mean this is God leading them. And as Jeremiah 32:21 says (it’s a summary of the experience of Israel’s release),
“You brought your people out of Egypt with signs and wonders, by a mighty hand and an outstretched hand [arm].”
God did this. God did this by signs and wonders. There is no other explanation for the ten plagues, which broke the spirit and the will of Pharaoh and the people in Egypt. There is no other explanation for the opening of the Red Sea than that God intervened and God did it.
Why then in the world did He lead them into a period of barrenness and when they find water, the water is bitter?
Now this need not have taken them by surprise. Do you remember the Passover they celebrated the night that they were delivered, when God sent the angel of death to every Egyptian home? But every Israelite home took a lamb and they slew the lamb, put the blood on the doorposts of their homes and they ate the meat of the lamb.
We talked about that two or three weeks ago and I didn’t talk about the menu for that meal that night because it wasn’t appropriate to the point. But I will just remind you that God specified what they should eat that night. And they should eat, with the lamb, unleavened bread (that is bread without yeast – and there was a reason for that, which is not explained at the time but you learn later and we won’t talk about that) but also they were to eat bitter herbs.
“When you eat this lamb, I want you to enjoy the nourishment of this lamb, but,” says God, “I want you to eat with it some things that are bitter.”
Why?
Because bitterness again and again is God’s means of blessing, and blessings, whatever they are, are mingled with bitterness and often the bitterness is the means by which God does things that are deep and are lasting.
Now let me just qualify that. I am not talking about bitterness of heart. That is a destructive thing. It eats away inside and it’s powerful in its effects and Scripture warns about that in the book of Hebrews Chapter 12:15. It says,
“See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.”
That there are going to be situations in life when you have a choice: you either draw on the grace of God, and if you don’t, the situation itself will create a bitterness, which will cause trouble and defile many.
That is not what we are talking about here – the bitter heart – that is another thing altogether. We are talking about the bitter experience that often we go through.
I was in Hong Kong this last week and I saw part of a documentary on the growth of the church in China over the last century. The title of the documentary was “The Bitter Cup.” It wasn’t just talking about the post 1949, which was the year of the Revolution, the Communist Revolution and the oppression of Christians and the cultural revolution where many, many were put to death. But way back at the beginning of the Century, the Boxer Rebellion in which thousands of Christians died in that time as well.
But I was intrigued by the title of the film, The Bitter Cup, because the Chinese church has drunk from a bitter cup.
And some of you may be experiencing something that is bitter in your life at the moment and you say, “You know, I have looked to God; I have acknowledged Him in all my ways, I am trusting Him to direct my paths yet I have found myself in a situation that is bitter, that is uncomfortable.”
Bitter experience can do two things, we learn from these verses here. It can cause you to turn to grumbling or (that’s in Verse 24) it can cause you to turn to God (that’s in Verse 24). Let me talk about those two things.
In Verse 24 it says,
“So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What are we to drink?’”
This grumbling became a bad habit. If you read on a little bit in Chapter 16 and Verse 2,
“In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.”
Down in Verse 11,
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites.’”
If you count carefully you will find in Chapter 16 alone that there are seven times that they grumble. This became a bad habit. Grumbling is trying to find somebody else to blame for the situation. And of course they grumbled not to Moses; they grumbled against Moses.
But what they failed to understand – and this will lead to grumbling – that there is a purpose in these trials. In Deuteronomy Chapter 8 and Verse 2 it says,
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years” (listen) “to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart.”
Now during those forty years Moses says to them in Deuteronomy 8 (and this was stated in the last year there in the wilderness), that as the Lord led you through the wilderness, there have been many things that have humbled you and have tested you, and what they have done is expose what is in your heart.
In Deuteronomy 13:3,
“The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
Because trials and testing reveal the heart, what is really going on inside a person, what is a person really like? If you are not sure, wait until they are in trouble and then you find out.
Watchman Nee, whose books many of you may know, said Christians should be like China tea - when they get into hot water, all the goodness should come out.”
But the sad thing is, says Watchman Nee, when Christians get into hot water, often the badness comes out.
But what comes out is what is in the heart. You know it is possible to be fair-weather believers. When things are okay, we are okay. When the sky is blue and the sun is shining we are having a good time. But when things are not okay, we are not okay.
Martin Luther, the great reformer in Germany, said, “When our supply is gone, our faith soon fails” - our faith is gone very often.
But sometimes God does lead us into trouble and He leads us into trouble sometimes in such a way that we do not know what the answer is. And that is when you can either grumble – go to grumbling or go to God.
A flight from Toronto to Hong Kong is fifteen and a half hours – that’s a long time so I watched a couple of movies on the journey last week. And one of the films I saw was the film “Defiance.” I don’t know if any of you have seen it; it’s a recent film. It’s a story about how three brothers led a Jewish resistant movement in the forests of Byelorussia during World War II. They started with just a few of them in Poland on the run from Warsaw. Then they were joined by others and then they bumped into other Jews who were fleeing as well and they crossed the border into Byelorussia and it grew into hundreds of people.
And at one stage in this film, amidst all the tragedy and all the pain and all the sadness they were enduring, there was a Rabbi who conducts a funeral of a young person who has died. And as they stand around and he stands by the graveside they have just dug in the forest, in a very moving lament, he complains to God about the fact that “we are the chosen people.”
And he says this to God - he says, “We have no more prayers, no more tears. We have run out of blood. Choose another people. We have paid for each of your commandments; we have covered every stone in every field with ashes. Sanctify another land. Choose another people. Teach them your deeds and your prophecies but grant us one more blessing – please take back the gift of Your holiness.”
That is a man speaking for a people who are in desperate trouble and they say, “Our biggest problem is that we are the chosen people of God. We have known only trouble.”
Maybe this is how the Israelites were feeling back here in Exodus Chapter 15. Maybe it is how some of you are feeling in your walk with God, because you have gone right into trouble that you think, “Why doesn’t God liberate me from this? Why didn’t God deliver me from this?”
And so the people grumbled against Moses, says Verse 24. But Verse 25 says,
“Then Moses cried out to the LORD.”
One of the options is to turn to grumbling; the other option is to turn to God. Moses cried out to the Lord.
The people looked for a quick way out of the problem (“Moses, get a solution; get us out of this”).
Moses looked for God and to God. And if you are doing business directly with God, which is the prerogative of every Christian because every Christian has the same access to God as any other Christian. There are no Christians who have any special access or greater access because our access is purely on the basis of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have access to God.
And when Moses turned to God, God spoke to him.
Before I look at what God said to him, may I just remind you of something that is very important here?
If you were to ask any Israelite, “What is the reason why God has liberated you?” They might give you an array of answers. Somebody might say, “Well, God has liberated us so that we are no longer slaves back in Egypt. He has liberated us to get the slave drivers off our backs so they are no longer driving us every day.”
Well all of that, of course, is wonderfully true.
Somebody else might say, “You know, God liberated us to take us back to the land He gave to Abraham, back to the land of Canaan.”
Somebody else says, “Yes, it’s a land flowing with milk and honey. Everything you need is going to be there. God has brought us out to bring us in.”
And that would be true. But those truths are secondary to God’s reason and He explains it in Exodus 19:4 when He says to them,
“You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”
You see the ultimate objective says God, is not about geography (you are better in Canaan than you were in Egypt, though that is true); the ultimate objective of your deliverance is about bringing you to Myself, that you be My people, I will be your God and we will live in relationship together. I have brought you to Myself.”
And this of course is God’s ultimate purpose in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now you go to any Christian and say, “Why are you a Christian”, they might give you all kinds of reasons.
“Well I am a Christian because I was so bowed down with guilt that when I came to Christ and I confessed my sin, He forgave me and liberated me and I’m free.”
Wonderful! That is a wonderful part of the gospel.
Somebody else might say, “Well, you know I am a Christian because I want to be sure that when I die I go to heaven.”
That’s a wonderful part of the gospel.
What is God’s purpose in the gospel? It is to bring you to Himself, into relationship with Himself. In John 17 Verse 3 Jesus defined eternal life when He said this:
“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
This is eternal life, says Jesus, knowing God, experiencing God Himself, knowing Christ.
John 14:6 Jesus said,
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
And when it says, “No one comes to the Father,” it doesn’t mean no one comes to heaven but by Me, though that is true, but that’s not the point.
The point is no one comes to the Father – it’s coming into relationship with the Father because the very next verse says,
“If you had known me, you would know my Father as well.”
In other words, says Jesus, “I am the way, the truth and the life for what purpose? That you may know God, you might come to God and come into experience with God.”
Now if we think of – if the Israelites thought of the object in their deliverance as being to get them into Canaan, then the expectancy is, “We’ll get to Canaan with the least amount of trouble, with the least amount of obstacle and we’ll get there smoothly and quickly and we’ll follow the most comfortable route.”
But that is not the purpose. “It’s to bring you to Myself. Canaan; you’ll get there, but it’s to bring you to Myself. And in order to bring you to Myself, there are going to be lots of things along the road, lots of bumps, lots of difficulties along the road that will do one of two things – they will either take you from God or they will bring you to God in a deepening of your relationship with Him.”
And when you and I experience rough, tough things in life, as we do; we are not exempt from these; these things are designed in order to expose what is in our heart and either bring us into a deeper relationship with God or if our heart is not right towards God, they will take us away from God – we’ll end up with that bitterness of spirit, not just the bitter experiences.
At the end of the first service this morning a couple came to talk to me who are visiting Toronto. And they came to say, in the light of what I had said this morning, that “two years ago our son was killed.” He was ten weeks off graduating as a medical student and he was killed in an accident, the result of which he drowned. And the father said to me, and his eyes welled up with tears, he said, “this event brought us closer to God than we had ever known in our lives before.”
Of course that event could have taken them from God. They could have responded with anger (and I am sure they had anger in their hearts and I am sure they had to work through all those emotions) but “it was two years ago and it has brought us closer to God.”
Let me read again Deuteronomy 8 and Verse 2:
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert for these forty years, to humble you and to test you…to know what is in your heart.”
Deuteronomy 8:3
“He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known.”
Notice the language there – “He caused you to hunger.” It wasn’t just an accident. That’s an event we will look at next week in Chapter 16. He caused you to hunger. It was by intent. Why?
Because if God’s ultimate purpose for His people was “to bring you out of Egypt, to bring you to Myself; the geography is secondary; it is to bring you to Myself,” then sometimes what brings you to Myself is dealing with your heart. And dealing with your hearts often requires putting you into situations where I test your heart and what is in your heart comes to the surface, and if it’s junk we can clean it up and if it’s good, we can purify it.”
And that’s why it says of this event at the end of Verse 25 of Exodus 15,
“There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them.”
The divine purpose in the bitter water is that it was testing them.
How do you respond to the difficult situations you face in life? And some of us are possibly facing particular difficulties right now in the climate in which we are living, the economic climate, the uncertainties that are blowing around our heads at the moment.
Do you become angry and lash out, whatever the equivalent of grumbling against Moses might be for you?
Do you simply resign yourself to them and shrug your shoulder and say, “Well que sera sera, whatever will be will be?”
Or do you embrace them in such a way that you recognize this may be an agent of God, even though it may not be a good thing, and I am going to embrace it and I am going to take it to God and say, “God, what are You doing in this situation?”
You see the test of how much we trust God comes when we don’t actually know what is going on. When you know what is going on it is easy to trust God; it’s when you don’t know what’s going on that you find you have to put your trust in God.
So for your God and mine, though the medicine is not nice, sometimes it is very good. God leads us into a situation when we don’t know what is going on. Do you really trust Him?
Notice in Verse 26 where after they came to Marah – and I am going to talk in a moment just briefly about the piece of wood it talks about that he threw into the water – but let me just read you at the end of Verse 26 where God says about the experience at Marah with the bitter water,
“I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”
Now He associates the bitter water of Marah with “healing you.”
Jamie Buckingham, who many of you may know his name and read some of his books; he has written a book called “A Way Through the Wilderness” and he talks about the Israelites in the wilderness here. And Jamie Buckingham himself has spent quite a bit of time in the Sinai Desert. He has taken people on trips there and he got to know the desert well.
But he writes interestingly about this passage. And he says,
“What did God want the Israelites to do? Obviously He wanted them to drink the water of Marah for it was filled with magnesium.”
(Now earlier he has explained that this is what made it bitter. And he has explained that from his own research and experience there.) He says,
“It was filled with magnesium and it is true that even Moses could not have known about the medicinal qualities of calcium and magnesium. For one thing, magnesium is a powerful laxative. It was God’s way of cleaning out their systems. Had they drunk the bitter water and continued to drink it despite the effects on their intestines, they would have expelled mostly amoeba, parasites and death-dealing germs that they brought with them from Egypt” (referring back to the fact that He says, “I will not bring on you the diseases that I brought on the Egyptians,” that some of these diseases latent within their systems would be cleaned out by drinking this bitter water.)
And then he says,
“There is another medicinal quality about the water of Marah. Calcium and Magnesium form the basis of a drug called Dolomite. Dolomite pills are used by professional athletes who perform in the hot sun. It is basically a muscle control drug to be used in extremely hot weather. Joggers, tennis players, those who exert themselves in a hot weather take Dolomite to control muscle spasms. It is also used by patients with heart problems to control the heart muscle and keep it from going into fibrillation, which is the muscle beating out of control. God had provided just the right medicine, not only to clean out the systems of the former slaves and clean out the Egyptian diseases, but to prepare their bodies for the long and arduous journey through the desert. Thus their first stop in the wilderness journey was not a place of despair but a place where God provided medicinal water. Over and over we are reminded that the reason for wilderness experiences is purification and preparation.”
And Jamie Buckingham goes on to say later that the whole diet of the nation had to be changed, and you find that later in Exodus. You find the dietary laws that we now know as kosher laws. And he says,
“To accomplish this, God started with a purge ridding them of all their perverse yearnings and desires.”
God leads us to bitter waters often for purposes of purging and cleansing. “There” says Verse 25, “at Marah he tested them.” And the testing was for their good.
Charles Spurgeon was the greatest - probably greatest - 19th Century preacher and he put it like this. I quote from one of his sermons:
“I have always looked back to times of trial with a kind of longing, not to have them return, but to feel the strength of God as I felt it then, to feel the power of faith as I felt it then, to hang on to God’s powerful arm as I hung on to it then, and to see God at work as I saw Him then.”
That’s a wonderful retrospective view of the bitter waters, the trials, the difficulties – you look back not for the bitter water but for the experience of God that you find in the midst of that.
We can resist the trials and we turn to grumbling or we can embrace the trial and turn to God.
A friend of mine, Chris Thomas is his name; he is the son of Major Ian Thomas, whose name some of you are familiar with. And Chris sent me an e-mail recently in which he said this, talking about the present crisis around us:
“Material loss and spiritual gain so often seem to be served on the same plate.”
There’s brilliant insight there.
“Material loss and spiritual gain so often are served to us on the same plate.”
And so my first point is that there are bitter blessings. And these bitter blessings can turn you to grumbling and that will drain you of your energy and you won’t find any solution – you just pass the buck on whoever it is you are grumbling to.
Or you can turn to God. And in turning to God, these bitter blessings lead to my second point, bigger blessings.
Remember Psalm 50 [30] and Verse 5? It is a great verse.
“Weeping may remain for a night but rejoicing comes in the morning.”
And God led Moses to bigger blessings when he cried out in Verse 25,
“Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.”
Beside the bitter water was an antidote and it is intriguing: it is a piece of wood.
I have looked at what the various commentators have to say about this verse and this piece of wood. It seems there is no wood that is known to neutralize this kind of bitter water that you sometimes find in the Sinai Desert. And therefore it seems to me that this wood, as so often is true of events in Scripture, are foreshadowings of something of significance to us.
Most of the commentators would associate it with the cross of Christ. Now we may think that is a big jump and a big leap.
But there is that association of the cross of Christ being the means of healing. In 1 Peter 2 Verse 24 it says,
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.”
He uses – Peter there uses the word tree.
“…that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”
And we may, as many have done, apply Biblical typology – that is where something in one passage is a type of something else, or biblical metaphor, but I am not going to fight if you come and say, “I don’t think that’s what it means” because it doesn’t state and therefore we have to be very careful.
But we do know this (and this adds to this being a picture of applying the cross of Christ to our situations of bitterness) that the antidote to all our need is found in the work and the person of Jesus Christ. We know that to be true. And maybe this is just a glimpse, just a glimpse of that.
But it is interesting that associated with this, it goes on to say in Verse 25, second part of Verse 25, that,
“There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them.
“He said, ‘If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”
Notice the qualifications there. “If you listen, if you pay attention, if you do what is right, if you take My decrees; if you turn to Me (is the implication of all that), then I will not bring on you the diseases.
I think there are three stages here. There is a testing of the people, which is designed to lead to a turning to the Lord, which is designed to lead to a treating of the bitterness.
Testing – that’s God’s doing; turning – that’s our response. The people turned to grumbling; Moses turned to the Lord.
When Moses turned to the Lord, there was treatment to their bitter water.
But then He took them beyond Marah in Verse 27, to a place called Elim.
“Then they came to Elim, where there twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.”
There are more Elims than there are Marahs. There were twelve springs at Elim; that means there was water – and enough. There were twelve tribes – twelve springs – enough water.
Not only that, there were seventy palm trees. Now of course the value of a palm tree in the desert is it shows you where the water is because palms are long roots that go way, way down. If you see a palm tree generally you know one thing: there’s water there. Or if you see a cactus, there is water there somewhere.
But the trees provide shade – water from the springs and shade from the trees. And notice that they camped there near the water. They visited the bitter waters of Marah but they camped by the springs of Elim.
We visit the bitter waters; that is part of life. We visit and experience bitter experiences. We are not exempt from them.
But we camp by the water, by the spring, by Elim.
I can’t help but draw an association with this and the conversation Jesus had with the woman of Samaria in John Chapter 4. She had come to draw water, you remember, and Jesus was sitting there and engaged her in conversation. And He said to her,
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again.”
“You drink this water; you fill up your bucket, you take it home; you are going to drink it all; you will be back tomorrow for more; you take it home until the end of your life you will constantly be getting new water because it’ll constantly be drained of it.
But, He says,
“Whoever drinks the water I give him” (moving now from the physical water from the well to what He had talked to her about – that spiritual water)…
“Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
You see if you have a bucketful of water, when the bucket is empty, the bucket is empty; go back and fill it up again. But if you know I am offering, you will discover that right in the heart of your own life there is a spring of water that doesn’t run dry. And you always have enough.
Now you know it’s possible that in the Christian life our mentality is that we come maybe to this church on Sunday morning and we basically come carrying our bucket, hoping we will get something in the bucket this week I can take home and drink during the week, but I run out by Tuesday, so I am really drained. And then I come back for another bucket and I hope you will fill it up for me. And sometimes you get half a bucket; sometimes you will get just a cup full in the bottom of the bucket. Sometimes you will go home saying, “I didn’t get any water this morning.”
But do you know something? You are not going to live the Christian life that way. You are going to live the Christian life when you realize that there is a spring of water within your own heart when Jesus Christ is living in your heart.
And although we may visit the bitter waters of Marah –and we do when we go through the bitter experiences of life – we every day camp by the spring.
And every day we have in Jesus Christ all that we need. That’s why in Lamentations Chapter 3 and Verse 22, when Jeremiah walks through the rubble of a destroyed Jerusalem and everything around him is rubble, he says,
“But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’S great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
He says, “Everything around me is rubble, everything around me is bitter.” And it is called Lamentations because Jeremiah is walking through the destroyed city of Jerusalem weeping. That’s what Lamentations means – weeping.
“But this I call to mind, and then I have hope.”
Although the city is gone, the city is rubble, the people are taken off into exile; one thing I know is that His mercies are new every morning. I live everyday on the fresh daily supply from God. His mercies are new every morning.
Let me ask you: do you know that experientially, that Jesus Christ is as fresh to you on a Monday morning as He is on a Sunday morning? That you go to the well on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and you drink at the well, you camp at Elim where the water is good?
But you have to make time for that. I read a story of a man visiting America many years ago from another country. And he saw a water fountain in a park for the very first time. And he was thirsty so he went up to it but he couldn’t see how to make it work. It had no tap; it had no buttons to press.
And he was about to turn away, when somebody seeing him looking around for something to poke and press and turn, and somebody pointed out to him a little notice on the side of the fountain. It said, “Stoop and drink.”
And when the man stooped down to where the water supply was, an electronic eye detected his presence and the water came flowing out.
I think that’s a beautiful picture. We stoop and drink. We bow the knee to Jesus Christ and find in Him we have all that we need that is fresh.
There is a song – I finish with this – that we sing. It’s a new song but it’s a wonderful song.
In Christ alone my hope is found
He is my light, my strength, my song.
This Cornerstone, this solid ground
Firm (listen) through the fiercest drought and storm.
(Firm in the desert)
What heights of love, what depths of peace
What fears are stilled, when strivings cease
My comforter, my all in all
Here in the love of Christ I stand.
Is that just a song or is that your experience of Jesus Christ? Firm through the fiercest drought or the wildest storm, He is my source and my strength.
Let’s pray together…