The Bitter Water and the Tree

Miriam's song was still going around the camp when Moses led everyone away from the Red Sea and out into the Desert of Shur. People hummed it as they walked. (A song that good stays in your head for days.)

They walked one day, and the water skins got lighter. They walked a second day, and the skins went flat. On the third day there was no water left at all, and the sand ran on to the edge of the sky.

"Mama, I'm thirsty," the children said, over and over. Their mothers had nothing to give them.

Then somebody at the front shouted, "Water! Over there!"

Down the slope they ran, thousands of them, water skins flapping and goats bleating, and flung themselves at the edge of a pool. They scooped up big handfuls and gulped.

PTOO! Everyone spat at once.

"It's bitter!"

"It tastes like medicine!"

It was too bitter to drink. That is why the place was called Marah, which means Bitter.

The people turned on Moses. "What are we supposed to drink?" they grumbled. Three days earlier they had watched God hold back a whole sea, and now one sour pond had them complaining as if he had never done a thing.

Moses did not grumble back. He cried out to the LORD.

And the LORD showed him a log, a piece of a tree.

Moses picked it up, swung it, and threw it into the pool. SPLASH.

A man knelt and took a careful sip. Then another. "It's sweet!" he shouted. "It's good!"

Soon everyone was drinking: children with water running down their chins, mothers filling the skins, goats crowding in with their noses. The same pool in the same desert had turned sweet.

There at Marah, God gave his people a rule to live by, and he tested them. "If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God," he said, "and do what is right in his eyes, and keep all his commands, I will not put on you any of the sicknesses I put on the Egyptians. For I am the LORD, your healer."

(Healer is a good word to learn. A healer makes sick things well again. God had just healed a whole pond.)

Then he led them on to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there beside the water. (Twelve springs for twelve tribes. Nobody had to wait in line.)

Marah's water stayed sweet. Soon, though, the people were grumbling again, this time about bread. A log could heal a pond, but it could not heal a grumbling heart.

Years went by, and God kept promising through his prophets, "I will heal you." One prophet promised that someone would be wounded for the people, and by his wounds they would be healed.

Then one day another tree was lifted up outside Jerusalem. The man nailed to it said, "I am thirsty," and the drink they lifted up to him on a sponge was sour wine. He took the bitterness of every grumble and every sin into himself, and he died.

On the third day he was alive again. The Bible says Jesus carried our sins in his body on that tree, so that by his wounds we are healed.