Water from a Stone

The bread from heaven came down six mornings a week, sweet as honey, but nothing ever fell from the sky to drink.

God's people folded their tents and walked on through the desert, stopping wherever the LORD told them, until they camped at a place called Rephidim. There was sand. There were rocks. There was not one drop of water.

Soon the babies were crying, the goats were bleating, and the grown-ups were the loudest of all. (Goats are not patient about water. It turned out people weren't either.)

A crowd pushed its way up to Moses. "Give us water to drink!"

"Why are you quarreling with me?" Moses asked. "Why are you testing the LORD?"

"Why did you bring us out of Egypt?" they shouted. "So that we and our children and our animals could die of thirst out here?"

Some of them were already looking at the rocks on the ground and picking out the sharp ones.

Moses hurried away and cried out to the LORD. "What am I going to do with these people? A little more, and they will stone me!"

The LORD answered him. "Walk on ahead of the people. Take some of the elders of Israel with you, and take the staff you used to strike the Nile. I will stand there in front of you, on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, and the people will drink."

(When Moses struck the Nile with that same staff, the river turned to blood. This time he would bring it down on a rock and get water.)

So Moses set off in front of everyone, past the tents, past the crying babies and the thirsty goats, with the elders puffing along behind him, all the way to a big gray rock at Horeb. God had said he would be standing right there, on the very rock Moses was about to hit. Nobody asked why. The answer would be a long time coming.

Moses lifted the staff high and brought it down.

CRACK!

Water burst out of the stone. It splashed over sandals and ran between the tents and filled the dry ditches. Children drank with both hands. Goats shoved their noses in. Mothers filled jar after jar, and fathers drank until their bellies sloshed.

Moses gave that place two names, Massah and Meribah, which mean "Testing" and "Quarreling." The people had quarreled with Moses, and they had tested the LORD by asking, "Is the LORD among us or not?" (They asked it with God's own cloud hanging over their tents.)

The water from that rock filled every cup, but cups get empty again, and the people's question kept coming back: Is the LORD among us or not?

More than a thousand years went by. God's people sang about the rock, and they waited.

Then God came and stood among them, as a man. Crowds argued with him, and more than once they picked up stones to throw at him. In Jerusalem he called out, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!" Soon soldiers struck him, and he died on a cross. When a soldier pushed a spear into his side, out came blood and water.

His name was Jesus. God had been among his people after all, standing right where the blow came down. Later Paul, who spent his life telling people about Jesus, looked back at that desert and wrote: "The Rock was Christ." He meant Jesus.