Water from a Stone

You know what it feels like to be thirsty. The kind where your mouth turns to dust, and all you can think is water, water, please, just a little water.

Now imagine being thirsty like that for days. In a desert. With no river anywhere. With your children crying for a drink, and nothing in your cup but air.

That was God's people.

He had carried them out of Egypt. He had split the sea so they could walk through it on dry ground. Every single morning he sent bread down from the sky, just because he loved to feed them.

But now they were thirsty, and thirst makes you forget.

They forgot the sea. They forgot the bread. They looked at the dry, cracked ground, and they grumbled, "Did God bring us out here just to die? Is he even with us, or not?"

That last question is the saddest one. Is he even here? Maybe you have wondered it too, when something hurts and hurts and will not stop, and you start to think God has forgotten you.

God had not forgotten them for one single second.

Moses was frightened. The people were so angry they were ready to throw stones at him. So he cried out, "What do I do?"

God did not say, "Tell them to stop complaining." He did not say, "They do not deserve a drink."

He said, "Go, Moses. Walk out in front of them. Take your staff, the same staff you stretched out over the sea. And there, on the rock at Horeb, I will be standing. Strike the rock."

I will be standing there.

God put himself right by the rock. And Moses lifted his staff and struck it hard.

The stone broke open.

Water came pouring out. Cold and clear and rushing, more than they could drink, splashing over the dry ground, filling every cup, running down the chins of laughing children.

Out of the hardest, driest thing in the desert, God poured a river. For grumbling people, for doubting people, for people who had just asked if he was even there.

Long, long after, when God's own Son had come, one of God's writers looked back at that rock in the desert, and he wrote something that might make you catch your breath.

That rock was Jesus.

The rock that was struck so the thirsty could drink was pointing ahead all along. Pointing to Jesus, who would one day be struck for us. Broken open on a cross, so that something better than water could come pouring out.

He called it living water. A drink that goes all the way down into your tired, thirsty heart, and never runs dry.

So the next time you wonder, Is he even here? remember the rock. He was standing right there in the desert, beside his grumbling, doubting, dearly loved people, turning the hardest thing in the wilderness into a river.

And Moses picked up his staff and kept it close. He was going to need it again very soon.