Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 305 · November 1
Smote the Rock Twice
“And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.”
Most of us know what it is to do something in a temper and have it work. Perhaps it was one sharp sentence at the table that ended the argument and spoiled the evening. The argument stopped, so nobody asked how we had stopped it.
The place is Kadesh, in the desert of Zin. Miriam has just died and been buried there, and there is no water. The people gather against Moses and Aaron, and the two of them fall on their faces at the door of the tabernacle. The instruction God gives has a rod in it, but no blow: "Take the rod," and "speak ye unto the rock before their eyes." What Moses does instead takes only two verses: "Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock? And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice."
Four passages explain what went wrong, and they do not all point at the same thing. God says straight away, "Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel." Later He says, "ye rebelled against my commandment in the desert of Zin." A psalm looks only at Moses' mouth: "they provoked his spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips." And when Moses tells the story again years later, he puts the weight somewhere else: "the LORD was wroth with me for your sakes." Almost forty years earlier, at a different rock, God had told him, "thou shalt smite the rock." So Moses did the thing that had worked before.
Then comes the part that unsettles anyone who reads slowly: "the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also." It worked. Straight after it, God told Moses and Aaron that they would not bring the people into the land. Nobody in that crowd, drinking, could have guessed that anything was wrong. Good results tell you very little about the heart of the person who produced them.
God, the water came, and we hold on to that, because You were kind to thirsty people even when Your servant got it wrong. Some of us have carried complaining people for years, and we have said things we would not want quoted back to us. Reach us before our tempers do. And when our tempers get there first, do not let a good result talk us out of what really happened. You said to speak, and Moses struck, and still the water ran. Speak to us again, and give us the patience to answer You by speaking too. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 305 is Good to All (Psalm 145:9).