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The two weeks meant to end the crisis stretch into forty years, and the only question left is a weary “now what?” In Numbers 20 the whole congregation reaches that breaking point in the wilderness of Zin—no water, Miriam gone, and hearts already wishing they had simply perished sooner.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
Moses had witnessed God’s faithfulness firsthand—the glow on his face after being in God’s glory, the tablets of the Ten Commandments—yet he still struggled with discouragement and anger when facing the Israelites’ complaints. Why do you think experiencing God’s power doesn’t always protect us from falling into discouragement and sin in subsequent challenges?
The pastor describes righteous anger and unrighteous anger as “identical twins” that are difficult to distinguish in the moment. What practical steps can we take to pause and discern the difference before acting, especially during prolonged periods of waiting or uncertainty? Can you think of a time when you struggled to tell the difference, and how did you (or could you) handle it differently?
God instructed Moses to speak to the rock rather than strike it, which would have demonstrated God’s power in a new way. Instead, Moses struck the rock and missed an opportunity to display God’s grace. How can we apply this lesson when responding to others’ complaints or sins against us, and what opportunities have you missed to demonstrate God’s grace because you were too focused on your own frustration?
The pastor notes that the 40 years of wilderness wandering are largely skipped over in Scripture—treated as a footnote rather than a major part of the story of God’s salvation. How does this perspective change the way you think about difficult seasons in your own faith journey that feel unrecorded or unnoticed? How does the connection between the rock in Numbers 20 and Christ as the source of living water in 1 Corinthians 10 deepen your understanding of God’s provision even in those wilderness seasons?
Reflecting on the church’s experiences with COVID delays and the ceiling collapse, the pastor describes discouragement as causing us to “turn down the volume” on God’s voice. How can we practically stay connected to God’s voice and vision during extended periods of waiting, uncertainty, or unmet expectations, and what encouragement does the sermon offer for staying faithful when plans repeatedly change?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Amen.
Well, with that, let’s go ahead and prepare to dig into God’s Word.
I want to play a little game as we start here. I’m going to ask you what you notice if I show you a screenshot, okay? Sound good? Okay. Here it is. Bridge. Oh, bridge. Okay, good, good. What else do we have here? A tab with a server error. Is there one up there? Oh boy, not a server error. Yeah, there is. Huh. Well, that’s bad. Bad server errors. Yeah. What else do we have up there? Well, sort of something like that, something we were offering at the beginning of the… awfully excited about when that was taken. The very first one, yes.
So, oops, I shouldn’t have done that. That was that server creeping over here. No, so that screenshot looks like our website, right? But that screenshot was taken exactly five years ago today. And I wanted to share that because I took that screenshot really wondering what it was going to mean. Because, yes, there was a bridge. Yes, there was a countdown. But that countdown wasn’t going to happen the way that I thought it was going to.
Because do you remember what was happening five years ago? COVID. Yeah. Anyone remember how it felt at this point in March 2020? You know, what could we do? What couldn’t we do? Was the whole world going to collapse? And we’d soon be like in one of those apocalyptic movies, you know, hiding under some concrete, tossing rocks at people, and so on. You know, like, what was going to happen?
And so this countdown, which I put up about a month before, and when we had, we picked out a date that was going to be the first worship service. We were going to launch. We were going to have the service. It was so happy and exciting that we were going to do this. I remember looking at that page that day, and I did not feel happy about it because I thought, what in the world does this mean?
Well, that day, what it meant, in part, was this. If you look there, you see the very first Little Hills live stream. And so it was Monday, March 16th, 2020, the very first Steadfast. And there it was. I hadn’t quite figured out how to do lighting properly yet, so it was a little dark. But our very first Steadfast. Tomorrow, we’re going to have the 261st Steadfast. I’m pretty excited about that. But there it was.
And I remember, it wasn’t the way we were supposed to start. I remember even saying that this was how we thought the very first thing we’d do at Little Hills would be, but it just felt like we need to actually just study God’s Word together. We need a little bit of God’s Word. Let’s go ahead and look at Psalm 57. And so we did. And I announced a three-week series. We’re going to do it for three weeks until that countdown finished. Because then we were going to be back, right? Because it was, what, two weeks to stop the spread, and then it’d be over, and everything would be good.
Next night, we had our very first online Bible study. We’d been meeting in person for years, but there is our very first online Bible study. And that Bible study is still going. Looks a little different now. If you’ve been there recently, it can’t, on smaller devices, it can’t even show everybody on the screen at one time, which is pretty exciting. But we thought, okay, we’ll do that for a few weeks, too. And so those are the things that happened. It wasn’t what I was expecting when that countdown was happening.
And I’ll say, it was this weird mixture. Sometimes I felt really encouraged when that live stream happened, and then I got some feedback afterward from people that were excited about it. A few of you were already watching that night, and it was sort of like, oh, okay, this is good. At least we kind of got together, and we’ll keep encouraging each other until that countdown finishes. It’s pretty exciting.
Next night when we said, okay, yes, we can still get together and have a Bible study even though we can’t be together, it was pretty exciting. And then it kept going, right? And notably, this was not the first, if you’ve ever, some of you have been through church plants multiple times, so you know this. You don’t announce that you’re launching two days before you’re launching or a month before you’re launching. This is a years-long process, and it had been in discussion for quite a while before this, and so there’s just a lot that goes into it.
And then you get to this point, and you think, now what? And I think tonight, we’re going to turn to Numbers chapter 20. I think Moses is sort of at this point. Now what? And the challenge when we get to those now what points, and there’s a lot of exhilaration and excitement, but then there’s a lot of times where it just feels like it keeps going on, and the two weeks to get across the wilderness turns into 40 years. It suddenly doesn’t feel so exciting and encouraging. It feels very discouraging. That’s where we find Moses tonight. We’re all going to find those places, and so let’s pray tonight as we look at God’s Word that we’d understand how God is with us in those times. Would you pray with me?
Father, we do thank you for your faithfulness, even as we wait, even as we feel uncertain, even as we don’t know where you’re leading us, even as two weeks turns into two years or 40 years. Lord, would you help us to see how you’re working, to hold on faithfully to your promises, and to do what you’ve called us to do. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Let’s go ahead and look at the first few verses of Numbers chapter 20. Here’s what we read:
“And the people of Israel, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kadesh. And Miriam died there and was buried there. Now there was no water for the congregation, and they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron. And the people quarreled with Moses and said, ‘Would that we had perished when our brothers perished before the Lord. Why have you brought the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness that we should die here, both we and our cattle? And why have you made us come up out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place? It is no place for grain or figs or vines or pomegranates. There is no water to drink.’”
I think they’re a little discouraged, wouldn’t you say? They’re saying, well, here’s the clue that they’re discouraged. They’re saying, “We wish we would have just died.” That would have been better. And we say, boy, they have sour attitudes. But imagine for a moment here, you are part of the Israelites, and you’ve seen God do mighty things in the two weeks to stop the spread. And then you’re in year one and two, and it keeps rolling for 40 years. And you’re in the desert. And at this point, you’re in a place that doesn’t even have water to drink. And you think, you know, we’ve suffered an awful lot. And if we’re just going to die here, why didn’t we just die before? Because to suffer all this and get our hopes up so that we’re just left out here to die, it would have been so much easier just to die sooner.
They’ve hit rock bottom. They are discouraged. And we rightly criticize them, right? They should recognize God’s faithfulness. But I’m hesitant to criticize them because I’ve witnessed God’s faithfulness too. And I can tell you an awful lot of times, and I’d imagine you can do the same, where after experiencing God’s faithfulness, then you turn and you face the next situation. And it goes on and on and on. And the thing you feel is not encouragement. “God, why did you keep me alive just so I can die here?”
And here’s an interesting thing that a commentator pointed out in this passage that I hadn’t really thought about. Have you ever thought about how you get a lot of detail at the beginning of the exodus, and then they’re condemned to be out there for 40 years? And for the most part, you get a few stories, but you jump pretty quickly to the end of that time. Why do we have so much detail at the beginning and the end? Well, because of their sin. And indeed, their discouragement is a consequence of their own sin, but so too often is ours. Because of their sin, they’ve had this time that basically doesn’t count. It’s not even worth recording.
In this grand story of God’s rescue of his people, it’s a footnote. The time span’s important. They waited 40 years. But what happened during those 40 years is not a consequence for the story of salvation. And I think it’s really striking when you think about it that way. Yes, this is not the sort of story where—there are parts of the Bible where big swaths of time just skip over really quickly, and it’s just part of the story. But here, as it’s talking about the formation of God’s people, we’re getting all these details about what they do over and over and over again, and at this point, they’re just on pause. And yes, they brought it on themselves, but still you can’t help but think, “But now what? Was there any purpose to my life? Was there any reason for anything that we were doing?” And even as they’re about to see God work again, and as they see other things, as Moses sums up the law before they go into the promised land, as all these things happen, there’s so many challenges.
And some of them are brought on themselves, and some of them are God saying, “You need to learn to trust and go through this patiently.” But boy, in the moment, it’s so easy to look at it from the outside, so easy to look at it when you know how it’s going to go at the end, and say, “Well, just wake up, folks. God’s working here.” But in the moment, it’s so hard. Sometimes we hit that high point, that point that feels again like God is moving, and it almost gets harder after that, because we start to let our hopes up, and then it still isn’t quite there, and we just lose sight of where he’s sending us.
Another picture. This is actually from three years ago, earlier this week. March 13, 2022. And for those of you that were in this or that were online in this, you may remember what we did is we were getting ready to launch in person. We got together out in the parking lot. It was still like, well, is it safe to be inside together? And I’ll get more in a second.
There was another reason we weren’t going to be inside, a little bit more pressing reason. So we stood outside in the parking lot. We prayed. We prayed for the ministry, and then we split up and went out into the community. We divided up over the city of St. Charles, and we prayed for different neighborhoods, praying that God would allow us to minister here. And then our online family, what did they do? They went to their own neighborhoods around the world, and they prayed as well. That night felt so good.
But there was a reason why we weren’t in the building then, if you recall. Many of you have heard this story, but there was a reason we weren’t in the building, and that’s because part of the ceiling had fallen in. And if you remember, we had a really good snow that February, so just a few weeks before. There was a small leak that turned into a large leak and dropped part of the ceiling. And not only dropped the ceiling, but the water had stayed in there.
And so the reason we couldn’t even be in the building, even though it had fallen in the back, was it was this horrible moldy scent when you walked in. You knew it was not good for you. If we came inside, we put on respirators because it had to be dealt with. They sprayed with kills and things like that before they put up new drywall because it was noxious in here. It was terrible.
And when we met that night to pray, we prayed about the launch that we were going to do on Palm Sunday. Because we were going to go into Easter. There’s that Easter countdown. We were going to go into Easter, and we were going to have our first service on Palm Sunday, celebrate Holy Week together, and then our second service was going to be Easter Sunday. And I was so excited again, and I know many of you were. I remember just a couple weeks after this picture was taken, sitting in here, a few of us were in here. Melanie was in here. Jim, who helped get us started, he was in here. We were sitting here, looking at the space.
We’d gone back to the back, and Jim, who’s an electrician, he’s inspecting the work being done, and we look at it, and we realize there’s just no way this is going to be done in time. And this was, I think, the fifth time we’d delayed launching in person, and I remember just thinking, it felt so good a couple weeks ago when we had this in-person prayer service, and we were so excited about being ready for Easter, and now where are we?
I think that’s, as I thought about it more and more, and I thought about my own attitude in those moments, it really helped me, I think, to understand a little bit more about where the Israelites were in this, and where Moses is at in the next part that we’re going to look at.
Because Moses, I mean, the Israelites had seen amazing things. Moses had seen amazing things, right? He had actually gone up the mountain, and God had presented him with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. He was so much in the glory of God’s presence, he came down, people saw the glow of his face, he’d go into the tabernacle, again, he had to put the veil over his face. Why? Because he was so much in the glory of God. And yet, then he’d go back out, and they were still wandering in the wilderness, and the people were still being stubborn, and the people were still doubting and complaining.
And Moses probably thought, how many more delays are there going to be? And I kind of wonder, as Moses is presented with this next complaint, if part of the problem for Moses is that he’s looking at this and thinking, you guys are complaining, we’ve just gone through 40 years because of your stubbornness and your unfaithfulness, and now God’s going to give us 40 more years or something. How much more am I supposed to take?
Verse 9: “And Moses took the staff from before the Lord as he commanded him. And then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, ‘Hear now, you rebels! Shall we bring water for you out of this rock?’”
Moses has had enough.
Here’s the challenge when we face discouragement. Here’s the challenge I know what happens when I face discouragement. What do I do? I turn inward. I look at myself, right? Did anyone else ever do that? You just start thinking about, oh, this is so discouraging to me. I’m so dejected over this. I’m so discouraged. Well, what’s God doing here? And I think that’s really where Moses is. He’s gone, and he’s pleaded the case for the Israelites, as he’s done before, but he’s weary.
And God’s told him, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go. I’m going to provide you with water. God doesn’t even seem to be overly angry if we look at those intervening verses. God understands that these people have waited 40 years. They aren’t perfect by any means, but they’re thirsty, and God’s going to provide it. And God gives Moses a different commandment than he’s done before. He says, Moses, here’s what I want you to do. You’re going to go out to the people. You’re going to announce that the Lord is going to provide water, and you’re going to speak to the rock. You’re not going to hit it. You’re just going to speak to the rock. You’re not going to hit it. You’re just going to speak to that rock, and water is going to come forth.
God wants to present to them that it doesn’t even take—somehow Moses doesn’t have a special powerful staff that can break rocks into water. He’s not sort of an early well-drilling servant. Moses doesn’t have to do anything. The Lord, by the power of the word, can provide them with water.
So Moses hears that, but he’s so turned inward, he’s so focused on himself at this point, that he misses it. What we see is there’s the sin of the Israelites, and he’s worn down by it. And it doesn’t lead him to holiness. It leads him to sin himself.
Psalm 106 digs into this: “They angered him at the waters of Meribah, and it went ill with Moses on their account, for they made his spirit bitter, and he spoke rashly with his lips.”
Spoke rashly.
Moses is like us. He’s a sinful human being. And for all his faithfulness, Moses here at this moment, where, as the Israelites are about to be prepared to go into the Promised Land, and he needs to turn their eyes towards their Savior, Moses instead does what? He says, do we have to provide water for you? He’s focusing on himself. “I am so sick of you ingrates. Don’t you realize? I mean, think about it for a moment, you Israelites. I’ve had to put up with you for 40 years.” Yeah, you’ve been out here for 40 years. “I’ve had to put up with you for 40 years, and now you want me to give you water too? Do you know how hard it is every time I have to go into the boss’s room and ask him for water and stuff? I am sick and tired of your complaints.”
Here’s what’s tragic about that. Many of those that are hearing this at that time, not all of them, but many of them, they were past the cutoff. They had been told they were never going to enter the Promised Land. The Lord wasn’t going to allow them to. But Moses was going to be allowed to. Moses had a ticket to the Promised Land, and Moses is holding onto that ticket, and all he can think about in that moment is not what God’s been doing or what he is doing or what his call is in that moment. All Moses can think about is, “I am so discouraged, I’m so tired, and you’re a bunch of ingrates.”
And it’s funny. We might read it in one way and say, “Oh, look at Moses standing up for God’s holiness. How dare they question the Lord?” But when he says, “Is it that we need to bring out water for you?” I think what Moses is really saying is he’s now thinking about how he has to do it. Yes, the miracle comes from God, and I don’t think Moses intellectually doubts that, but he’s really focused on what he’s going to have to do.
He’s been doing this for so long, and he’s so tired about him.
Reminds me of Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger.”
And I think here we see the demonstration. We’ve had this discussion in Bible study at times. What’s the difference between anger and sinful anger? Moses crosses the line somewhere in this conversation because should he be angry for the Lord and that the people aren’t believing in the Lord? Yeah. Should he make it about himself? No. Should he be more angry than the Lord himself is? No.
But when we’re in those moments of discouragement, it becomes really hard to tell the difference between righteous anger, righteous responses in general, and the unrighteous response. And if we don’t really want to know the distinction because at the moment we just want to feed what we’re feeling, that snake of anger just wants to lash out and the last thing we want to do is anything about it.
Because we can’t even tell the difference. I don’t think Moses went up there and thought, “I’m going to do something that isn’t what God said and I’m going to make a complete fool of myself so that God is mad at me now.” That wasn’t what he was thinking. He was just so focused on the fact that things were not going how he hoped. And he was tired. And he’d had enough with this. He just does what he feels like. And he can’t see the difference.
I think he actually thinks he’s defending God’s honor, but by his very words he’s showing that there’s something else happening in his heart.
Reading the story about Orlando and Brandon Nembard. Orlando and Brandon are twins. But not just any twins. One of them is a murderer.
See, a few years back they were both at a nightclub and got into a fight and one of them pulled out a gun and shot and killed somebody. Well, witnesses saw Orlando, they thought, do this, and he was reported. Police arrested him, put him in jail and put a giant bond on him. It was, I think, $500,000 because they thought they had a lock-tight case. The witnesses said, he looks just like this. He was there that night. And then it came out, wait, but he has an identical twin and he was there that night too.
One of them actually did kill. But unless you pulled his wallet out and looked at his ID, the average observer couldn’t tell the difference. They had this information, but they weren’t paying close enough attention. Wouldn’t in that moment. They couldn’t tell the difference.
And I think a lot of times righteous anger and unrighteous anger, to our eyes, are identical twins. I think Moses here, he has these twins up there in front of him or sitting on his shoulder like we sometimes like to imagine, right? And he says, okay, how am I going to come out here? I’m so frustrated and God’s showing the mercy again but I’m just so frustrated at this. And he comes out and he says, “Hmm, which one should I listen to here? They look the same. This one sounds more satisfying.” And he goes out and he lets them have it. And he takes that staff and he strikes that rock and says, “Are you going to insist that we give you water?” And he’s fired that gun. And only because he’s the one holding the gun can he tell who did it. Only at that point. Up to that point he couldn’t tell.
That’s the danger when we get discouraged. It’s really, really, really hard to tell the difference. And that’s where we need to pause. What Moses needed to do in that moment was pause and say, “God, I am not feeling like your messenger at the moment. I am not in the place I know I should be. I need your help.”
But I can’t beat up Moses on that anymore than I can beat up the Israelites because how many times do I find myself in that place where I’m not thinking what God wants me to think. I’m not doing what God wants me to do and I don’t want to pause and ask him to correct it because I don’t want to really correct it. I don’t think Moses wanted it corrected at this moment. I think he wanted it corrected about 10 minutes, 20 minutes later. By then the gun had been fired.
He had this opportunity to demonstrate the majesty of God in a brand new way. “I can speak to a rock that the Lord picks out and water will come out of it because God is that powerful” and he’d set aside the opportunity. He set aside an opportunity for God’s glory to be seen fully because in that moment he’s focused, he’s discouraged, he’s focused on himself.
And the funny thing is, especially when it has to do with other people’s sin, the opportunities we have to really speak to God’s grace is when people around us are sinning and especially if they’re sinning against us. Beautiful opportunity to show God’s grace. And a really, really dangerous opportunity to show the exact opposite. That’s what Moses does here. He’s just so discouraged. He misses the vision that God has here, a chance for God’s graciousness to be shown and instead tries to turn it into a judgment really because he wants vengeance.
So the irony of this is while he’s angry at all these Israelites rebelling against the Lord and complaining, Moses is rebelling right with them. And isn’t it funny? So often when I get worked up and “How can these other Christians be so foolish and so stupid?” And God’s saying, “Why don’t you see if you can show them love?” “I don’t want to do that, Lord. Why don’t I tell them how stupid they are?”
It’s funny that just as we become so focused on ourselves when we’re discouraged, we also sort of turn down the volume knob on God. Take a look at what happened. Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice and water came out abundantly and the congregation drank into their livestock.
And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not believe in me to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”
Can you imagine being Moses in that moment? I read that, I think it’s one of the saddest moments in scripture. Moses has followed the Lord, he’s done the Lord’s work, but he hasn’t finished well.
What happened? As he turned down that volume knob, he turned down the volume knob of trust, trust that God would bring justice. What did God say to Moses? “For the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants when he sees that their power is gone and there’s none remaining, bond, or free.”
The Lord’s the one that’s going to do it. Moses thinks he needs to somehow be vindicated and I’m sure he justified it in his head, “I’m vindicating the Lord,” but he missed the fact that it’s the Lord’s job. Yeah, God’s being kind of gracious and merciful here. He needs a little help. Those people, he doesn’t know what it’s like to be with them every day.
I’ll just add a little, right? Just add a little on, make it work a little better. I’ll tell them how it really is. Now, is there a time that we should correct people? Is there a time to sometimes say, yep, Moses did that. But here was clearly an opportunity to show God’s grace and Moses chooses instead to try to show God’s wrath. But really, if he could be honest with himself in this moment, he can’t be. He’s too focused.
He wants to show his own wrath. It goes back to that commandment to be angry but do not sin. Something we need to check. When our discouragement leads to anger, the temptation, that snake comes up to us and says, “Here, here’s some words to say. They work really well, they’ll get the point across.”
And we need to be very prayerful in that moment. Are we actually showing what God wants us to show? And yes, there will be times that the answer is yes, that it really is from the Lord, but let’s make sure of that. And there should be a lot more times that we’re showing God’s grace. Our default, our normal should not be to show God’s wrath.
You see, Moses was missing here in this moment why God wants us to focus on the fact that the Lord is the one who’s gonna bring vengeance because God’s withheld that vengeance. He’s given a time for people to turn and believe in him and to repent. And what does he want us to do in that time? It’s not to just condemn people and make them feel hopeless.
He wants us to talk about what God wants us to do. He doesn’t want us to feel hopeless. He wants us to talk about the grace and the love of God so that people know that they can turn and follow him.
When Paul references that vengeance is the Lord’s in Romans 12, what does he do? He talks then about going and loving our neighbors. Isn’t it interesting? When he’s talking about, we want vengeance, he says, go and love. And that’s not our natural bent when we’re feeling angry. It’s not my natural bent. But how powerful is that?
How powerful would it have been if Moses, he’s grumbling as he goes into the Lord’s presence, everyone says, oh yeah, Moses is in a bad mood today after we were grumbling about this. And he comes out and says, you know what? God loves you and he’s gonna provide you with water. And here it is. I don’t even have to strike the rock. He’s just gonna bring it. I can’t even get out my aggression by pounding on that rock. I don’t need to. There’s nothing about anger here. It’s about God’s love. They’ve lost the vision.
Moses didn’t even know fully what that rock represented. 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 2: “Speaking of the Israelites, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them. And the rock was Christ.”
As God provided that rock that was going to pour out water, he didn’t just provide a rock. He provided a rock that was gonna be a symbol of the living water that was to come. Not a symbol of something we have to force out in anger. Not something that we somehow will out. We don’t do it.
No. A rock that comes on his own accord for us. Moses couldn’t see that in the moment. An awful lot of times I can’t see it in the moment either. I still don’t necessarily know at times where, I wish I could say I figured it all out now. I still don’t know necessarily where God’s bringing us as a church at times. But looking back after five years, as I’m reminiscing, as I was preparing for tonight, I can see things that God’s done that I couldn’t figure out why in the world that he was leaving us in this conundrum. That he’s done that would not have happened.
When every week we pray before the service in our prayer circle here, we pray for our online church family and the technology that connects us. And I think, you know, if not for the way we started, we wouldn’t have an online church family. That wouldn’t have happened.
As I think about the different faces that come through these doors and how we’ve been brought together as a church family, would it have happened had the timing been different? I don’t know what the ideal timing is, but God does.
And yet there were times I was angry. I was angry at the landlord. Why isn’t this building getting fixed faster? I’m angry at the virus. Why is it, we’ve been working so hard, praying so hard for this church plant, and now we have to decide, can we afford the rent while we can’t even open the doors? Why can’t I just work? I feel so uncertain.
And you think you’re hearing God, and all of a sudden you realize you’re just hearing yourself, or at least I realize I’m just hearing myself. It reminds me sometimes, I’ve had this happen actually when I’ve talked to several of you on the phone. I usually geek out a little as an Apple user here. Everyone knows I love my Apple products.
So I have my phone, but usually if you talk to me, you’re probably not talking to me on my phone. I’m usually talking to you on my computer because I can transfer the calls. Anyway, and of course, I’d rather talk with a Bluetooth headset. I have my AirPods, I put them in, and I can answer the call.
But sometimes, because those Bluetooth headphones can switch between my phone and my computer, I’ll sit down at my computer, my phone’s nearby, and all of a sudden I’m talking to someone, and they go silent. And I think, well, did they hang up, or were they stepping away for a moment? And all of a sudden, I barely hear this voice in the distance. And I look over and I realize, wait, the headphone’s transferred away from the call. And there’s this itty-bitty voice coming out of the phone because it’s thinking it’s up to my ear.
The voice is still there, but I can’t hear it. And I’m just blissfully unaware. My circumstance, my own choices, they’ve taken it away. And the question is, am I going to hear it and respond before I lose that phone call? The choice for Moses here, the choice for us every single day as we seek to follow the Lord in faithfulness, is do we realize when our anger, when our discouragement, when the circumstance of life, when other people’s sins have caused the headset that we’re listening to God’s word with to transfer to somewhere else? And God’s voice is still coming out, but it feels very distant in that moment.
And do we, in that moment, get angry? Do we give up? Do we pick up the phone and say, “God, I still need to hear you?” And do we adjust because we realize that He’s calling us to trust and He’s calling us to follow His vision, that He is working even when things aren’t working how we want them to?
You know, it’s sad when you look at this chapter because it starts with a really ominous tone when you think about it. Miriam, Moses’ sister, dies at the beginning of it. And then if we go on just a little further in the story, what do we see? Aaron dies. And then we know that Moses, he dies.
Of those three siblings, none of them actually go into the promised land. Miriam in her rebellion and jealousy, Aaron in his rebellion and jealousy against Moses, they get discouraged, things aren’t going so well. Why is it our wise guy brother gets to be the one who’s all in charge and important and stuff? Why not us? And they fade off and they die. They don’t get to continue to do the work of the Lord in the way they could have. And Moses then does the same.
And you think about that, and thankfully, just as God is merciful to them there, a lot of times we go on, but do we realize the place where we’re kneecapping ourselves, where we’re taking out the ability to be the effective messengers for the gospel, to be fully experiencing what God’s called us to do because we’re too busy being discouraged, being angry, being focused on what other people are doing, and we’re not focused on what God wants us to do?
And so it is in the midst of Israelite sin, there was an opportunity for the siblings who had testified powerfully to faithfulness, who had followed the Lord so many times, there was an opportunity and they missed it. Miriam dies here and you think about it, Miriam in some sense is the first of the siblings that we get to see any faithfulness out of. She believed that something could happen when her brother was going to be executed as a baby. What does she do? She uses her wits to save him and to set up everything that comes after that. And then she just dies here.
Moses dies before the promised land. Aaron dies before the promised land. That’s encouraging, isn’t it? Are we going to die before the promised land? I don’t think that’s what this is about. Because what we typically mean by that is God is going to reject us. God is going to no longer favor us.
And when I said that this was one of the saddest parts in scripture, I think sometimes when I read it, it felt like God is just rejecting Moses. You know, he failed, he’s done. Until one day it all came together. I was preparing a sermon on the transfiguration, the place where Jesus meets several folks with a few of the disciples. They go into the, they get to see Jesus being glorified.
I’m being a little obtuse here because do you know who one of the people there is standing there with Jesus? Moses. Do you know where he is? In the promised land. Do you know whom he’s with? The eternal king who brings true salvation.
What’s the story about? I don’t think it’s about, Moses isn’t spiritually rejected. Moses isn’t cast off by God because he didn’t get every single thing right. Moses simply loses the ability to be as effective in that moment as possible. But God doesn’t reject him fully. God doesn’t turn his back on Moses. Moses gets to be there for one of the most amazing moments in all of history. Moses does enter the promised land. And he sees the full salvation of God.
And that’s where I think the heart of this comes down to for us. If you trust in Jesus, you can rest in the confidence of that. You don’t have to live in fear every single day you’re going to strike a rock and God’s going to reject you. Because he didn’t do that for Moses.
What this is a message about is how are we going to be effective in the time that God gives us on this earth? Are we going to stay focused? Are we going to stay with God’s vision even when it doesn’t make full sense? When we’re not sure why we’re having a global pandemic in the midst of our better plans? Or are we going to choose to look inside at the things that turn down that volume on God?
Because discouragement is strong, it’s loud. But God’s grace is louder. Discouragement is blinding but God’s restoration of our sight is stronger. And here we see the opportunity. The God who could plan centuries before Jesus would come to have a rock, a rock of all things, represent his salvation. That’s the same God. He’s the same one who’s planning exactly what he’s doing with you.
And so the call for us to trust in him, knowing that he is faithful. And because we know that he is faithful, then to not let that discouragement turn us away from his vision and his calling but to enable us to stay focused on him. Would you pray with me please?
Lord, would you help us to be those who are faithful? Who turn our eyes away from the world but to be those who are faithful? Who turn towards you and hold on to you? Lord, we don’t want to let the Bluetooth disconnect. We don’t want to pick the things that are displeasing to you because they just look like the things that are to our eyes.
We want your wisdom that we pick rightly, that we do rightly, that we act and speak rightly. Lord, would you start us with a foundation? Would you give us the strength from your Holy Spirit to know and to believe that you are faithful and that you do not abandon those whom you call? And then would you give us the strength to hold on to that conviction that even when the volume seems to go down we would go seeking after your voice with the help, the strength that comes only from your Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Thank you, Chris.
As Chris passes out communion, the gluten-free is in the middle and the non-gluten-free is on the outer rings.
Maybe tonight you’ve been wondering if it’s even worth trying to follow the Lord because you say, you know, there have been a lot of times that I’ve struck the rock in my life. I never really bothered to follow God, but there have been times I’ve been playing mad at him. I’ve been angry. Maybe it doesn’t do any good.
But don’t miss the end of that story. Don’t miss the end of Moses’ story. Yes, the sneaky snake snuck up on him. Yes, he got wrapped up in his own sin. And yes, it has consequences. We all know that, right? We’ve experienced the consequences of our sins. But know that God’s grace in his redemption is stronger.
And tonight, we always ask, if you haven’t trusted in Jesus yet, please let these elements pass you by. But as you see these elements, know they’re elements testifying to God’s grace. And so if you haven’t yet trusted in him, make tonight the last night you can say that you haven’t trusted in him.
Make tonight the night that you do trust in him. If you’re online, our online church family would love to pray with you. If you’re here, I or anyone else here, we’d love to pray together with you and celebrate because the good news is we have a God who overcomes everything, even our own foolishness, even our own anger and frustration.
And he knows that we have all those things, all those failures, and yet what did Jesus do on the night, the very night he was betrayed, he’s ministering to his people, to his disciples. And he took the bread and he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In like manner, after supper he took the cup and he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood poured out for you under the remission of sins. Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance of me.”
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