Numbers 20:1-13 May 16, 1999

Angry at God’s Grace

On June 18, 1972, an airliner crashed at Heathrow Airport in London. 118 people died in the wreckage. The intensive investigation that followed revealed that the pilot had been unhappy because of the way an airline strike had been settled. As he took the plane off the ground, he noticed that it pulled badly to one side. The men who loaded the cargo had failed to keep the weight in balance. That was the last straw! The pilot, already angry, exploded in rage and overcorrected, jamming the controls. The plane dived into the runway and all on board were killed.

"Anger," Benjamin Franklin once said, "is never without a reason but seldom with a good one." An old Arab proverb says, "Anger is the wind that blows out the lamp of the mind."

We never think rationally when angry. We can’t be clear-minded when we’re hot headed.

We know today that there are measurable physical reasons why heightened anger affects our ability to be rational. When we are angry our adrenaline flows faster and our strength increases by about 20 percent. The liver, pumping sugar into the bloodstream, demands more oxygen from the heart and lungs. The veins become enlarged and the blood supply to the problem-solving part of the brain is severely decreased because, under stress, a greater portion of blood is diverted to the body's extremities. This is an emotional condition that the person is in, and it means that, while he's beautifully equipped for a brawl, he's very poorly equipped to contemplate.

There is in Scripture the story of a man who worked forty long, hard years toward accomplishing his goal of delivering God's people to the Promised Land, only to be turned away himself because he didn't control his anger. I refer, of course, to Moses. Most people probably don't think of Moses, the man whom God used to deliver the Ten Commandments, as a hothead, but the record in Scripture is clear and God has preserved Moses's story so that we might learn a good lesson.

1. In the first month the whole Israelite community arrived at the Desert of Zin, and they stayed at Kadesh. There Miriam died and was buried.

2. Now there was no water for the community, and the people gathered in opposition to Moses and Aaron.

3. They quarreled with Moses and said, "If only we had died when our brothers fell dead before the LORD!

4. Why did you bring the LORD's community into this desert, that we and our livestock should die here?

5. Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place? It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates. And there is no water to drink!"

6. Moses and Aaron went from the assembly to the entrance to the Tent of Meeting and fell facedown, and the glory of the LORD appeared to them.

7. The LORD said to Moses,

8. "Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink."

9. So Moses took the staff from the LORD's presence, just as he commanded him.

10. He and Aaron gathered the assembly together in front of the rock and Moses said to them, "Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?"

11. Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.

12. But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, "Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them."

13. These were the waters of Meribah, where the Israelites quarreled with the LORD and where he showed himself holy among them.

Numbers 20:1-13

People quarreled with Moses, but were angry at God.

The angry mob is ready to attack Moses yet another time. Once again they look around and see things were not going well, so they complained to Moses. But notice the content of their complaint. This is at the end of the forty years in the desert. Those complaining were the new generation, those that did not die when they refused to enter the promised land back in Kadesh-Barnea. But they wished they had died; they wish they were not left to rot in the desert. While they list the absence of many important foods, their chief reason is thirst. It’s not that they lacked luxuries, but essentials for life.

Verse 3 tells us they quarreled with Moses. "Quarrel" in Hebrew is "rib", a legal term for a lawsuit. They were taking Moses up on charges of not taking good care of them. But while they thought their complaint, their lawsuit, was against Moses, God viewed it differently. Look in verse 13. This place was called Meribah. Notice the three letters in the middle - rib. This spot is called "The Place of Complaining," but notice against whom the complaint is lodged: God!

Instead of giving God thanks for sparing them, they not only despise the mercy of their reprieve, but quarrel with it, as if God wronged them in giving them their lives. They prefer slavery to liberty, the house of bondage to the land of promise. At the center of all this is their refusal to believe that God is good, despite the lack of water. They could not, would not believe that God is faithful to His promise. That is the essence of faith. Their anger blinded them to the fact that for 40 years God provided them with everything they needed. Now this immediate and important need cast a long shadow over God's faithfulness for so long.

When we dump on others, often the root problem is that we are angry at God for the way things are going; but we act as though we don’t have a complaint with Him. We know how foolish it may be to shake our fist at God, so we subtly do so by shaking our fist at whoever is in our way. We become angry with our spouses, kids, friends or co-workers because they’ve let us down. But our anger is rarely directly caused by their failures, but by the inconvenience those shortcomings have caused. Our anger at others is really just unspoken frustration with God’s providence. If God is in control, why is everyone around me so incompetent?

Our anger is often an immediate response to the situation which displeases us. It is hard to always be looking at the big picture, to remind ourselves that God is still at work when everything seems to becoming unglued. But we must constantly return to the foundational twin truths to our lives: God is sovereign and God is merciful. To put it in the simple terms of a child’s prayer at the dinner table: "God is great, God is good." You’ll find the Christian life is a lot easier when you remember that. Otherwise, we became angry whenever we forget one or both of these truths.

God responds with grace.

As we follow the events through the wilderness, time and again God’s initial reaction is to pour out wrath on the ungrateful wretches. But this time God’s response seems rather quiet. God settles the issue not on His tribunal of justice, to sentence the rebels according to their desserts, but on the basis of grace. He is going to give them what they want, despite their anger.

I imagine Aaron and Moses, faces pressed to the ground in the Tabernacle, wondering when the Lord is going to threaten, punish, send a few thunderbolts, open up the ground once again. It is a formula you and I expect. God hates sin, so God must punish sin! This is true, but if we forget the way in which God deals with sin, anger will come up again. If we forget grace, anger will come up once again. And that is exactly what happened. We now see an anger that is especially dangerous. What about the anger we feel when we are right?

God spoke grace, but Moses wanted wrath. Notice what God told Moses.

Verse 8 - "Take the staff." Which staff? Verse 9 tells us it is the one from the Lord’s presence, that is, Aaron’s staff, the one which sprouted leaves, flowers and almonds in the past. This staff was kept in front of the two tablets in the Ark of the Covenant, pointing to a mediator, one who was dead but came to life, who would be the answer to God’s perfect demands found in His Law. Moses was to take that rod and speak to the rock.

That was all too nice, too gentle, too kind for Moses. He had other ideas in mind. His blood was boiling again from the mistreatment of God by these outlaws. Again and again they dishonored God with their stupid sinfulness. They treated God with disdain one too many times.

Moses adds a bit of flourish to the scene, to get these hard hearted sinners to see their sin.

"Listen you rebels!"

Moses vents his anger. We’d say he had good reason to be angry. You think you’ve got it tough working with a rebellious child, a toddler who thinks "no" means "Do whatever you want, dear!" Moses has put up with their carping for forty years! That is a long adolescence! Were they rebellious? Sure they were, but…

"Must we bring water from this rock?"

Having just called them rebels, he sets himself up as judge over them and himself as their deliverer, but a reluctant one at that. Why should Moses perform this miracle for these ungrateful miscreants? Moses’s inflated self-perception comes through. Anytime we speak to another who has offended God, but forget our own sin, our anger will become quickly misplaced.

Just like the person on a moral crusade, Moses takes on the stature of God. Moses points out their rebellion against God just as he rebels against the Lord’s commands. Forgetting his high calling as a representative of the Lord, he appropriates the honor which belongs to God alone.

Moses refused to believe that God was faithful when people were faithless. So he took Aaron’s budding rod which spoke of life and instead of speaking to the rock and trusting God to provide he struck the rock, not once, but twice.

He was acting in fierce anger; yet anger is always a symptom of a deeper disease. There was something of wounded pride as he called the people rebels. There was presumption in the offer to work a miracle. There was self-will and disobedience in his thrashing the rock. With a flair for the dramatic, he re-enacts what he believes should happen to the people - they should be beaten down for their arrogance and faithless anger at him for their own predicament and their anger at God for not believing He was both sovereign and kind.

God does not threaten the people with destruction here, but Moses does. He speaks judgment when God offered grace. Moses’s anger over their sin overshadowed God’s grace which forgives sin.

How often do we find it necessary to play the Holy Spirit? We’re sure the obstinate rebels need a little more "fear of God" in them and we’re sure we’re just the right ones to slap them upside the head with the Law of God till they cry for mercy. It’s too easy to let them off the hook and give grace, to talk of forgiveness. A little righteous indignation can go a long way, at times!

I recall a pastor who referred a counseling case to me, a fellow who was certainly intractable, rather recalcitrant. I outlined for that pastor the tack I would take, reminding him of what God has done for us in Christ, apply God’s goodness to us in the Gospel so that he would not want to chose sin. To this approach the other pastor snorted: "He doesn’t deserve to hear any good news; he just needs to be made to feel so bad he won’t sin again!"

That pastor was fed up with him. His response was one of desperation and anger. But desperation and anger is never a good starting point. Over and over again our anger leads us to take action when we should have trusted in God. "I’ll straighten them out and give them an earful." "It’s about time they be made to squirm." "I want them to feel the flames of Hell licking at their feet…what can I say to make them afraid?" These are taking matters in our own hands, as if we need to make things right. And that is the sin of not trusting in God.

I’m not saying we say nothing about sin. It is not that we sugar coat sin so no one is uncomfortable. But our actions must not be motivated with the anger we feel towards others because of what they have done. Just like Moses, we then fail to honour God as holy, and we fail to see His grace at work. We must never forget God’s Law and His perfect demands. But when we use it as a club to clobber those who bother us, when we place ourselves outside its condemnation, as though we’ve achieved a special status by personal obedience, then in anger we forget God’s grace.

Moses refused to believe in the power of the spoken word. A simple word would not do. Grace was not enough; they needed to see punishment. When we forget God’s grace is sufficient for changing another person’s heart, we succumb to the dramatic, the sensational, to achieve our purpose. But that anger, the indignation we sense, can be a warning light of a much deeper problem we have.

When we justify our anger as zeal for God’s Law and excuse our flare-ups as "righteous indignation," when we talk about having a passion for God’s holiness and an intolerance for immorality, but never get to the life-changing words of Christ’s death for a sinner like me, then in our anger we have forgotten God’s grace to sinners like us.

This is not just for those who get riled up over a certain moral issue facing our land. As a parent, if your anger at your child’s disobedience is so great that you can not immediately after explain their infraction then offer the means of God’s forgiveness to a repentant heart, you just pulled a Moses. You’re beating the rock instead of speaking to it.

What is the problem with anger? For Moses, his anger at the Israelites’ sin seemed so holy, so righteous, but it really rejected God’s holiness and substituted God’s righteousness with his own.

He did not treat God as holy.

In disobeying instructions and showing no respect for the symbol of God’s presence, Moses failed to sanctify God; that means he did not acknowledge God’s purity and unapproachability. God’s anger finally comes through - not toward the Israelites who angrily demanded water and doubted that God was good. Rather God’s displeasure is reserved for Moses.

Verse 12: "You did not trust me enough to honor me as holy." Moses and Aaron have not treated the Lord as sacred before the eyes of the children of Israel. Instead, by their lack of reliance on God’s promises, they have proved to be impediments to the manifestation of Yahweh’s power and holiness before the eyes of His people. When this happens, leaders of God’s people have lost their ability to lead.

What is the issue with God’s holiness here? Not just that He is perfect, but that He is utterly different. He is not like us. He is able to maintain His holiness and show us grace. God’s forgiveness is not antithetical to holiness. Justice and mercy are not contradictory. God forgives because He is holy. His holiness demands a substitute, which Christ became for us. His holiness then says that since Christ suffered for us, we need not find another to sacrifice, another to pay for our sin.

How do we see this in this passage?

Numbers 20 bears a marked resemblance to another time, forty years before when the people complained about a lack of water and God supplied water from a rock. In fact, what happened in Exodus 17 seems to give a good reason for Moses to act the way he did.

Just a few days after the Red Sea, the people complained about water. That time God told Moses to take his staff, the staff which parted the Red Sea, which turned the Nile into blood and gather the elders and go to the rock at Horeb. The imagery was clear. The staff which brought judgment on the disobedient Egyptians would not strike the disobedient leaders of Israel. But what God says next is strange. In 17:6 God says: "I will stand before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock and water will come out of it for the people to drink." God uses language of judgment, but it is He who will stand before Moses. He identifies Himself with the rock and it is the rock which is to be struck. Elsewhere in Scripture, it is always we who stand before God, we who deserve the punishment. But here, God takes His place as the one to be struck.

The importance of this rock is made clear by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:4 where he says that the rock which accompanied them in the desert was Christ. Paul understood the rock which was at the beginning of their forty year trek was the same rock at the end. When they began their journey the rock was to be struck. The image would’ve been clear to the Israelites: Christ became the one judged, not the people; He bore the punishment for their sin of disbelief that God would provide, for their anger at God not being good to them.

But in Numbers 20 instead of striking the rock, Moses was to speak to it. There was no need to strike again. That was done for the generation before. Now all that was needed were words of faith that God would provide. Christ was sacrificed once for all, not repeatedly every time we sin. His death is all-sufficient for our failures. Once He died for our sins, He is not punished again, but rather, we, in faith, must come to Him and speak. Instead of the rod of judgment of Exodus 17, now comes the High Priest’s staff of life, that as we see our sin, we are asked speak, to look in faith to the provision given for us in Christ.

Then God pours out for us water that brings life. Just as Nick showed us last week in Isaiah 41, when we are dry and thirsty, God will hear our cries and give us "rivers which flow on barren heights and springs in the valleys. The deserts will turn into pools of water and the parched ground into springs." Why? Isaiah 41:20 "So that people may see and know, may consider and understand that he hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it."

To believe anything else is not to trust God enough to honor Him as holy.

When confronted by sin, when we see immorality for what it is, whether it is in our own lives or in someone else’s, it is easy to get so torqued that we just want to strike out. But we must never forget that God offers a remedy for sin: not our anger, not our frustration and self-righteous indignation, but the simple and powerful words of the Gospel. There, on the Cross, God dealt with those sins which make me so mad. Now what He asks of us is that we, in faith, look to God’s provision for us and believe that is sufficient for us today.

To do anything else is not only counter-productive, it is sin, it is disbelief, it is self-righteous. This life-changing truth must challenge our thinking so that we can encourage others with it as well. We can go to others with words of hope: God has dealt with sin on the Cross. Christ has been struck and all we need to do is believe, trust His holiness, know that we are secure in Christ. Anger is a serious problem. It doubts God’s goodness; it ignores His control in His world. But most of all, when our anger appears justified, but yet we allow that anger it to overshadow God’s character, that He is holy, that He demands perfection and offers forgiveness because of Christ, we have ceased to believe the Gospel we profess.