Although the people have experienced God’s care and see his presence in the pillar of cloud and eat his bread daily, they long for Egypt. Instead of turning to God, they harass Moses. It even gets really dramatic. Moses fears being stoned (Exodus 17:4).
The past always looks better in hindsight. We forget suffering.
Endurance and trust is a sticking point in our lives.
What is striking is that God’s solution is always different. Now Moses has to use the stick of the Exodus. With this, God wants to remind the people why they left Egypt and how he delivered them. The divine power of exactly the same strength can also produce water from a rock.
Moses is to smite the rock. Later Moses is said to speak to the rock (Numbers 20:8). But the second time Moses acts idiosyncratically. Acting according the first experience with the rock, he commits his greatest mistake in life.
What challenge me: God always has other solutions. We can’t just snap back from our faith experiences to what worked once has to work now. Faith is not a method but dependence on God. A conscious listening and doing what he says. If any person has an experience of faith, it doesn’t mean that if I do the same thing, I experience the same thing.
It is exciting that God hears us and is responding to us. But it also leads us into new situations so that we can experience a whole new way of how God cares for us. So that our trust in him grows. So that we turn to him and long for him more and more. As it says in Psalm 42:2-3, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”
Life with God challenges us. A diamond needs to be polished in order to develop its radiance. Gold needs to be refined.
Man grows with the challenges of life. A fact we like to ignore.
In slavery, the Israelites were told what to do. A life of freedom requires that they can organize themselves on their own responsibility. They must develop ways of interacting with one another and experiencing their God so that they can understand and appreciate him.
These experiences are recorded in the Bible for us to learn from. Therefore, if we were gathering manna daily like the Israelites, it is a good habit to draw daily inspiration from the Bible and God.
It is sobering how quickly positive experiences with God are forgotten and how people tend to look for someone to blame. It is not for nothing that Psalm 103:2 says: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits“.