When there is no water in Refidim (Exodus 17:4-6), Moses is afraid that the grumbling people will stone him to death.
Moses has to take out the staff of Exodus. God uses it to remind the people why they left Egypt and how he delivered them. The same divine power can also bring water out of a rock in the desert. This seemed impossible.
Moses is to strike the rock. Later, Moses should speak to the rock (Exodus 20:8). But the second time Moses acts on his own authority. He acts on his first experience with the rock and makes the biggest mistake of his life.
God always has different solutions. We cannot simply say from our experience of faith that what worked once must work again.
Faith is not a method, but a dependence on God. A conscious listening and doing of what he says. If someone has an experience of faith, it doesn’t mean that if I do the same thing, I will have the same experience.
Verse 6 says that God stands before Moses at the rock. It is a picture of Jesus being struck and then being called (1 Corinthians 1:2). 1 Corinthians 10:4 says, “And the rock was Christ”.
Exodus 17:4-6 4 So Moses cried to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” 5 And the Lord said to Moses, “Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6 Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.”
Messiah images in the Torah
- God seeks us – Adam where are you?
- The possibility of a choice – Two trees in the Garden of Eden
- Neediness instead divinity – A new view
- God’s master plan – Salvation through a human being
- A divine clothing – God acts
- A world upside down – Kai and Abel
- Living in the presence of God – Enoch
- God is calling – Noah
- A king-priest like Melchizedek
- God visits Abraham
- Life through a sacrifice – Isaac
- The ladder to heaven – Jacob
- New identity from Jacob to Israel
- Messiah Ben Joseph – Joseph the son of Jacob
- Shiloh, whom all nations will serve – Blessing on Judah
- Moses, the prototype of the Saviour
- References to Jesus in Moses
- The Passover Lamb
- The pillar of cloud and fire
- God wants to be with us – The tabernacle / The temple
- The snake on a pole – An image of a new beginning
- The rock in the desert – Faith is not a method
- A prophet greater than Moses
- A star from Jacob – Bileam