The Lord has been working deeply in my heart so far in 2012 the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “Hallowed by your name” (Matthew 6:9). When we pray that prayer, we are asking the Lord to work in our hearts, and in the hearts of the people around us, in such a way that we will honor him as the holy God he is. This prayer acknowledges that in order for sinful human beings to hallow God’s name, the Lord must first work his grace in our hearts, so that we do see and love his glory and thus set him apart as holy.
The Bible, however, regularly sets forth a tension between God’s sovereign work in the human heart on the one hand and human responsibility on the other. So while we are not surprised to read in Matthew 6:9 that we need to ask God in his grace to enable us to hallow his name, neither are we surprised to read in 1 Peter 3:15 this command to Christians: “[I]n your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy.”
Honoring Christ as holy involves loving God and obeying his commands, but today I want to observe a prominent case from the Bible when one of the great saints of the Lord failed to honor God as holy. I am speaking of Moses, the great man of God the Lord used to lead the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into the freedom of the Promised Land. Numbers 20:2-13 tells the sad story. The event occurs toward the end of the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert, and once again they are running low on water and complaining about it to Moses. They are accusing their poor leader of bringing them out into the desert simply to kill them. This whole scenario had occurred about 40 years earlier, at the beginning of the exodus, and at that time God had instructed Moses to strike a nearby rock, and miraculously the Lord caused water to gush forth from that rock (Exodus 17:1-7). This time, however, the Lord specifically instructs Moses to speak to the rock, and God promises the water will come forth once again (Numbers 20:8). However, apparently out of total exasperation with the stubbornness of the Israelites, Moses strikes the rock twice with his staff (Numbers 20:10-11). And though the rock gives forth water once again, God becomes angry with Moses and disciplines that great man of God. Moses is now 120 years old, and he has been leading Israel for 40 years. His greatest desire is to enter into the Promised Land. Because of his disobedience in the matter of the rock, however, God informs Moses that “you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them” (Numbers 20:12).
At first glance this punishment by the Lord seems in our human estimation to be a massive overreaction on his part to Moses’ disobedience. Yes, we acknowledge, Moses did clearly disobey an unambiguous the Lord. He clearly sinned. But is striking a rock rather than speaking to it all that serious of a matter? Why does God get so upset with a man who has been forced to endure so much grief at the hands of his people for 40 years?
The Lord gives the reason for his discipline of Moses in Numbers 20:12: “[Y]ou did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people.” In other words, Moses failed to hallow God’s name. He failed to set apart the Lord as holy in his heart. He did not uphold the holiness of God before the eyes of the tens of thousands of Israelites who were watching him.
Perhaps there is more going on in Numbers 20:2-13 than meets our eyes at first. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10:4 that in some mysterious way, the rock from which the Israelites drank in the desert was no less than Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4). How this is the case is not clear, and this statement of Paul is fraught with mystery. However, we also know from Hebrews 11:26 that by special revelation from God, Moses had at least some understanding of Jesus who was to come. If we put all these thoughts together, the Christian writer Edmund Clowney suggests that Moses’ act of striking the rock not only failed to hallow God’s name but in fact deeply dishonored the name of Jesus:
When Moses struck the rock, a stream of life-giving water poured out into the desert. When Jesus was crucified, John tells us that blood and water poured from his side (John 19:34). . . . We do not wonder that Moses was judged severely for striking the rock a second time, when he had been told to speak to it (Numbers 20:7-13). Only once, at the appointed time, does God bear the stroke of our doom. (Edmund Clowney, The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament (Philipsburg, Penn.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1988), 126, emphasis added).
In other words, the act of Moses in striking the rock this second time was such a great offense because he already had struck the rock one time, 40 years earlier, and since the rock represented Jesus, it was to be struck once and only once. Only one time would Jesus endure the blow for the sins of sinners—at the cross of Calvary. After his sacrificial death at the cross, Jesus’ work of atonement would be finished (John 19:30), and he would not be struck a second time. It is at this level that it appears we are to understand the seriousness of Moses’ failure to hallow God’s name in Numbers 20:2-13.
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