Quarrelling and Questioning

Quarrelling and Questioning

(Exodus 17:1-7) J G White

Sun, March 23, 2014, Windsor UBC

Some people are never satisfied. There’s a Jewish story about a lady's grandson playing in the water; she is standing on the beach not wanting to get her feet wet, when all of a sudden, a huge wave appears from nowhere and crashes directly over the spot where the boy is wading.

The water recedes and the boy is no longer there. He simply vanished. She holds her hands to the sky, screams and cries, "Lord, how could you? Have I not been a wonderful mother and grandmother? Have I not given to Bnai Brith and Haddasah? Have I not tried my very best to live a life that you would be proud of?"

A few minutes later another huge wave appears out of nowhere and crashes on the beach. As the water recedes, the boy is standing there, smiling, splashing around as if nothing had ever happened. A loud voice booms from the sky, "Okay, okay, I have returned your grandson. Are you satisfied?"

She responds, "He had a hat." (sermon central, haruth.com)

Most of us regularly have moments in life of not getting what we need as we want it.  We quarrel and we question God.  Let’s wander a bit with the children of Israel in the wilderness of Sin - sounds strangely appropriate to us in the English language. From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink.

We don’t find what we need when we want it.

Life is often a personal journey by stages.  I’ve looked back at mine, at times, in chapters that happen to be eight years long; so I’m in year two of my latest chapter.   A fair bit of my own quarreling and questioning has been with myself, and my resistance to others have been hidden, maybe passive-aggressive.  I don’t get what I want out of my own life, and I stew about it, or get bogged down in self-criticism and inaction.  

Many other people, we realize, have real questions for others in their lives, and real quarrels.  Life for so many - even many of us - gets to be about getting what we want from others, and reacting to our disappointments.  

2 The people quarreled with Moses, and said, "Give us water to drink." Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?"

We quarrel with one another and test the Lord.  

There is a tricky connection between quarreling with one another, and testing the Lord.  When we are believers, we each want God on our side, the Bible to back us up, and the one who disappoints us must be the faithless one.  There is danger is saying: “If you don’t agree with me, you are disagreeing with the Lord!  You have not enough faith.”

But here, in this ancient wilderness, it is the quarreling of the people with Moses that is actually how they express their testing of the Lord.  “God is not providing; this must not be the right way.”  Moses get’s the brunt of their desperate frustration.  

3 But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?"

The quarrel intensifies.

For these Hebrew people, the situation seemed like a matter of and death.  But so many smaller conflicts in our lives can become heated and we act as if it is a life-and-death matter.  There will always be quarrels.  The resolution - there is the miracle!

History gives us a rather interesting account on resolution of conflict. French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas  (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo) once had a heated quarrel with a rising young politician. The argument became so intense that a duel was inevitable. Since both men were superb shots they decided to draw lots, the loser agreeing to shoot himself. Dumas lost. Pistol in hand, he withdrew in silent dignity to another room, closing the door behind him. The rest of the company waited in gloomy suspense for the shot that would end his career. It rang out at last. His friends ran to the door, opened it, and found Dumas, smoking revolver in hand. "Gentlemen, a most regrettable thing has happened," he announced. "I missed." (sermon central)

Quarrels intensify, and gladly there seldom are duels these days, though we know violence keep occurring in our society.  It is sad to see quarrels among God’s people, but its a long tradition of falling into this that we follow.  

I happened to run into Rob and Bethany Nickerson the other day.  Rob is interim Lead Pastor of New Minas Baptist Church.  He spoke of how things were going, in a church that suffered some sort of serious conflict last year and got into a bit of a shambles.  Bethany said, “We made it through the annual meeting all right.”  Rob shared about the little things, petty things, that people cling to and make so important, while other steps to vision and peace were really needed.  I told him I would keep him and his congregation in prayer.  

Back to the scene a few thousand years ago… 4 So Moses cried out to the Lord, "What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me."

The leaders call out to God when at their wits end.  

Yeah, this still happens regularly.  I’ve had a few moments of wanting to pull my hair out here, as I did while in Parrsboro; and I will in Digby.  On the other hand, followers often have reason to call out to the Lord, frustrated with your leaders.  And that is the best response - go to God.  Keep in communication with the Lord.  Giving the Father the silent treatment only works if we are earnestly listening and seeking Him.  But pouring out our concerns to God is one of the main paths of prayer.

You heard Judy and Lawrence that song, How Long Has it Been?  Mosie Lister, 1956.

Oh how long has it been  since you talked with the Lord

And told Him your heart's hidden secret

How long since you prayed

How long since you stayed

On your knees till the light shone through

The light shone through for Moses quickly, in the verses of Exodus Elizabeth read for us today.  

5 The Lord said to Moses, "Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6 I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink." Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel.

God provides.  Basic provision.  

The Lord had been doing this all along, and would continue to… for decades, for ever!  But the plan for life is not always according to our plan.  Dear Moses and those ancient Israelites.  In Exodus 15 they complain because they have no good water to drink.  They get water.  At the start of chapter 16 they feel they are starving and are going to be killed with hunger by Moses.   Later in the chapter, once they are provided with manna, bread from heaven, so to speak, some of them ignore the reaping instructions and hoard it, so it rots and gets wormy.  Also, when they are supposed to rest on the seventh day, some go out to gather manna, and there is none.  Today’s scene of the thirsty, quarrelling people, is answered with water from a rock.  Later, their stubborn ways continue, when they build a golden deity to worship while Moses is off on a sacred, mountain top mission.  

On and on it goes - they people giving up on God and God’s leaders, and God providing.  Deuteronomy is the record of Moses’ last great speeches, forty years on, reiterating the law and their story in the wilderness.  In Deuteronomy 8:7 we read of Moses telling the folk, “you have been rebellious against the LORD from the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place.”

There are times when we get in God’s way when He is trying to tend to the business of His kingdom here on earth. "A man was struggling with a large box at the back edge of his truck. A passing neighbor saw his plight and came over to help him. He put his shoulder to the box. After a few tiring moments the neighbor exclaimed, "What’s in that box anyway? I don’t think we will ever get it on the truck." "Get on!" the exasperated man shouted, "I’m trying to get it off!"

Well-meaning Christians can be God’s worst enemies. When we judge and condemn others, when we set up our own standards of what it means to be saved, when we claim absolute knowledge of God’s will and of his Scriptures, we take over God’s role and attempt to run his business" (Hoefler, p. 47). That is the very reason that we sometimes fail to see that we are trying to put the box on the truck when God wants the box off the truck. (sermon central)

Thanks be to God, in His amazing grace He keeps calling us back to himself, using our quarrelling and calling His plan into question.  We have this tendency to doubt that God is doing what God is supposed to be doing.  

Our story today ends: 7 He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?"

It comes down to our consideration of God’s presence.  When we don’t get our own way, do we find God still with us?  We can be ready to learn from the Lord about what life will be, and how to thrive, not just survive.  Even when disaster strikes, can our spirits be trained to thank the Lord and say, like King David,  “The Lord is my Shepherd; I lack nothing.”  And with Job, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”  When we have Christ, what else do we actually need?  Beware of quarreling with God, when we actually have what we need.  

Years ago - not that many years ago - there was a cute, old-fashioned couple who always sat together at Sunday service in a tiny, rural Church.  Hughie & Dorothy had been boyfriend and girlfriend since the 1940s.  They never married. He lived down near the seashore, Dorothy lived up on a high hill covered with blueberry fields.

Hughie lived right across from the little, one room, Baptist Church.  He was the guy who came over early and turned on the heat.  He unlocked it, and later locked it up.   Two or three times each month, on Sunday evenings, the Church had service; every time, Dorothy and Hughie were faithfully there.

One year, Dorothy became ill, and she died.  Sadly - I found this very sad - Hughie quit the church.  Said he didn’t understand how God could do this to him.  He had a quarrel with God.  Sad, because it was so unreasonable an expectation.  Sad, because he was emotionally unprepared to lose his special friend.  Sad, because his faith in the Lord has such a gap in it.  This happens to lots of people.

But in the same area were others who got closer to God, when death visited them.  I remember Donnie & Krista, a couple about my age.  I had met them once, and met them again when Donnie’s father died and I was asked to have the funeral.  Krista and Donnie started worshipping - every. single. Sunday.  They devoted themselves to the Lord and were baptized into the fellowship of Christ, and served.

Is the Lord with us or not?  We ask this in many aspects of our lives, alone and together.  As Psalm 95 says, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me, though they had seen what I did.  And, let the words in Isaiah 55 be ours.   Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near. (6) AMEN.