You know those days that everything seems overwhelming: the good, the disappointing, the average – it all just leaves you drained. Wednesday was one of those days. I had planned to go to church like normal, but the day wore on, and by the time I finished work, I was exhausted. A run to the store, and then a few minutes to get ready, and I was running late. By the time I arrived in my seat, all I could muster was a weak prayer composed of a couple lines I’d heard in a song years ago. “…I’ve been in the valley all day: So Lord please leave a blessing when you pass my way.” And my Father graciously did. So full, disclosure a good part of this is my gleanings from the sermon, added together with things from my personal Bible reading.
In Exodus 15, we find the nation of Israel celebrating the deliverance God gave them from 400 years of serving in bondage, and from their enemies that chased after them. With a strong arm, God fought on behalf of His chosen people, sending plagues on the nation of Egypt who kept them in slavery, and protecting the people of Israel from experiencing the greater part of them. Then, shortly after the Egyptians set the Israelites free, the king decided they should chase after the recently freed nation. The Israelites were trapped between the Red Sea, a mountain and the enemy army. But God opened a way for them through the sea and they walked through on dry ground while the army, attempting to cross behind them, was wiped out. That was three short days ago. But now they are in need of water and have none with them. Then off in the distance they see it! The waters of Marah are there, just ahead. Imagine with me the excitement, the thrill, and the relief they must have felt as they pushed forward towards the satisfaction of their desire, their need. They reach the water and take a drink. But the water is bitter. They can’t drink it without getting sick. What they thought to be the answer to their troubles turned out to rather increase them. One might think that those who had just barely finished walking through the middle of the sea with walls of water on either side might think to ask the same God to provide now again in their difficulty. But instead they murmur and complain against their God appointed leader. In their need, they leaned hard on their own understanding to figure out the solution. But their solution left them sick and thirsty, bitter and angry.
Years before, Abraham, the father of the people of Israel, was called by God to leave the city and the country that he knew, and to go to a land that God would tell him. In obedience, Abraham packs up his wife and his household and leaves, beginning a nomadic life, journeying to a country he did not yet know. Finally, he arrives in the land of Canaan and God tells him, “This is the land I will give to your children.” But then a famine comes, and Abraham decides the best course of action is to head down to Egypt to weather the lean times. As they get closer to Egypt, Abraham tells Sarah, his wife, “Say that you are my sister, so the people of the land will not kill me to take you, because you are so beautiful.” They stuck to this plan, and soon enough, Sarah has been taken, by permission, to be bride to the king. Abraham leaned hard on his own understand but his solution left him and his wife in a difficult situation.
I’m sure that you have found yourself in a difficult place. A place that seems to need desperate measures to make it through. It may seem that there’s no answer from God, and the temptation may come to lean on your own understanding. The desire to amuse yourself, filing your spare hours with things of the world or empty things, so that you don’t have to think about how it feels like God has left you, may slip in and grow. The thoughts that you can figure a way out and it’ll be good enough even if it requires you to do things you know God wouldn’t approve of may creep in and provide a glittering lie. Let me encourage you to still your thoughts, to strain them through the Word of God. Take a moment and remember who our God is: “I am the Lord that healeth thee.”
In Exodus 15, God instructs Moses, the leader of the Israelites, to chop down a tree into the bitter waters of Marah, and thereby God heals the water. There at Marah, God lets the people know that He was testing them and then instructs them, “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee.” Then He brings them to Elim, where there were twelve wells of water, and seventy palm trees, and the people were there able to rest by the waters. God tested them in their obedience, in their love, and in their trust. Seeing them fall short in their trust, and in their love (evidence by their lack of willingness to wait or do anything other than complain against the One who had brought them through everything), God instructs them on obedience while reassuring them of His trustworthiness and love as He reminds them that He is the One who heals them and supplies their need at the oasis of Elim.
Dear friends, in your deserts and in your famines, don’t lean on your own understanding to deliver yourself. Don’t look to the world and it’s philosophies for how to handle or evade the situation at hand. Look to the God that heals you, the Father who loves you, and in tenderness tests you so that you might see more clearly who you are, that you may be ever changing into His likeness. “I am the Lord that healeth thee.”
Hope in truth 