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“Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, “Hear now, you rebels: shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, and water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their livestock.” (Numbers 20:10-12, ESV)

Pastor Abel’s sermon on this passage is titled, “Remember the Third Person”.

This passage shows us the failure of Moses in the wilderness. A few verses earlier, God gave this command to him, “and the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and tell the rock before their eyes to yield its water. So you shall bring water out of the rock for them and give drink to the congregation and their cattle’” (Numbers 20:7-8, ESV).

God told Moses to ‘tell the rock.’ Moses struck the rock. That is a big problem, and because of it, Moses was not allowed to enter the promised land. Moses gets the same punishment as the rebellious Israelites who refused to enter the land: death in the wilderness.

Why is it such a big deal to God that Moses hit the rock instead of speaking to it? God gives the reason: “And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them’” (Numbers 20:12, ESV).

In other words, Moses’ action of striking the rock was not an act of faith, but of self-reliance. Moses did not trust in God, but in his own ability to force the water out of the rock. In doing so, Moses took matters into his own hands, rather than submitting to God’s will.

Fly forward a few thousand years to another prophet in the wilderness with a very similar problem involving rocks.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:1-4, ESV)

Our Lord, Jesus, passed the test that Moses failed. Jesus, who had the ability to force the stones to become the nourishment he needed, just as Moses did, refused to take matters into his own hands, and instead trusted God. The verse he quoted back to the devil was written my Moses in Deuteronomy 8:3.

The failure of Moses in the wilderness is the same failure we make every day when we take our lives in our own hands instead of trusting and obeying God. Thanks be to God that we have a savior who went into the wilderness and passed the test, who gave his life for us to cover all our sin.

Further Study