Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

Massah and Meribah

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: Massah and Meribah

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 054

Dictation Name: RR171AC54

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made the heaven and the earth. The hour cometh and now is when the true worshipper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, with joy and thanksgiving, we come again into thy presence, rejoicing in thy mercies, thy providential care, and the certainty of our victory in Jesus Christ. Make us ever joyful in thee, ever grateful, ever instant in thy service, and grant, oh Lord, that we might be effectual in thy great victory when the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and our His Christ. Grant us this, we beseech thee. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is from Exodus 17:1-7. Exodus 17:1-7. Massah and Meribah. “And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no water for the people to drink. Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst? And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me. And the LORD said unto Moses, Go on before the people, and take with thee of the elders of Israel; and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest the river, take in thine hand, and go. And behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the LORD, saying, Is the LORD among us, or not?”

Man’s basic and original sin is his attempt to be his own god, to determine good and evil for himself, to be his own source of law. This is what Genesis 3:5 tells us. But God is the source of all law and he is, therefore, the essential and ultimate judge over all creation.

When man presumes to be his own god, he then assumes it to be his right to pass judgment on all things. Now, this is the issue in the episode at Rephidim. The presupposition of Israel was this: Since God has all the power that is His, why doesn’t He deliver His people into a situation comparable to the Garden of Eden immediately? Why doesn’t He take care of them and all their problems so that they have no problems? When God can perform miracles at His word, why are not we the objects of miraculous care at every minute so that we never have problems? Why does God allow all kings of unpleasant things to happen to us? Why, among all men, should His covenant people be subjected to ugly trials and troubles?

Now this is not an accidental matter, nor an academic question, nor is this type of probing restricted to the Hebrews of Moses’ time. It happens to too many people when they have problems, they turn on God. Whenever ungodly men, of course, gain power and attempt to play God, they seek to create a trouble-free life, and to eliminate all testing and troubles for men. This is the modern state and what it seeks to do. It tries to limit the trauma of competition, of testing, of unemployment, and so on and on, but all it’s efforts lead only to grim and ugly disasters, and the same is true of many, many parents. Once they become successful, they try to make sure that their children will never encounter the problems they faced and, as a result, their protectionism encourages their children in evil. Now this is clearly true of the ungodly, but it is also true of many who call themselves God’s people.

Israel refused to understand why God, who had performed such great miracles in Egypt and after, was not giving them an easy and cushioned life. Isaac Watts knew that temper in his day when he spoke of people who might want to go to heaven in flowery beds of ease. In brief, what the people were asking, “Why was there no social security from God?”

Somehow, Moses was to blame for all of this, and they were almost ready to stone or kill him, we are told in verse 4. Moses had very good reason to be alarmed. The religions of Antiquity were humanistic attempts to account for the universe, and they have a great resemblance to modern thought. They saw the origin of the universe in some kind of creation, or act, by the gods, but their basic perspective on origins was dramatically different from the biblical account. It was closer to the modern, scientific perspective. The pagan account saw a primeval chaos as originally prevailing, and out of this somehow came the gods, and the gods moved in the face of this chaos to bring about some kind of order, and for paganism, the persistent problem faced by man and society was a possible return to chaos, but they had a paradox in their thinking because for them, all life came out of chaos, therefore all energy was in chaos. So, you had the fertility cults, you had Saturnalia, various ways of invoking chaos periodically for a season, for a week or two weeks, in order to revitalize society. This was the thesis of Antiquity, and it created a paradoxical situation. Social order for pagan man has required a continual war against chaos in order to survive, and yet survival required a periodic revolutionary upheaval. A Saturnalia, political and social, in order to regain the vitality order needed to survive. Order was thus an unnatural necessity, which went against life’s urge to chaos.

Now this is fundamental to Antiquity, and it is the background, the presupposition of modern though, but for the Bible, chaos is not the problem. Chaos is a manmade disorder in society and the world. It began with sin. It was man’s revolt, man’s rebellion against God that brought in disorder and chaos into the world. To declare that chaos is the problem is to posit and declare that an ultimate and unchangeable metaphysical fact is the source of all trouble, but this is false. For us, it is obvious. Sin is the problem, and to say that it is sin, is to say that man’s problem is a moral question, something that he can do a great deal to correct, but to say that it is a metaphysical problem means that it cannot be corrected.

Israel was denying the need for or the existence in themselves of a moral problem. The problem was in God, not in themselves, and that’s why they were crying out against Moses and against God. And of course, we have to say a great deal of pious praying in our time asks God to change, instead of seeking to be changed, to be remade, to be enabled to grow, and then to be blessed by Him.

Well, Moses told Israel that they were really testing, they were challenging, they were putting on trial God Almighty. The names Moses gave to the place tell us what Israel was doing. Massah means testing, and Meribah means quarreling. They were testing God, and they were quarreling with God because He would not be ruled by them. Moses later, in Deuteronomy 33:8 reminded Israel of the meaning of Massah. He says they did seek to prove him at Massah, and they did strive with him at the waters at Meribah. At Deuteronomy 6:19, he says, “Ye shall not tempt the Lord, your God as ye tempted Him in Massah,” a verse that our Lord quotes in the temptation. In Deuteronomy 9:22, “At Taberah, at Massah, and at Kibrothhattaavah, ye provoked the LORD to wrath.” This incident is very much remembered in the Bible. In Psalm 95:7-9, we have a reference to this episode at Massah. Hebrews 3:7-8 and verse 15 refer to it also, and these texts call attention to Israel’s sin, and warn us against the same kind of sinning. The miracle of the water out of the rock is celebrated in Psalm 78 and in Psalm 105 and 114, as well as in Isaiah 48:21. The name Massah apparently was the name Moses gave to the place, but to the stream of water that came out of the rock he gave the name Meribah.

Now more than a century ago, one of the greatest of the preachers in England, Joseph Parker, spoke about this episode, and he said Christendom, and in particular he was speaking of the English-speaking world and especially England, he said they were approaching their own Rephidim, a place where necessities would test their faith. “We have not,” he observed, “gone an inch beyond Rephidim, the place of necessity, because with all God’s provisions and care, we see only our need,” Parker said, “We see only our necessities, not what God has done and is doing,” to quote Parker, “We have almost a new English. We have been so complete in our criticism and our progress as to have almost established a new alphabet of things. We rejoice in this and call it progress, and boast of it with honest and legitimate triumph, but the preacher’s questions is, ‘How far have we advanced morally, spiritually, and in all the higher ranges and diviner outlooks of our being?’ Here we seem to be still at Rephidim. Geographers say they cannot find out the exact locality. Rarely, there need be no difficulty about the exact location, it is just where we are. We carry the locality with us.”

God instructed Moses to take the elders of Israel as his witnesses, and use his staff. The staff with which he signaled God’s judgments, beginning with the Nile, on Egypt. As he used the staff to strike the rock and bring forth a stream of water. A tremendous stream, one to feed a people of two million. Now the staff had been used essentially as God’s instrument of judgment on Egypt. Now, it would bring forth the much-needed waters, but it was still a witness to judgment. They had insisted on judging God. They were now being judged, even though the immediate result was a blessing. God, in time, was going to deal with them. Their question to Moses had been, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They assumed it to be God’s duty to serve them and in time, He would, with judgment.

I cited a little earlier what Joseph Parker, one of the greatest men of the pulpit in England had to say about this episode, and how he related it to what was facing his own people, his own nation, and the Christian world generally. Well, it is interesting, about the same time an historian also thought of this episode as revelatory of something in the world around him, a very great writer, McCalley, and McCalley observed this episode, and I quote, “It is the nature of man to overrate present evil. A hundred generations have passed away since the first great national emancipation of which an account has come down to us. We read in the most ancient of books that a people bowed to the dust under a cruel yoke, scourged to toil by hard taskmasters, not supplied with straw, yet compelled to furnish the daily tale of bricks became sick of life, and raised such a cry of misery as pierced the heavens. The slaves were wonderfully set free. At the moment of their liberation, they raised a song of gratitude and triumph, but in a few hours they began to regret their slavery and reproach their leader who had deployed them away from the savory fare of the house of bondage to the dreary waste which still separated them from the land flowing with milk and honey. Since that time, the history of every great deliverer has been the history of Moses retold, down to the present hour, rejoicings like those on the shore of the Red Sea have ever been speedily followed by murmurings like those at the waters of strife.”

How little Israel learned from this experience we see in Numbers 20, when in the Desert of Sin they again grew angry with Moses and with God because they had no water. Their premise was, “If God is our God, then there must be no problems for us.” Now that premise is still too prevalent in the world of those who profess the faith. It is no accident that Parker and McCalley found this episode so revelatory, and we would have to say it is more important now than it was about 140 years or so ago.

In verse 6 there is a reference to the rock in Horeb. Now sometimes the Bible uses Horeb and Sinai interchangeably, and other times it’s two places. As far as we can determine, the name of the mountains in that area was Horeb, and Sinai was a particular peak towards which they were moving and where the ten commandments were given. This episode recognized over and over again in history for its importance as revelatory for man is still true. It tells us of how men, as they approach God, approach Him wanting the Garden of Eden just because they have been saved. As though somehow, now that they profess the name of Christ, or the name of the Lord, they are entitled instantly to paradise, to Eden.

I like the expression by one of the great Puritan, and post-Puritan writers, Thomas Boston, who said, “Men, in their foolishness, seek to leap our of Delilah’s lap into Abraham’s bosom, to go from a life of sin into instant heaven, and it isn’t so.” Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee for this, thy word. Heal us, oh Lord, of our Rephidim, of our readiness and our proneness to demand everything. Our unwillingness to grow, our insistence that our will be done. Be merciful unto us, oh Lord, and teach us to grow, to learn that these testings and trials that we experience are for our greater glory in thee, and that every faith will be tested, and that it is because we are thy children, that we are subjected to these things. Our God, we praise thee. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] I think the comment on chaos was repeated by Mao Tse-tung and today by Gorbachev. They’re going to improve their society by unleashing all their controls.

[Rushdoony] Well, it’s, given their premises, it’s logical thinking. They’re going to have a controlled revolution in order to achieve their Marxist goal, because they’ve also made clear they have not surrendered their Marxism, and what they’re doing is as a strategy towards that goal. Controlled chaos, that’s what Saturnalia was. In the Saturnalia, it is interesting, for example, in Rome, during the week or two weeks of the Saturnalia, every moral order was reversed in order to revitalize society. The worst condemned convict in prison, waiting execution, was freed to become king, which meant possessing the queen, every sexual crime was now required, every kind of evil practiced, but only one group was forbidden to partake of the Saturnalia: the bakers. Somebody had to provide food, so the bakers were to work continuously so these people could indulge in their Saturnalia, and that type of event was first stylized into revolution by the Mazdakites in Persia in the middle to late 400’s and 500’s of the Christian era, and they overthrew the monarchy. They insisted on the total possession of all property, all money, and all women to be communized totally, and Persia which had been, really, a great center of civilization, never recovered from that, and even though a surviving prince of the royal house was, after about 50 or 70 years, to regain the throne. Hosra Anorshevan II {?}, the country was so weakened that in the few generations, it collapsed totally under the onslaught of the Turks, and the whole history of Europe was altered by that fact. But that was a revolutionary cult, and it is interesting that although the Mazdakite revolt was very much in the minds of revolutionaries, including Marx, nothing has ever been written about it except a chapter I wrote which has not yet been published, but it is a key factor in the world of revolution, and it was a Saturnalia-type of development, formalized into a political and social revolution. Yes?

[Audience] What kind of religion did Persia have prior to that?

[Rushdoony] It was the Zoastrian faith, and this was a group of political and religious leaders who came out of particularly that faith, and pushed it to the nth degree. And they required it of every group within the Roman empire, uh within the Persian Empire. Yes?

[Audience] Is there any relation between that and Nietches’ Thus Spake Zoastria?

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. Same kind of thing. The kind of cult that was represented infiltrated Europe, the, in various forms, the Policians in the time of Byzantine Empire as a supposedly Christian group, they took on the façade of Christianity, also known as the Tondrakians, and then the Bolomils in the Balkans, and the Albigencians in southern France. And, of course, everybody is trying to rehabilitate them now. Yes?

[Audience] When I was in New Guinea, I noticed that after people had made their gardens and used it for a couple of years, they had to let it grow back wild completely before they could make the garden again over, and I’ve often wondered if that, the view that those people had that they had to let everything go back to chaos came from seeing things like that in nature.

[Rushdoony] It’s the same thing you find it all over the world, where you don’t find a biblical faith. The basic belief is in the ultimacy of chaos, and therefore, the ritual acts of overturning order periodically and revolution are the means of revitalizing society, and this type of thinking had climaxed in the modern world so that people believe that revolution is essential, or some kind of disorder, in order to create order, a new order. Yes?

[Audience] Is violence always served the cause of chaos, or can violent acts of force be used in the cause of justice or the reestablishment of order?

[Rushdoony] Well, the alternative is not pacificism, because the Bible does say that, at times, war is necessary. But basically the biblical concept of war is that it is to be in defense of your country and your freedom, that it must not go beyond certain limits. We are not to make war, for example, against fruit trees and grapevines. It is not to be total war, in other words. Yes?

[Audience] See a parallel in the political conventions every four years, craziness that goes on there, in order to reestablish.

[Rushdoony] Well, of course what they do believe in, is increasingly in their thinking, a kind of revolution. One of the things that I came to see in some of my reading recently and have mentioned to one of two of you, is that in the Medieval Era, there was a tension between two things as the Medieval Era developed. One was that the strong states were those that were totalitarian, and their strength was in continuity, so the problem was: How could you have continuity without a drift towards totalitarianism? Whereas in Poland and in the German Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the monarchs were elective, which meant that with each new monarch, there was a normally a totally different direction, and they were busy undoing what the predecessor had done, and that’s become the problem in our time, except that we have both evils now. We have a growing drift, such as monarchy had, towards totalitarianism on the part of the bureaucracy, plus increasingly, a revolutionary temper with each new party that takes power, and it’s with difficulty that anyone stems that tide.

[Audience] There is one comment there where the Bible says you can’t make war against fruit trees. It exhibits how far Israel has moved from the Bible because they are uprooting the agriculture of the Palestinians.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. That is especially a grim fact because they are without excuse, of all people they know that. And, except for some of the very orthodox rabbis, no one has protested against that. Yes?

[Audience] While we may not expect God to grant us instant paradise in our relationship with Him, may we rely on Him at least for basic needs, Israelites did over longing for water.

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Audience] A subsistence thing, not exactly paradise.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but the point was, God had taken care of them marvelously to that point, and they didn’t say, “Well, the Lord delivered us from Egypt, from the Red Sea crossing, He’s provided us with manna, He’s going to take care of us.” Instead, they’re immediate reaction was, at a moment’s frustration, “Something’s wrong with God.”

[Audience] So the problem was grumbling rather than trust.

[Rushdoony] What?

[Audience] So the problem was grumbling rather than trusting?

[Rushdoony] Yes, their feeling that God had to do it before they felt the need, had to provide before they were aware of something, but God was testing their faith. It wasn’t that they were not going to get water, He was putting them to the test. When they have a problem, what’s their reaction going to be? Are they going to know that I am their God and will care for them or are they going to turn against Moses and against me? That was the issue. They were not like Job who said, “Thou He slay me yet will I trust Him.” Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] You said that during the Saturnalia that a criminal could come in and sort of be king?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Would he stay king the rest of the yes?

[Rushdoony] No. When the two weeks were over he was executed. [laughter] But for the two weeks, his word was law as long as he didn’t do anything good, and he could not revoke his sentence. You see, evil had to be enthroned, the destruction of order, disorder, as vitality and therefore, they chose the worst convict, the worst condemned man. Well, if there are no further questions, let us conclude with prayer.

Our father, we thank thee that, in the wilderness of our time, thou art leading us, and thy purpose is our deliverance and our blessing. Help us to keep our hearts and minds firmly fixed on thee, knowing that thou art greater than our needs and our problems, and thy purposes for us in time and eternity, altogether glorious. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.