The Sin That's Keeping Us From the Promised Land (Part I)
Why misrepresenting the holiness of God is at the heart of all the Church's woes
This newsletter is part I of a two-part series on the foundational sin of misrepresenting the holiness of God. Part II can be found here.
It’s clear from the current flood of debauchery unfolding before our eyes (1 Peter 4:4) that we are in the midst of a tectonic cultural, and perhaps even civilizational landslide. And it’s also clear, given that America and her European predecessors were among the the first cultures to be thoroughly Christianized, that the Church deserves the lion’s share of the blame for this collapse. We say this not because we are unduly hard on the Church, but because we as the body of Christ have been given such a high and holy calling by God in the world (Matthew 5:13-16; 1 Peter 2:9, 10). And, as a plain matter of historical fact, it was we Christians who were once in charge of many of the now cratering cultural institutions. They fell under our watch. And besides, who else is going to stem the tide of the ever threatening flood waters of evil and chaos? The pagans? They are not equipped to do so, but we ought to be.
America, Western culture, and the many societies across the world that are influenced by them are in for a big hurt. And it’s fundamentally our fault as Christian believers.
It’s us. We’re the problem.
We have lost our saltiness, our distinctive, life-preserving flavor, and everyone is worse off for it (Matthew 5:13):
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
I don’t know about you, but getting stomped on repeatedly by giant feet doesn’t sound like much of a revival to me. It sounds like judgment (Revelation 14:19, 20).
But before getting into the weeds of all the specific intentional and unintentional sins besetting the modern Church, we have to address the sin beneath all the other sins. The “Church of the living God” is supposed to function as “the pillar and ground of the truth” in society (1 Timothy 3:15). In doing so, it restrains evil by functioning as the living conscience of a nation, leading the way into godliness by embodying the blessings of life done God’s way, which is perfect, holy, and altogether lovely and good. When a Christian society goes off the rails, it is because the Church, to one extent or another, has allowed it and even lead the way into it.
So the Church’s compromises are upstream of society’s woes. But if that is the case, then which of the Church’s compromises is upstream of all the rest? Which is the most foundational?
For the answer, we turn to a pivotal moment in the life of Moses.
The patience of Moses
Moses was a patient man. Besides Jesus, he is perhaps in competition only with Job for the title of “world’s most long-suffering.” We hear a lot about “the patience of Job” (James 5:11), but the patience of Moses was also a thing to behold.
Moses is of course best known for leading his people, the Hebrews, out of their bondage as slaves in Egypt. But that was a cake walk compared to the incessant complaining, backbiting, and outright mutiny he endured at the hands of these same people once they had entered the wilderness of Sinai. There, the people were tested by the harsh desert conditions. Moses, however, was mainly tested by the people.
The book of Numbers (which the Jews call בְּמִדְבַּ֥ר, or bemidbar, meaning “In the Wilderness,” a much more compelling title if you ask me) records this staggering observation (Numbers 12:3, emphasis mine): “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth.” That, believe it or not, is something of an understatement. If you sit down and read these accounts, you will find that, over a period of four long decades, Moses displayed more grace, forbearance, and humility in his dealings with the people of God than you or I could muster for half an hour under the same circumstances on our best day. So Moses’ title of “world’s meekest” was well deserved. Indeed, he was the very embodiment of meekness, a quality defined by restraint of one’s inner passions and powers in order to humbly accept whatever adversity, trials, and offenses life throws one’s way, knowing that they are all part of God’s larger plan to redeem and restore all things in Christ, the ultimate exemplar of the trait (1 Peter 2:19-25).
The honorifics Moses received for his patient endurance are not limited to the Torah, that is, the first five books of the Bible that Moses was responsible for (Deuteronomy 31:24). In the New Testament, for example, the book of Hebrews states (Hebrews 3:1, 2):
“Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, who was faithful to Him who appointed Him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house.”
High praise. It is no wonder that Moses and Elijah were honored with a front row seat to Jesus’ transfiguration. Although Jesus’ glory outshined Moses’ as the sun outshines the stars (Hebrews 3:3-6), still, Moses was up there. And, incredibly, it was somewhat familiar territory for him—his face once shone blindingly after conversing with the LORD on another mountain (Exodus 34:29-35).
Simply put, prior to the arrival of Jesus Christ (Deuteronomy 18:15), Moses was the greatest, most revered man in all the scriptures, and perhaps the most significant religious figure on earth to that point in history. If a Biblical Mount Rushmore were ever constructed, he’d be a shoo-in for it. Until Messiah, no shepherd was used of God so mightily in the face of so much flak from his flock.
Yes, Moses was a patient man.
But unlike Jesus, he wasn’t perfect.
Between a rock and a hard place
God’s judgments are ironically appropriate and undeniably fair.
When the wandering Israelites rather impudently demanded some variety in their standard manna menu, God gave them quail meat in such abundance that it became a loathsome thing to them, oozing, as it were, out of their nostrils (Numbers 11:18-20). When we consistently refuse God’s best for us because it is challenging or we think we know better, his judgment very often involves simply handing us over to our dreams become nightmares: “OK, you asked for it.” In this way, His judgments are ironic since He gives us precisely what we asked for, only for us to receive it, realize the steep downsides of our request, and experience the inevitable buyer’s remorse. Only then do we begin to realize the extent of our folly and the depths of God’s wisdom. He knows better than we do, and his judgments prove it.
Ironically appropriate—undeniably fair.
And so it was with Moses’ judgment.
We know that the generation of adults that followed Moses out of Egypt in the exodus was, as the original Hebrew puts it, “a real piece of work.” They rebelled time and again, brazenly complaining in the very hearing of God (Numbers 11:1). Meanwhile, God not only provided daily bread from heaven (Exodus 16), He led the people through the wilderness with a cloud by day, to protect them from the scorching heat, and a fire by night, to provide light, warmth, and comfort during the cold, dark desert nights (Exodus 13:21; Psalm 105:39). In spite of the countless miracles of salvation and provision they had witnessed, they remained a fickle, frustrated lot, always complaining, griping, grumbling, mumbling, groaning, and moaning their way through life. Eventually, God had enough, consigning every last one of them to dropping dead in the wilderness. No, this unbelieving, misbehaving generation wouldn’t make the final cut into the promised land.
And neither would Moses.
Moses not entering the promised land? How could that be? Wasn’t he the calm and collected one? Wouldn’t he, of all people, have made the cut? Hadn’t he endured enough?
And yet, it was not to be. Through one act of disobedience, just one, and that on a seemingly trivial matter, Moses was barred from entering.
Here’s how that part of the story goes (Numbers 20:1-12, emphasis mine):
“And the people of Israel, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kadesh. And Miriam died there and was buried there.
Now there was no water for the congregation. And they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron. And the people quarreled with Moses and said, ‘Would that we had perished when our brothers perished before the LORD! Why have you brought the assembly of the LORD into this wilderness, that we should die here, both we and our cattle? And why have you made us come up out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place? It is no place for grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink.’ Then Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly to the entrance of the tent of meeting and fell on their faces. And the glory of the LORD appeared to them, 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.’ And Moses took the staff from before the LORD, as He commanded him.
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. 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.’ These are the waters of Meribah, where the people of Israel quarreled with the LORD, and through them He showed Himself holy.”
So Moses, stuck between a rock and a hard place, tragically disobeyed God’s command to speak to the rock, instead opting to strike it twice with his staff.
If the first question that pops into your mind upon reading that is “That’s it? What’s the big deal?” then the significance of this crime is as lost on you as it was initially to Moses and the rest of us. The question itself proves God’s point: We are not grasping the gravity of what just went down. If we had, we would have instead asked “How could God possibly let Moses off so easy!”
For though this may seem like an odd side story, nothing could be further from the truth: The sin Moses commits here lies at the very heart of the all the modern Church’s woes. The fact that we, like Moses, miss the weight of this sin, and sense the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, just goes to show that we too are in desperate need of a wake up call to help God’s message get through.
Because if it doesn’t, we too might miss out on the land of promise.
Speak to the rock and it will teach thee
So what was God getting at with this apparently harsh “overreaction”? If He was trying to get a point across to Moses, and by extension us, what was it exactly?
We need to take a cue from the book of Job here: “speak to the earth [or in this case, the rock], and it shall teach thee” (Job 12:8).
What was it that caused Moses to incur such a steep penalty from God simply for tapping a rock twice?
In a word: unbelief.
God put His finger on it with the lead off to His pronouncement of judgment, which serves as its rationale (emphasis mine): “Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore […]” (Numbers 20:12a). There’s the logic. The rub was this: God commanded Moses to speak to the rock, trusting, by faith, that this would lead to its gushing forth a torrent of water in an undeniable demonstration of God’s miraculous saving power. This, in his moment of rebellion, Moses most certainly did not do. And why not? Because of unbelief—the very sin that prevented the “rebels” Moses chided from entering the promised land (Hebrews 3:7-19, emphasis mine):
“For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was He provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.”
The holy God of Israel does not play favorites: If unbelief was egregious enough to keep the people out of the promised land, then it was certainly enough to keep their leader out, who if anything was to be held to a higher standard (James 3:1). And the reason why God refuses to show favoritism is precisely because He is holy. Unlike us so often, God always and everywhere regards His holiness with absolute, sacred solemnity. He never turns a blind eye to bold affronts to His holiness, no matter how innocuous they may appear to us. To do so would mean that God Himself was capable of the same disregard for His holiness that we are, but that could never be (Ezekiel 39:7).
God’s holiness is His core defining quality, or to put it another way, the utterly unique umbrella trait that covers everything else that is true of Him. Only one of God’s attributes, if we can label it as such, is repeated to the superlative degree: “Holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8). To uphold His holy commandment to Moses, which really translates to upholding His holy name, to upholding Himself, God mercifully brought forth the waters in spite of Moses’ sin and the punishment it merited. And through the “waters of Meribah,” as well as through revoking Moses’ privilege of leading the people into Canaan, “He showed Himself holy.”
God revealed his holiness by showing impartial judgment to Moses while once again preserving His people in the desert, not because they were right little angels (far from it), but rather to fulfill His promise to deliver them from Egypt and to bring them to the land of Canaan (Deuteronomy 7). It was this same promise that Moses so beautifully took God up on, by faith, when God tested him at Sinai (Exodus 32:9-14, emphasis mine):
“And the LORD said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.’
But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, ‘O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did He bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’’ And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on His people.”
Bullseye. Moses’ passes this test with flying colors, “reminding” the LORD that, while they are Moses’ people by blood, they are God’s people by covenant. And covenant is thicker than blood (Hebrews 6:13, 14):
“For when God made a promise to Abraham, since He had no one greater by whom to swear, He swore by Himself, saying, ‘Surely I will bless you and multiply you.’”
And besides this, what would the Egyptians say if God incinerated His people off the face of the earth? Mightn’t that give them the wrong impression about God and what He was up to all along? Wasn’t the entire point of the exodus to show that there was no god like the God of the Hebrews (Exodus 8:18, 19a, 15:11; Psalm 83:17, 18, etc.)? And didn’t God choose to deliver His people with awe-inspiring signs and wonders to make a great name for Himself, the world over? Exodus 9:13-16 (emphasis mine):
“Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Rise up early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, ‘Let my people go, that they may serve me. For this time I will send all my plagues on you yourself, and on your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is none like me in all the earth. For by now I could have put out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.’’’”
This was the exclamation point of the exodus: There is no god like Israel’s God! As Moses and the Israelites sang in the climactic chorus of the “Song of Moses and Miriam” after miraculously crossing the Red Sea (Exodus 15:11):
“Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?”
Or as Hannah exuberantly prayed in 1 Samuel 2:2 (emphasis mine):
“There is none holy like the LORD: for there is none besides you; there is no rock like our God.”
Indeed.
For Moses, this was a hard-won lesson that he would not soon forget. Knowing, trusting, and obeying the Holy God of the universe is everything, since these things are essential if we are to be on the good side of His covenant promises to save His faithful through judgment on the unfaithful.
But even when we, through our disobedience, fail to proclaim His praises, “the very stones will cry out” (Luke 16:40). They are proclaiming His glories even now, if we have ears to hear.
Et tu, Moshe?
We need to pitch our tents on these points a bit longer before moving on (Number 9:15-23). God told Moses, in effect, “Just speak to the rock. Tell it to yield its water and it will, before your very eyes.” And Moses flat didn’t believe God: “Because you did not believe in me” (Numbers 20:12). If he had taken God at His word at this point, then he would have proved it by doing it God’s way. But the faith, the simple, childlike trust in God’s word simply wasn’t there in this instance. Like the people, who “tested the LORD by saying, ‘Is the LORD among us or not?’” (Exodus 17:7b), Moses too harbored his doubts. “Is He really going to make good on His word? Will He deliver on His promise to bring us through this howling wasteland and into the land flowing with milk and honey?” In other words “Is God really…God?” Numbers 23:19:
“God is not man, that He should lie, or a son of man, that He should change His mind. Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?”
If you were to ask the average Israelite of that generation these questions, his or her answer would be a resounding “Nope.” “God is a liar. He delivered us from our perfectly comfortable lives in Egypt apparently so that He could have the pleasure of torturing us to death in this miserable desert. So much for that covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” That is what they said, in both word and deed, throughout their wilderness wanderings. God was testing them for their good, in preparation for future blessing; they were convinced that God was merely toying with them to their detriment, in preparation for further disappointment. And God’s ironically appropriate, undeniably fair judgment was to allow them to self-fulfill their own prophecy: if they insisted on it, then that generation would die in the desert after all, but not because that was God’s intent.
Moses’ actions at the waters of Meribah reveal that on some level, even if to a far lesser degree, he too shared in his generation’s unbelief, in their rebellion. And through Moses’ punishment, God was trying to make this point loud and clear: Unbelief is a big deal. When God imposes an apparently disproportionate punishment on what seems to be a trifling peccadillo, it’s not God’s judgment that is off, it’s ours, and He’s trying to clue us in to that fact by grabbing our attention with a swift and decisive act of judgment (Leviticus 10; 2 Samuel 6:1-15; Acts 5:1-11). He is not overreacting to a minor infraction—we are not taking a major sin seriously, or perhaps even perceiving it to be a sin in the first place. He is not miscalibrated to His own holiness—we are.
Because God is the ultimate, infinite, all important all in all, and all created things exist from Him, through Him, and for Him (Romans 11:36), then it follows that unbelief in Him represents the greatest, most inexcusable, profoundly absurd blunder a creature could ever commit. There is no greater slap in His face than either explicitly or implicitly denying that He exists or denying that He is who He says He is. Who are we to gainsay God (Romans 9:20)?
When the crowds asked Jesus “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus replied “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 6:28, 29). The book of Hebrews states that “without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6). Paul points out in Romans 14:23b that “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” That’s how important belief in God is.
In this episode, Moses did not believe that God would do what He said He would do, either for him personally, for the people, or for their father Abraham before them (Genesis 12:3, 15, 17:3-8, 18:18, 22:15-18). To that extent, Moses did not believe in God Himself, that He was who He said He was. But this was inexcusable unbelief, even at that point in redemptive history. Moses and the Hebrew people had a much broader foundation to build their faith on than what they had witnessed with their own eyes, astounding as that was. They had the “more sure word of prophecy” (2 Peter 1:19).
God has told them that He would multiple them greatly as a people, and that is precisely what He did (Exodus 1:6).
He told them that they would be enslaved in Egypt for a time, but that He would deliver them gloriously out of their bondage, and that’s just what happened (Exodus 14).
He swore that He would bring them back to the land that He had led their forefathers to as sojourners and that they would possess it as their homeland—these too came to pass (Joshua 12).
He also said that all the world would be blessed through their nation, a promise that is being fulfilled to this very day (Isaiah 11:10, 42:1-4; Matthew 12:21, 28:19, 20; John 12:32).
Indeed, this testimony from the book of Joshua is true: “Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass” (Joshua 21:45).
And the people say “Amen, hallelujah, praise the LORD!”
At least, that’s what they should have said.
In spite of the abundant evidence that God had provided them to both stir and buoy their faith, the people stubbornly refused to believe that God would fulfill His yet-to-be-fulfilled promises. Hence, they constantly second-guessed God’s motives and maliciously accused Him at every turn (Exodus 14:11, 16:2, 3, 17:3; Numbers 20:3-5). “What, did you bring us out here to starve to death or die of thirst or something? Apparently there was a shortage of grave sites in Egypt? Why didn’t you just save us all the drama and kill us there instead?”
Yikes.
For this reason, that generation of Israelites became forever synonymous with hard-hearted, unapologetic, mind-blowing, unbelievable unbelief.
And we in so many ways are no different than they are. We are those Israelites. We utter the same grumbling complaints to God. We make the same audacious accusations. In short, we are simply kidding ourselves if we think we are a cut above them. We are made out of the same stuff as they were.
In support of this, Christians are repeatedly warned in the New Testament to be careful, lest we too fall short of entering our promised land. 1 Corinthians 10:11, 12:
“Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.”
And Hebrews 3:7-15 (emphasis mine):
“Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
‘Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said,
‘Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.’”
We Christians must be on guard against drinking from the same poisoned well of unbelief that tainted an entire generation in wilderness, save for only two individuals, Caleb and Joshua, who were men of a different spirit (Numbers 14:24) and entered the promised land by faith (Numbers 13:30). Only two from that generation entered in! “Lord, will only a few be saved?” (Luke 13:23).
Although Moses was characterized by a similarly exceptional spirit of faith, it was to the prevailing spirit of unbelief that he sadly succumbed to in the incident at Meribah. Like Elijah, Moses was a man subject to the same passions as we are (James 5:17). Aged and mature man of God though he was, Moses was also at times frustrated, angered, and provoked by the people.
After all, he wasn’t made of stone.
There’s something in the waters…
Stay tuned for part II next week. In it, we will discuss the surprising meaning behind the rock of Meribah and the lessons Christians must draw from its waters if we are to avoid profaning that which God calls holy.
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