http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15469289/was-the-apostle-paul-anti-semitic

I love Reformed theology (the doctrines of grace, the five points of Calvinism) the way I love a cherished picture of my wife. If I said, “I love that picture,” would you say to me, “But that’s not your wife. That’s a picture. You shouldn’t love a picture. You should love your wife”? If you said that to me, I would say, “I know it’s only a picture. I don’t love the picture instead of her; I love the picture because of her. I know the difference. She is precious in herself. The picture is not. It is precious only because she is.” The picture is precious because it reveals her. It does the best a picture can do.

That’s the way Reformed theology is precious. God is valuable in himself. Theology is not valuable in itself. It is valuable as a picture, a portrait, a window, a telescope. So, I love Reformed theology because I love God. I love Reformed soteriology because I love the sovereign Savior. Reformed theology makes me happy because God makes me happy. I find in Reformed theology a vast Lake Superior in which to paddle around and make thrilling discoveries because Reformed theology is a lake-sized picture of an ocean without bottom and without shores. And that ocean is God.

Few people have helped me go deeper or farther in that ocean than Jonathan Edwards. He wrote,

The enjoyment of [God] is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams. But God is the ocean. (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:244).

The truths of Reformed theology are shadows; God is the substance, the reality. The beauties of Reformed theology are beams; God is the sun. The depths of Reformed theology are the streams; God is the ocean. The delights of Reformed theology are sweet, but in God’s presence is fullness of joy, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11). Reformed theology is beautiful because God is beautiful.

Reformed Theology and the Centrality of God

The portrait of God in Reformed theology is beautiful first because it relentlessly foregrounds the greatness of God, the supremacy of God, the centrality of God, or — the word most often used in Scripture — the glory of God. Geerhardus Vos, a Dutch-American theologian who died in 1949, captured the central theme of Reformed theology when he wrote,

Reformed theology took hold of the Scriptures in their deepest root idea. . . . The root idea which served as the key to unlock the rich treasuries of the Scriptures was the preeminence of God’s glory in the consideration of all that has been created. . . . [Reformed theology] begins with God. God does not exist because of man, but man because of God. This is what is written at the entrance of the temple of Reformed theology. (Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, 241–42)

When we tried to formulate a mission statement for our church in 1995, which is still on the wall in our sanctuary today, we said, “We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.” That was our effort to give expression to what Reformed theology saw in the Bible — namely, that God is first. God is supreme. God is central.

Or to put it more accurately, God is not just the first reality, the supreme reality, or the central reality; he is Reality. He is the only reality that absolutely is. When God identified himself and gave himself a name in Exodus 3:14, he said, “I am who I am.” He simply and absolutely is. He never came into being. When there was no universe, and no space or time, there was God.

“Reformed theology is beautiful because God is beautiful.”

This is an electrifying truth! God simply is. Explosive. Wild. Untamable. It changes absolutely everything to know this. To foreground this and make it the bedrock, the capstone, and the all-pervasive reality of your theology will shape all thought, all feeling, and all of life and ministry.

Jonathan Edwards captured the supremacy and centrality of God like this:

All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God’s works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God. . . . The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, and the middle, and end [in this affair]. (God’s Passion for His Glory, 242, 247)

That’s a beautiful rendering of the truth and sentiment of the apostle Paul in Romans 11:33–36:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

Antidote for Pragmatism

I remember ten years into my pastorate reading this terrible indictment of Christian pastors from Albert Einstein, and resolving, God helping me, never to be guilty of this. Charles Misner wrote,

I do see the design of the universe as essentially a religious question. That is, one should have some kind of respect and awe for the whole business. . . . It’s very magnificent and shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing.

Reformed theology is beautiful because it is a great antidote to a kind of pragmatic, managerial, therapeutic dumbing down of the glory of God and the central reality of the universe and the Bible and life and ministry.

God’s Commitment to His Glory

One of the ways that Reformed theology portrays the glory of God and the centrality of God is by drawing attention not just to the God-centeredness of the Bible, but to the God-centeredness of God. God’s commitment to his own self-exaltation — his God-centeredness — permeates the Bible from cover to cover. And Reformed theology holds the great honor, the great beauty, of reveling in God’s God-centeredness. Listen to this litany of God’s God-centeredness — God’s zeal to see his own glory, his own name, exalted:

“He predestined us for adoption . . . to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Ephesians 1:5–6 my translation). God planned his praise.
“The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalms 19:1). He designed it that way.
“You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified” (Isaiah 49:3). That’s why he chose them.
“He saved them [at the Red Sea] for his name’s sake, that he might make known his mighty power” (Psalm 106:8).
“I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations” (Ezekiel 20:14).
“Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name. . . . And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name . . . and the nations will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 36:22–23).
“For my name’s sake I defer my anger; for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you. . . . For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 48:9–11).
“I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake” (Isaiah 43:25).
“[Jesus comes] on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10).
Jesus prays, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory” (John 17:24). He’s saying, “I died for this — that my people would see my glory. I will be central and supreme among my people.”

I know that a lot of people, thousands of people, do not at first regard God’s God-centeredness as beautiful and, therefore, they don’t regard Reformed theology as beautiful. As far as they’re concerned, what I just described is megalomania. Before C.S. Lewis was a Christian, he said he read texts like these and they sounded to him “like a vain woman wanting compliments” (Reflections on the Psalms, 109). When Oprah Winfrey was 27, she heard a sermon on God’s jealousy for his name and said, “Something about that didn’t feel right in my spirit because I believe that God is love, and that God is in all things,” and she walked away from biblical Christianity. Brad Pitt grew up in a Southern Baptist church but turned away because he said,

I didn’t understand this idea of a God who says, “You have to acknowledge me. You have to say that I’m the best, and then I’ll give you eternal happiness. If you won’t, then you don’t get it!” It seemed to be about ego. I can’t see God operating from ego, so it made no sense to me.

So, it’s pretty clear that many people do not find God’s God-centeredness — God’s self-exaltation — beautiful and, therefore, turn away from him and from Reformed theology. It’s like George MacDonald (one of C.S. Lewis’s heroes), who said (to my utter dismay so many decades ago), “From all copies of Jonathan Edwards’s portrait of God, however faded by time . . . I turn with loathing” (Creation in Christ, 81). That was like a gut punch to me as a young man, as I was falling in love with the God of Jonathan Edwards and this portrait of him called Reformed theology. I have spent the lion’s share of my thinking in the last fifty years trying to show that baked into the biblical portrait of God’s God-centeredness is a beautiful answer to the accusation of megalomania.

Answering the Objection

The answer goes like this: God’s commitment to making himself supreme and glorious and central is not megalomania, because unlike our self-exaltation, God’s self-exaltation draws attention to what gives us the greatest and longest joy — namely, himself. It doesn’t work that way with us. That’s why we don’t like human beings who exalt themselves. Our self-exaltation draws people away from the one thing that can satisfy their souls: the infinite worth and beauty of God in Christ.

If I say, “Look at me,” I’m your enemy. If God says, “Look at me,” he’s your friend. If you obey me when I say, “Come, drink at the fountain of my resourcefulness,” you will die. If you obey God when he says, “Come, drink at the fountain of my infinite resourcefulness,” you will live. When God exalts himself, he is loving us. He is showing and offering the one thing that can satisfy our souls forever — namely, God. If Psalm 16:11 is true (“In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore”), what should he do to love you?

He should stand on every mountain and in every church, and say, “I am that great. I am that great. I will satisfy.” In our very experience of supreme satisfaction in him, his ultimate purpose is fulfilled — namely, the magnifying of his own all-sufficient, all-satisfying glory, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. This is the answer to the accusation of God’s megalomania: when he offers us himself at the cost of his Son’s life, he is both magnifying his own worth and satisfying our souls forever. There is a name for this, and it is not megalomania. It is love.

Reformed theology is beautiful because it foregrounds the centrality of the glory of God and, therefore, provides the deepest and longest satisfaction to the human soul. But neither C.S. Lewis, nor Brad Pitt, nor Oprah Winfrey, nor that precious prodigal for whom you would lay down your life will ever see this beauty, unless God, by omnipotent sovereign grace, rescues them from the blindness of our spiritual depravity and death, which is the second thing that makes Reformed theology beautiful. The first was that Reformed theology foregrounds the centrality of God. The second is that Reformed theology exalts the sovereignty of God’s grace in saving sinners.

Reformed Theology and Sovereign Grace

Reformed theology takes seriously, with blood-earnest seriousness, the beauty-destroying, hopeless condition of human beings under the wrath of God and on our way to eternal punishment — if God himself doesn’t intervene. “For we have already charged,” Paul said, “that all . . . are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one’” (Romans 3:9–10).

The Bible describes us as spiritually dead and unresponsive to God (Ephesians 2:1), hardened in our hearts against spiritual reality (Ephesians 4:18), utterly unable to change ourselves: “The mind of the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7–8 my translation). We are, therefore, according to Romans 6:17, “slaves of sin.” And all of this is a depravity that makes us blind to the glory of Christ — the beauty of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4). To the natural human heart, Christ appears as foolish, or legendary, or mythological, or just boring and irrelevant. Without a miracle, a work of omnipotent grace, we are all hopeless in our alienation from God. No theology takes this miserable condition more seriously than Reformed theology, which is why no other theology can portray salvation by sovereign grace more beautifully.

God’s Will, Not Man’s

Reformed theology not only takes this hopeless condition seriously. It also takes sovereign grace seriously. Oh, the beauty of sovereign grace — the beauty-restoring power of sovereign grace! This means that our rescue from the deadness, blindness, and ugliness of depravity into the life and beauty of salvation is found in God’s sovereign will, not man’s free will. Reformed theology does not believe in the existence of human free will — not if you define it as the power of ultimate self-determination. Left to our so-called “free will,” we die, because by nature we love and choose sin. The freedom to be the master of our own fate means death. If there is any hope for us in our rebellion against God, the hope will be in God’s sovereign, total rescue. Reformed theology does not believe that God contributes a helpful 99 percent and we contribute the decisive 1 percent to our conversion.

When we all get to heaven and lay our crowns before the feet of Jesus, no one is going to say, “Thank you, Jesus, for the 99 percent that you contributed to my conversion, but there is one crown I’m not going to lay down at your feet — namely, the decisive 1 percent that I, by my free, self-determining will, provided; that crown belongs to my final, decisive spiritual discernment.” No one is going to talk like that. Because that’s not the way it happened — not for one person in this room.

Purchased, Called, Kept

Reformed theology bows to the beautiful, humbling, precious reality that the blood of Christ — the blood of the new covenant (Luke 22:20) — purchased a new heart for his bride: “I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19). Do you have the new heart that believes in Christ? That’s how it happened. Your new heart was bought with the blood of the covenant (1 Corinthians 6:20).

Then, on the basis of that bloody purchase in history, God actually did it in your life. He took away the blindness, and caused you to see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4–6). He caused you to see the spiritual beauty of Christ crucified as compelling. Christ became your supreme treasure (Matthew 13:44). You experienced the gift of faith (Ephesians 2:5–10). And then he gave you the Holy Spirit as a down payment, a guarantee, a seal (2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:14). And he speaks these words over every one of his blood-bought, believing children: “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good . . . with all my heart and all my soul” (Jeremiah 32:40–41).

Are there any more beautiful words for a 78-year-old sinner to hear (or an 18-year-old sinner) than this: “You are mine. I will keep you. You will not make shipwreck of your faith. No one can snatch you out of my hand. I bought you, I called you, I own you, and I will keep you”? Is there anything more firm, more beautiful than that?

Yes. There is one more brushstroke to add to this canvas of beautiful, sovereign salvation from the ugliness of total deadness and blindness and depravity. And that brushstroke makes the firmness of sovereign grace as deep as it can possibly be. I will read it to you from 2 Timothy 1:9: “[God] saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” You will never love him, worship him, obey him, or enjoy him the way you ought until your heart leaps up with this reality: God gave me saving, sovereign grace in Christ Jesus before the creation of the universe. He chose me. He predestined me to believe, to be his child — “to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Ephesians 1:6 KJV) — before the foundation of the world.

Depraved, chosen, purchased, called, and kept (T.U.L.I.P.). We are saved by sovereign grace, infinitely beautiful sovereign grace. Reformed theology is beautiful because the God of sovereign grace is beautiful. Oh, that this sovereign God would look with such favor on the Acts 29 movement that nothing could move you from holding and heralding this beautiful and beautifying Reformed theology.

The people of Israel had been enslaved for hundreds of years in Egypt. The time for their deliverance had come, and God sent Moses to lead the people out of Egypt after ten devastating plagues and by a mighty defeat of Pharaoh at the crossing of the Red Sea. They camped first at Marah. From Marah they moved to Elim. From Elim to Dophkah. From Dophkah to Alush. And from Alush to Rephidim (Numbers 33:8–15), where we meet them in this text.

According to Exodus 16:1, they entered this region only six weeks after their deliverance. It is as though everyone in this room had seen God divide the Red Sea with your own eyes on May 1, 2022. This generation of Israel in just the last months had seen some of the greatest miracles in the history of the world.

There are four scenes in Exodus 17:1–7. Every one of them is brimming with implications for your life. As we read the text, I’ll pause after each scene to see if we can summarize its main point.

Scene 1: A Waterless Camp

All the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the wilderness of Sin [pronounced “seen,” a transliteration of the Hebrew proper name Siyn, with no reference to what we mean by “sin”] by stages, according to the commandment of the Lord, and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. (Exodus 17:1)

Main point: God led his people to a campsite with no water.

This was his plan. He led them there. You can see this in middle of verse 1: they moved “by stages, according to the commandment of the Lord, and camped at Rephidim” (Exodus 17:1). “By stages” means that there were two other stages between the wilderness of Sin and Rephidim (Dophkah and Alush). Moses makes no mention of them here because he has one point to make: God is commanding the movements of Israel (pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night, Nehemiah 9:19), and his command brings them to Rephidim, which has significance for one reason in this story: there is no water to drink.

If you are a Christian, this is your life. God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15). “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). Hundreds of you came to this conference encamped at Rephidim — where there is no water. As far you can see it’s wilderness in every direction and, from a merely human standpoint, your circumstances are going to end badly. There is no human way out. And this text says: You are not there by accident. Your ways are ordered by the Lord (Proverbs 20:24). And one of the purposes of these seven verses, and this sermon, is to help you see and feel why that is good news.

So, the main point of Scene 1 is: God has led his people to a campsite with no water.

Scene 2: An Angry Protest

Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’ And Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?’ But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” (Exodus 17:2–3)

Main point: God’s people did not trust that God’s providence is good, but accused Moses and God of harmful purposes.

In verse 2, the people take issue with Moses. Whatever is happening here — whatever it is — is not happening fast enough, and so they demand water. “Give us water to drink!” In essence Moses responds, “Your quarrel is out of place. It’s not a quarrel with me. When you quarrel with me you are trying God’s patience.” “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” (Exodus 17:2).

“Story after story after story in the Bible, including this one, is God’s roar from heaven: ‘Trust me.’”

Then in verse 3, we hear the heart of the indictment. They don’t ask, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt?” They ask, “Why did you bring us out to kill us and our children?” They aren’t questioning God’s timing. They are questioning his goodness. They aren’t saying that God is incompetent to give them water. They’re saying he doesn’t intend to. His purposes aren’t saving. They are murderous.

When Moses says, in verse 2, “Why do you test the Lord?” there’s a warning in those words. Don’t try God’s patience. It runs out for people who don’t trust him, who despise his ways. We know how the story of this generation ends.

None of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test [tried my patience] these ten times and have not obeyed my voice, shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers. And none of those who despised me shall see it. (Numbers 14:22–23)

We may not understand all the reasons why God chooses a waterless encampment for us. But story after story after story in the Bible, including this one, is God’s roar from heaven: “Trust me. Trust me.” They didn’t. That’s Scene 2.

Scene 3: A Life-Giving Presence

So Moses cried to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” And the Lord said to Moses, “Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.” And Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. (Exodus 17:4–6)

Main point: God’s life-giving presence toward absolutely undeserving people goes on. His patience has not run out. Not yet.

What is God’s answer to Moses’s question in verse 4, “What shall I do with this people they are almost ready to stone me”? His answer is, “I’m going to give them water to drink.” But to make it as amazing as possible, he describes four ways that this miracle of life-giving grace comes about.

First, the miracle will be public. “Pass on before the people” (Exodus 17:5). They indicted us in public. We will be vindicated in public, “before the people.”

Second, it will be well attested by the elders. “Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel” (Exodus 17:5). This will become part of what they know and teach and how they judge the people.

Third, this miracle will be seen as a continuation of the miracles of the ten plagues in Egypt. “. . . and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go” (Exodus 17:5). Moses only struck the Nile once with his staff. “In the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants he lifted up the staff and struck the water in the Nile, and all the water in the Nile turned into blood” (Exodus 7:20). In other words, “With this staff I turned water into blood. Today I will turn a rock into water.” Same staff. Same power. Same God. Same grace. True then. True today in your waterless wilderness.

Lastly, this miracle of life-giving grace will come about by the Lord’s presence. This is best of all. This is most wonderful. “Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink” (Exodus 17:6). “I will stand before you on the rock.”

“God says ‘My presence is your life. I brought you out of Egypt to myself. You think you need water? You need me.’”

He might have said, “I’m done with this rebellious people” and withdrawn his presence. But he didn’t. And he might have said, “I will not defile my presence with this sinful people anymore. I will go to the top of mount Horeb and unleash my lightning bolt, and strike this rock and bring water from the depths of the earth.” But he didn’t do that either. He said, “When you strike the rock, I will be standing on the rock.”

Why would he do that? Because what the people need more than water is the presence of God. The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life (Psalm 63:3). What, after all, has been the point of God choosing the people of Israel, making a covenant with her, leading her down to Egypt, bringing her out by a mighty hand, and taking her out into the wilderness? Here’s the way God says it in Exodus 19:4–5:

You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples. (Exodus 19:4–5)

He is saying, “I am taking my stand on the rock that will give you life, because my presence is your life. I brought you out of Egypt to myself. You think you need water? You need me.”

So the main point of Scene 3 is: God’s life-giving presence toward undeserving people goes on. His patience has not run out.

Scene 4: A Memorial of Failure

And he [Moses] called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the Lord by saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7)

Main point: Moses memorializes their failure to believe in God’s saving presence.

The story does not have a happy ending. There is no repentance. There is no awakened faith. There’s not even any water, just a promise of water. “The people will drink” (Exodus 17:6). No doubt the water came. God keeps his word. But Moses means for the story to end on a note of failure: Israel’s failure, not God’s.

Moses doesn’t name the place “Grace abounding,” or “Water from the Rock,” or “God is faithful.” He names it Massah and Meribah. Massah means “testing.” Meribah means “quarreling.” Then he makes the meaning explicit: “. . . because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the Lord” (Exodus 17:7).

Scene 4 harks back to Scene 2 where Moses said, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” (Exodus 17:2) And that’s where the story ends — memorializing Israel’s quarreling and testing — almost. Moses has one final indictment at the end of verse 7. He means for us to see the greatest failure in the light of the greatest gift. So verse 7 ends, “They tested the Lord by saying, “Is the Lord among us or not” (Exodus 17:7). God had said, “I will stand before you on the rock” (Exodus 17:6). The people said, “We don’t even know if he’s here or if he intends to kill us.”

Don’t Harden Your Heart

So, we step back now and ask, “What is Moses’s aim — God’s aim — in telling us this story?” The way Moses tells the story, failure is foregrounded. The story begins and ends with Israel quarreling with Moses and testing God. It begins and ends with unbelief. They don’t trust God. They harden their hearts against him. “God brought us into this waterless encampment and he doesn’t intend to be here for us.” And the trumpet blast of this text, echoing throughout the Bible and today, is: Don’t be like that.

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work” (Psalm 95:7–9).

“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’” (Hebrews 3:7–9).

“[They] all ate the same spiritual food [manna], and all drank the same spiritual drink. . . . Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. . . . We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did. . . . Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction. . . . Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:3–12).

In other words, this failure of Israel to trust God in the wilderness reverberates through the whole Bible. And the message is: “When God brings you into a waterless encampment, and you see wilderness stretching in every direction with no way out, don’t be like Israel! Trust him. Trust him. He brought you into the wilderness. He can bring you out. He led you to Rephidim where there is no water. There’s only a dry rock. And he will take his stand on the rock and be your life.”

Will he? Even in 2022?

Confidence for Waterless Campsites

For many of us, the great obstacle to joyful confidence in the waterless wilderness is not that God can’t save us, but the question, “Will he?” And the great obstacle to believing that he will is our sin. How can God be a just and holy God, and do what he did in Scene 3?

Surrounded by a thankless people who say that God brought them out of Egypt to kill them, God says, “Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock . . . and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink” (Exodus 17:6). How can God be righteous and act as though the despising of his name had so little consequence? Our very hearts cry out, “I have scorned the name of the Lord, in all my doubting and all my unbelief and all my despairing in my wilderness. Will God not simply join me in the belittling of his name by sweeping my sins under the rug of the universe? How can I ever be saved — how could they ever be saved — by a righteous and holy God?”

In the mind of the apostle Paul, there was no greater problem facing humankind. How can God uphold the righteousness of his name while showing mercy to God-belittling, God-despising sinners? How is Scene 3 in this passage even conceivable? God offering himself as our life while surrounded by the outrage of people indicting him as evil?

Paul has an answer to this greatest of all moral problems. I’ll read it you from Romans 3:25:

God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation (a satisfaction of God’s justice) by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Thunderclap of Justice and Mercy

When God passed over the sins of Scene 2 and Scene 4 and poured out mercy on sinners in Scene 3, was he unrighteous? Was he belittling his own name? Was he taking his holiness lightly? No. Because he knew what he would do in 1,400 years to vindicate his righteousness.

“The death of Jesus is a thunderclap of this truth: No sin is ever merely passed over! Ever.”

The death of Jesus is a thunderclap of this truth: No sin is ever merely passed over! Ever. It will be paid for in hell. Or it was paid for on the cross. No quarreling with God’s word, no testing of God’s patience, ever goes unpunished. Ever. God’s righteousness is absolute. And the unspeakable mercy of Scene 3 (Exodus 17:6) is owing directly to the blood of Jesus. “[The blood of the Son of God] was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins” (Romans 3:25).

Every undeserved blessing shown to God’s elect in the Old Testament was bought by the blood of Jesus. When Paul made that strange statement in 1 Corinthians 10:4 about Israel in the wilderness, “They drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4), this is what I think he meant:

The undeserved blessing of water from the rock, the undeserved blessing of manna from heaven, the undeserved blessing of deliverance at the Red Sea, the undeserved blessing of guidance day and night in the wilderness are all owing to cross of Christ. How right it is, then, to say, the rock was Christ, the manna was Christ, the deliverance was Christ, the pillars of guidance were Christ, because God’s guilty people could enjoy none of that without the blood of Christ.

And so it is for you who are in Christ. You who despair of your sinful selves and know that God owes you nothing. So it is for you. Every undeserved blessing you will ever receive is owing to the death of Christ. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). Not just he can give us all things, but he will. He will. He will give us everything we need to do his will, and glorify his name, and make it home.

When he leads you into the waterless encampment of Rephidim, and there is no human hope, trust him. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). Everything you need has been purchased, above all, himself, for your enjoyment now and forever (1 Peter 3:18).