Читать книгу Who is this Rock? - Garrett Soucy - Страница 8

But Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword. (Exod 17:12–13)

There is something addictive about the work of ancestry recovery. Rarely is the myriad of narratives that was woven together to make us who we are talked about in detail. One are two generations back is often the limit of our capacity to name our ancestors. Imagine if it you were to find out that a notable person had been discovered in your ancestry. Imagine if it were someone you’d never heard of, but someone with a story that others have remembered. It is the most natural thing in the world to begin to read about this person, even to hunt down photographs and crane one’s neck at different angles in front of the mirror to see if we can find the resemblance.

Moses is an ancestor of all true believers. God used him to preach about himself to those who are able to hear the sermon. In this Exodus passage, Moses is positioned by God into a crucible of sorts. It is in this strange posture that God will proclaim down the corridor of time the message that, in order to experience the victory of God, we must live in dependency on God.

Immediately after the event at the Rock of Horeb, the Scriptures take us to a battle between the Amalekites and the Israelites. The battle takes place in Rephidim, the region in which Israel was already camped, where God brought water from the rock.

Remembering how God had used his staff to repeatedly broker great outcomes, Moses tells Joshua to choose some men to go into the valley and engage Amalek, while he will place himself on the hill, overlooking the valley, staff in hand.

The Amalekites were relatives of the Israelites. This makes the attack so much more than an ambush from local infidels. We are told in Genesis 36 that Amalek is a grandson of Esau. These descendants of Esau travel out of Canaan and attack Israel without provocation. Many assume that the idea behind their offensive would be to try to gain the upper hand on this legendary people by attacking Israel before they make their way to Canaan and displace them. God will not forget this attack, as is clear in the closing verses of Exodus 17, but also in the remembrance of it in Deuteronomy. The attack, according to God, was a direct assault against the Creator. They didn’t fear God, we are told. Family traditions die hard. For this reason, Israel was being prepared to move into the land and destroy the remnant of this and other wicked people groups.

When Moses begins to grow weary, the two men who are with him, Aaron and Hur, place a rock under their leader so that he can perch himself atop it, while the men each position themselves on either side of the old man, in order to hold up his arms; for when his arms were in the air, Israel prevailed in battle, and when his arms would drop, Amalek would prevail.

No doubt, there are times when people might be tempted to think of events like this as dubious accountings. This is not the case. Why might someone think of this scene as being riddled with superstition? Because the reader is supposed to believe that when an old man held a magic stick in the air, one army would prevail over another. It can sound childish and uncivilized. The truth is that we are not dealing with magic. We are dealing with a God whose actions are not only powerful but didactic. He is not simply proving himself, but he is teaching all generations about himself.

What is the teaching in this battle? What is the promise we conflate with the power? Can it be that the gospel is being preached to believers, generations after this event, in the details of the account?

Firstly, we would be amiss to not recognize that this is the second time in this chapter that someone has perched themselves atop a rock. Only a few verses prior, as we saw in the last chapter, God told Moses that he would place himself atop the Rock just prior to Moses’ striking it. This was done so that the message being proclaimed down the hall of time would reverberate loud and clear. Paul tells us that the message was that Jesus was the Rock. For those who believe that the Son is co-eternal with the Father, this not only makes perfect sense, but it helps us to see the gospel cohesion in all of Scripture.

Now, just six short verses later, Moses is placed atop a rock. To have been given such gospel insight into the similar event at Horeb by Paul, and to then miss the gospel symbolism taking place in this battle with Amalek, would be tragic.

Is there a consistent Biblical description of how God uses the concept of the rock, and if it were to be applied in this passage, would the motif retain consistency? Clearly, the intent of this book is to show that this is the case, but, to begin with, see what David says, per the inspiration of the Holy Spirit:

The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. (Ps 18:2)

This is a warrior, speaking of God as a rock, and by that he means success in battle. Incontrovertibly, David’s warrior terminology extends far beyond literal war, even in his own day, although it does include literal war; however, in the New Covenant, the warrior analogies are applied literally to the truer and only still-standing enemies: spiritual strongholds. New Covenant believers can sing the imprecatory Psalms, but they must sing them against lust and greed . . . not Assyrians nor Persians. David, being a true believer in the Old Covenant, employs a mix of the literal and the spiritual.

The epitome of a successful battle would not only be the efficient conquering of one’s enemies, but also the successful protection of one’s own peoples. The latter is being sung about in the above-cited Psalm. On all sides, David says that God has been a Fortress, a Deliverer, a Refuge, a Shield, a Savior, and a Stronghold. He references God as being all these things in one word which he repeats: Rock.

Now, we see Moses, the leader of the people of God, stationed upon the rock, and a direct relationship emerging between this and the victory over their enemies. But this is not the only thing taking place. They are not only being kept safe and delivered from their own deaths, but they are winning the battle as well:

For who is God, but the Lord? And who is a rock, except our God?—the God who equipped me with strength and made my way blameless. He made my feet like the feet of a deer and set me secure on the heights. He trains my hands for war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You have given me the shield of your salvation, and your right hand supported me, and your gentleness made me great. You gave a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip. I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed. (Ps 18:31–37)

The only Rock that exists, is God, says David. He then goes on to describe, in the very same chapter, how God is not only a Rock who saves his people from their enemies, but he is a Rock who crushes the enemies of his people. Those who love to sneak and set traps, David says further on in Solomonic fashion, will be devoured by them. Such is the case with Amalek. Moses is seated on the Rock, and the battle is being won for the people of God. Moses is stayed on the Rock, and the Rock is undoubtedly the Rock of Salvation.

But the Rock upon which Moses sits is only part of the gospel message. There are other pieces built into it. Moses is seated on the Rock, but his arms are held up by other men from the camp. His arms are held up; his staff is in his hand; and Moses is growing weary.

The man of God, in this Exodus passage, is a mighty leader. He is a Bible hero unparalleled. But what is the message in this passage? The victory is not only related to the man of God being established on the Rock, but it is required of him that he remain in a posture of surrender and dependency. To fail to do so is to lose the battle. Aaron and Hur are not commissioned to cheer him on. They are commissioned to hold his arms up. What curious irony. The leader of the people exists in a perpetual state of surrender, that by doing so they might be victorious in battle. The only way this makes sense is to place it all under the rubric of gospel logic. Every person who surrenders to Christ is truly victorious:

Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 18:3b)

After the event at Horeb, Moses renamed the place, and he gave it two names. One name meant quarreling and one name meant testing. The quarreling commemoration was made because the people fought with one another and with Moses. Even down to this day, it is remembered of them that they complained and argued. The other name was given because the people tested God. Moses even says in what manner they did such a thing:

And he 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?” (Exod 17:7)

What they had done to test the Lord was to question whether or not he was still among them. And so, Moses stands with his hands raised in surrender to the Lord, and Israel wins. Imagine the shock and fear that must have raced through him when he made the connection between their success of the troops and the position of his hands. Moses is showing us what it looks like not only to be a godly leader, but to be a godly believer. It is to live in dependency on the Rock, both beneath us and above us.

It would have been the simplest thing in the world to deny that it is possible that his own arms being raised was the key to the success against Amalek. The simplest thing would be to confess a wave of self-centeredness and a brief encounter with the world of Messiah complexes. Moses could have slapped himself in the face a few times and asked Aaron to pinch him. What was he thinking? There is no way that a guy raising his arms in the air—or not—could determine the outcome of war. But it was not about a man raising his arms in the air or not. It was always about whether or not God was preaching the gospel through Israel for the rest of human history after him to receive. To put his arms down would have been to surrender to the unbelieving error that God must not actually be among them.

I remember a time when a woman who was not very old came down with a sudden sickness and was immediately on the brink of death. It was quite sudden and certainly a shock to the congregation. Everyone was praying for healing, despite the fact that hospice had been called in and the family had gathered to say their farewells. Remarkably, and in an unforeseen manner, this woman began to come out of the sickness and nearly as rapidly returned to a healthy form of functioning.

A friend was leading the call to worship the Sunday after this woman’s recovery and she chastised the congregation. “How dare we?” she said. “How dare any of us suggest that this woman’s tenacity is the cause for her recovery. How dare we use quippy sayings about us knowing she had it in her. We have prayed to God as our only hope, as the One who holds the power of life and death in his hands. If this woman has recovered, God alone should get the glory.”

It was a prophetic rebuke. How easy it is for us to be unbelieving in reference to God’s sovereignty over and involvement in the world. One could enter any number of jokes here about praying petitioners saying, “Forget it God, a helicopter is here now.”

This concept of believers being people who live in dependency on God weaves through the entire Bible. We find it in the letter that Paul wrote to the church in Galatia. The primary issue with these folks is that they had started flirting with a return to the customs and traditions of Judaism. That, on its own, isn’t the worst thing about their condition. The recovery of things like circumcision and food laws was most problematic because they stripped Christ from his rightful position as the fulfillment of these things, and they were rejecting the sufficiency of Christ in relation to both justification and sanctification. This Galatian error is best summed up in the following manner:

Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (Gal 3:3)

The fact that Paul has to address the error in how these folks lived—after being justified—shows that the poison of a works-based righteousness has crept beyond the borders of justification and has made its way into the fabric of sanctification as well. They had forgotten the simple truth that a mature Christian was not someone who could spar with theologians in the original languages. Not at all. A mature Christian is someone who has walked with the Lord for a long time and never put their arms down. To suggest that a continuance in the faith looks different than dependency on the Spirit is foolishness, according the Spirit of God:

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. (Heb 11:24–26)

Moses is preaching a sermon to all the believers that would come after him. He is showing the church, more than anyone else, what godly leadership looks like. Firstly, it is dependent on membership in the body. Aaron was Moses’ brother. Josephus, the Jewish historian, informs us that Hur was Miriam’s husband, making him Moses’ brother-in-law.7 He is Caleb’s son, making the kinds of lineages represented in this battle strongly contrasted. We hear about Hur a couple of times. We hear about Aaron more so. They were both men that God had given Moses to help him in leading the people of God.

Moses began to grow weary, and Aaron and Hur were the ones to place him on the rock, and to hold up his arms. They helped him show the people of God what dependency on God looked like. They came alongside him, literally, and helped him to do his job. This is kingdom leadership. It is leadership that cannot be accomplished without help. Kingdom leadership is encompassed on all sides by dependency: Moses is seated on the Rock, hands raised to heaven, arms held up by his friends. Now we begin to see what makes Moses such a great believer, his posture is that of a child.

Here is the lesson of perseverance as well. Moses did not persevere. He was persevered. All endurance requires an external perseverant. For the believer, this is ultimately promised to be God himself.

Being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. (Col 1:11–12)

These hands that are being held in the air are the very hands that held the tablets of the Law. They are the hands that carried the Word of God to the people of God, and now God is fashioning them to show the people of God how to abide in him. Just as Jesus declared that the Word of God was a thing never to pass away, so the Rock stands as this fixed marker, unwavered by the years and the calamities. Should this all go on for millions of years from now, there will be men and women of God whom he raises up, who place themselves on the very same Word and will not be shaken. They will stand in the line of Moses, whom God established as an example for New Covenant believers throughout the world, of what it looks like to be shipwrecked upon the shores of the living God.

I Need Thee, Every Hour

(Annie S. Hawks, 1872)

I need thee every hour,

in joy or pain;

come quickly and abide,

or life is vain.

I need thee, O I need thee,

every hour I need thee.

O bless me now, my Savior;

I come to thee.

7. Josephus, Antiquities Book III, 69.