MERIBAH.
Exo 17:1-7.
The people, miraculously fed, are therefore called to exhibit
more confidence in God than hitherto, because much is required of
him to whom much is given. They have now to plunge deeper into the
wilderness; and after two stages which Exodus omits (Num 33:12-13),
and just as they approach the mount of God, they find themselves
without water. Even the Son of Man Himself was led into the
wilderness next after the descent of the Spirit, and the avowal by
the voice of God; nor is any true Christian to marvel if his seasons
of special privilege are succeeded by special demands upon his
firmness.
One finds himself conjecturing, very often, what nobler history,
what grander analogies between type and antitype, what more gracious
and lavish interpositions might have instructed us, if only the type
had been less woefully imperfect--if Israel had been trustful as
Moses was, and the crude material had not marred the design.
It would be more practical and edifying to reflect how often we
ourselves, like Israel, might have learned and exemplified deep
things of the grace of God, when all we really exhibited was the
well-worn lesson of human frailty and divine forbearance.
In the story of our Lord, it has been observed that before the
Pharisees directly assailed Himself, they found fault with His
disciples who fasted not, or accosted them concerning Him Who ate
with sinners. And so here the people really tempted God, but openly
"strove with Moses," and with Aaron too, for the verb is a plural
one: "Give ye water" (Exo 17:2).
But as Aaron is merely an agent and spokesman, the chief value of
this tacit allusion to him, besides proving his fidelity, is to
refute the notion that he sinks into comparative obscurity only
after the sin of the golden calf. Already his position is one to be
indicated rather than expressed; and Moses said, "Why do ye quarrel
with me? wherefore do ye try the Lord?"
But the frenzy rose higher: it was he, and not a higher One, who
had brought them out of Egypt; the upshot of it would only be "to
kill us, and our children, and our cattle, with thirst."
Look closely at this expression, and a curious significance
discloses itself. Was it mere covetousness, the spirit of the Jew
Shylock lamenting in one breath his daughter and his ducats, which
introduced the cattle along with the children into this complaint of
dying men? Shylock himself, when death actually looked him in the
face, readily sacrificed his fortune. Nor is it credible that a
large number of people, really believing that a horrible death was
imminent, would have spent any complaints upon their property. The
language is exactly that of angry exaggeration. They have come
through straits quite as desperate, and they know it well. It is not
the fear of death, but the painful delay of rescue, the discomfort
and misery of their condition in the meanwhile, the contrast between
their sufferings and their own conception of the rights of the
favourites of heaven, which is audible in this complaint. And thus
their "Trial" and "Quarrel" are admirably epitomised in the phrase
"Is Jehovah among us or not?" a phrase which has often since been in
the heart, if not upon the lips, of men who had supposed the life
divine to be one long holiday, the pilgrimage an excursion, when
without are fightings and within fears, when they have great sorrow
and heaviness in their hearts.
Because God is not a Judge, but a Father, the murmurs of Israel
do not prevent Him from showing mercy. Accordingly, when Moses
prays, he is bidden to go on before the people, bringing certain of
their elders along with him for witnesses of the marvel that was to
follow. Such is the Divine method. As soon as unbelief and
discontent estranged the Jews of the New Testament from Christ, He
would not vulgarise His miracles, nor do many mighty works among the
unbelieving. After His resurrection He appeared not unto all the
people, but unto witnesses chosen before. And as the Jews were
chosen to bear witness to Him among the nations, so were these
elders now to bear witness among the Jews, who might without their
testimony have fallen into some such rationalising theory as that of
Tacitus, who says that Moses discovered a fountain by examining a
spot where wild asses lay.
With these witnesses, he is bidden to go to a rock in Horeb (so
nearly had these murmurers approached the scene of the most awful of
all manifestations of Him whose presence they debated), and there
God was to stand before them upon the rock, making His universal
presence a localised consciousness in their experience.
A true religion is progressive: every stage of it leans on the
past and sustains the future; and so Moses must bring with him "the
rod, wherewith thou smotest the river." The dullest can see the
fitness of this allusion. Among all the wonders which the shepherd's
wand had wrought, the mastery over the Nile, the plague which
inflicted an unwonted thirst upon the inhabitants of that
well-watered field of Zoan, was most to the purpose now. To kill and
to make alive are the functions of the same Being, and He Who
spoiled the Egyptian river will now refresh His heritage that is
weary. At the touch of the prophetic wand the waters poured forth
which thenceforth supplied them through all their desert wanderings.
Reserving the symbolic meaning of this event for a future study,
we have to remember meanwhile the warning which the apostle here
discovered. All the people drank of the rock, yet with many of them
God was not pleased. Privilege is one thing--acceptance is quite
another; and it shall be more tolerable at last for Sodom and
Gomorrah than for nations, churches and men, who were content to
resemble soil that drinketh in the rain that cometh upon it oft, and
yet to remain unfruitful. Already the conduct of Israel was such
that the place was named from human worthlessness rather than Divine
beneficence. Too often, it is the more conspicuous part of the story
of the relations of God and man.
AMALEK.
Exo 17:8-16.
Nothing can be more natural, to those who remember the value of a
fountain in the East, than that Amalek should swoop down from his
own territories upon Israel, as soon as this abundant river tempted
his cupidity. This unprovoked attack of a kindred nation leads to
another advance in the education of the people.
They had hitherto been the sheep of God: now they must become His
warriors. At the Red Sea it was said to them, "Stand still, and see
the salvation of the Lord ... the Lord shall fight for you, and ye
shall hold your peace" (Exo 14:13). But it is not so now. Just as
the function of every true miracle is to lead to a state of faith in
which miracles are not required; just as a mother reaches her hand
to a tottering infant, that presently the boy may go alone, so the
Lord fought for Israel, that Israel might learn to fight for the
Lord. The herd of slaves who came out of Egypt could not be trusted
to stand fast in battle; and what a defeat would have done with them
we may judge by their outcries at the very sight of Pharaoh. But now
they had experience of Divine succour, and had drawn the inspiring
breath of freedom. And so it was reasonable to expect that some
chosen men of them at least will be able to endure the shock of
battle. And if so, it was a matter of the last importance to develop
and render conscious the national spirit, a spirit so noble in its
unselfish readiness to die, and in its scorn of such material ills
as anguish and mutilation compared with baseness and dishonour, that
the re-kindling of it in seasons of peril and conflict is more than
half a compensation for the horrors of a battle-field.
We do not now inquire what causes avail to justify the infliction
and endurance of those horrors. Probably they will vary from age to
age; and as the ties grow strong which bind mankind together, the
rupture of them will be regarded with an ever-deepening
shudder,--just as England today would certainly refuse to make war
upon our American kinsmen for a provocation which (rightly or
wrongly) she would not endure from Russians. But the point to be
observed is that war cannot be inherently immoral, since God
instructed in war the first nation that He ever trained, not using
its experience of His immediate interpositions to supersede all need
of human strife, but to make valiant soldiers, and adding some of
the most precious lessons of all their later experience on the
battle-field and by the sword. Now, it assuredly cannot be shown
that anything in itself immoral is fostered and encouraged by the
Old Testament. Slavery and divorce, which it was not yet possible to
extirpate, were hampered, restricted, and reduced to a minimum,
being "suffered" "because of the hardness of 'their' hearts" (Mat
19:8). The wildest assailant of the Pentateuch will scarcely pretend
that it fosters and incites either divorce or slavery, as, beyond
all question, it encourages the martial ardour of the Jews.
And yet war, though permissible, and in certain circumstances
necessary, is only necessary as the lesser of two evils; it is not
in itself good. Solomon, not David, could build the temple of the
Lord; and Isaiah sharply contrasts the Messiah with even that
providentially appointed conqueror, the only pagan who is called by
God "My anointed," in that the one comes upon rulers as upon mortar,
and as the potter treadeth clay, but the Other breaks not a bruised
reed, nor quenches the smoking flax (Isa 41:25, Isa 42:3, Isa 45:1).
The ideal of humanity is peace, and also it is happiness, but war
may not yet have ceased to be a necessity of life, sometimes as
ruinous to evade as any other form of suffering.
Another necessity of national development is the advancement of
capable men. The empire of Napoleon would assuredly have withered,
if only because its chief was as jealous of commanding genius as he
was ready to advance and patronise capacity of the second order. It
is a maxim that true greatness finds worthy colleagues and
successors, and rejoices in them. And while the guidance of Jehovah
is to be assumed throughout, it is significant that the first
mention of the splendid commander and godly judge, during all whose
days and the days of his contemporaries Israel served Jehovah, comes
not in any express revelation or commandment of God; but the
narrative relates that Moses said unto Joshua, "Choose out men for
us and go out, fight with Amalek: tomorrow I will stand on the top
of the hill with the rod of God in my hand." They are the words of
one who had noted him already as "a man in whom is the Spirit" (Num
27:18), of one also who had unlearned, in the experience now of
eighty years, the desire of glittering achievement and martial fame,
who knew that the deepest fountains of real power are hidden, and
was content that another should lead the headlong and victorious
charge, if only it were his to hold, upon the top of the hill, the
rod of God.
Once it was his own rod: with it the exiled shepherd controlled
the sheep of his master; that it should be the medium of the
miraculous had appeared to be an additional miracle, but now it was
the very rod of God, nor was any cry to heaven more eloquent and
better grounded than simply the reaching toward the skies, in long,
steady, mute appeal, of that symbol of all His dealings with
them--the plaguing of Egypt, the recession of the tide and its wild
return, the bringing of water from the rock. Was all to be in vain?
Should the wild boar waste the vine just brought out of Egypt before
ever it reached the appointed vineyard? And we also should be able
to plead with God the noble works that He hath done in our time. For
us also there ought to be such experience as worketh hope. As long
as the exertion was possible even to the heroic force which age had
not abated, Moses thus prayed for his people; for the gesture was a
prayer, and a grand one, and must not be criticised otherwise than
as the act of a poetic and primitive genius, whose institutions
throughout are full of spiritual import. While he did this, Israel
prevailed; but the slow progress of the victory reminds us of these
dreary centuries during which we are just able to discern some
gradual advance of the kingdom of Christ on earth, but no rout, no
collapse of evil. And why was this? Because the sustaining and
permanent energy was not to flow from the prayers of one, however
holy and however eminent; three men were together in the mountain,
and the co-operation of them all was demanded; so that only when
Aaron and Hur supported the sinking hand of their chief was the
decisive victory given.
Now, the lesson from all this does not concern the High-priestly
intercession of our Lord, for the office of Moses is consistently
distinguished from the priesthood. Nor can the notion be tolerated
that if our Lord requires mortal co-operation before asking and
being given the heathen for His heritage, which is obviously the
case, the reason can be at all expressed by that weakness which
needed support.
No, the Lord our Priest is also Himself the dispenser of victory.
To Him all power is given on earth, and to Him it is our duty to
appeal for the triumph of His own cause. And here and there,
doubtless, a Christian heart is fervent and faithful in its
intercessions. To these, unknown, unsuspected by the combatants in
the heat of battle,--to humble saints, some of them bed-ridden,
ignorant, poverty-stricken, despised, holy souls who have no
controversial skill, no missionary calling, but who possess the
grace habitually to convert their wishes into prayers,--to such,
perhaps, it is due that the idols of India and China are now bowing
down. And when they cease to be a minority in so doing, when those
who now criticise learn to sustain their flagging energies, we shall
see a day of the Lord.
Observe, however, that as the active exertion of the host does
not displace the silence of intercession, neither is it displaced
itself: Joshua really bore his part in the discomfiture of Amalek
and his host. And so it is always. The development of human energy
to the uttermost is a part of the design of Him Who gave a task even
to unfallen man. Let none suppose that to labour is (sufficiently
and by itself) to pray; but also let none idly persuade himself that
while energies and responsibilities are his, to pray is sufficiently
to labour.
Thus it came to pass that Israel won its first victory in battle.
Another step was taken toward the fulfilment of the promise to
Abraham to make of him a great nation; and also toward the gradual
transference of the national faith from a passive reliance in Divine
interposition to an abiding confidence in Divine help. Let it be
clearly understood that this latter is the nobler and the more
mature faith.
With martial ardour, God took care to inculcate the sense of
national responsibility, without which warriors become no more than
brigands. So it was with Amalek: he had not been attacked or even
menaced; he had marched out from his own territories to assail an
innocent and kindred race ("then came Amalek" Exo 17:8), and
his attack had been cruel and cowardly, he smote the hindmost, all
that were feeble and in the rear, when they were faint and weary,
and he feared not God (Deu 25:18). Against all such tactics the
wrath of God was denounced when, because of them, Amalek was doomed
to total extirpation.
Moses now built an altar, to imprint on the mind of the people
this new lesson. And he called it, "The Lord is my Banner," a title
which called the nation at once to valour and to obedience, which
asserted that they were an army, but a consecrated one.
* * * * *
Now let us ask whether this simple story is at all the kind of
thing which legend or myth would have created, for the first martial
exploit of Israel. The obscure part played by Moses is not what we
would expect; nor, even as a mediator, is the position of one whose
arms must be held up a very romantic conception. If the object is to
inspire the Jews for later struggles with more formidable foes, the
story is ill-contrived, for we read of no surprising force of Amalek,
and no inspiriting exploit of Joshua. Everything is as prosaic as
the real course of events in this poor world is wont to be. And on
that account it is all the more useful to us who live prosaic lives,
and need the help of God among prosaic circumstances.