The Israelites are free.
They’ve escaped slavery in Egypt. They’ve crossed the Red Sea. They’ve seen God act in ways they could hardly have imagined.
And now they’re thirsty.
In Exodus 17:1–7, this isn’t a minor inconvenience. The people are in the wilderness with their children and livestock, and there is no water. There is no convenience store just around the corner, and there are at least several hundred thousand of them. Their fear is real. Eventually they put the deeper question into words:
“Is the LORD really with us or not?”
It’s easy to look back at their story and wonder how they could possibly doubt after everything they had already seen. But yesterday’s evidence of God’s faithfulness does not always calm today’s fear.
Sometimes doubt is not the opposite of faith. Sometimes doubt is what faith sounds like when it is thirsty.
Faith does not require us to pretend we aren’t thirsty or to call the wilderness a garden. Faithful people can still ask hard questions.
That becomes part of Israel’s larger challenge. Getting Israel out of Egypt happened fairly quickly. Getting Egypt out of Israel would take much longer. They had been set free, but they still had to learn how to live as free people. Freedom didn’t mean they would never again experience fear, uncertainty, hunger, thirst, or danger.
Before Moses strikes the rock, before the water begins to flow, God tells him, “I’ll be standing there in front of you on the rock.”
Big point: God is already there.
The people ask whether God is really with them. They can’t sense it, even though he is there with them. God doesn’t answer with a lecture. He gives thirsty people water.
That sounds a lot like grace.
Our uncertainty doesn’t make God disappear. Our questions don’t chase God away. Our fear doesn’t mean we have failed at faith.
When the diagnosis comes, when relationships change, when money gets tight, when grief lasts longer than expected, we may find ourselves asking Israel’s question too. We don’t have to manufacture certainty. We can bring God our thirst, our fear, and even our doubt.
And little by little, through grace, we learn what free people have always had to learn:
We are not walking through the wilderness alone.
We’d love to see you in person at Lincoln Park-Lynnwood United Methodist Church, 3120 Pershing Street, Knoxville, TN. Come as you are. We’re not in the judging business. We’re in the welcoming business.
