40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 79 (Exodus 15:22-27)

Episode Date: April 11, 2017

Chad Bird and Daniel Emery Price talk about how the Israelites (and us) struggle to be free. The faithfulness of God is shown again as they find themselves in need of water and God does something odd but very crucified to provide it. Check it out! 

welcome to 40 minutes in the old testament i'm daniel emery price joined by chad bird wearing his rock and roll san antonio shirt looking like uh he's looking he's just looking hardcore today so we must be we must be heading into some into some hardcore stuff we got some hardcore exodus stuff coming up here dan we are we're gonna rock and roll out into the desert for a long time for yeah this is yeah this is not a marathon this is like it's like a this is not even ultra marathon i don't know what you call this it's like a race all its own 40 years going around and around and around this is this is like the the ultra of ultra marathons right here this is the the not so amazing race yeah this is the race you don't want to have anything to do with

you're not going to make it out there is no finish line at least for most of most everybody there's not going to be well so so this is uh this is what happens uh we finished up chapter what we chapter 14 yeah we finished at 14 yeah and we did uh we sang our way through uh at least most of 15 yeah and uh and now moses is about to uh about to lead them out into the uh try to get to them get them to the promised land yeah yeah you know of course that that doesn't that doesn't work out But, yeah, so this was, you know, I think sometimes we forget that, that this was not what was supposed to happen. The Pentateuch was not supposed to be as long as it is because it should have been a whole lot shorter. Because a lot of numbers, for instance, takes place when, you know, they're out there wandering in the wilderness.

So it's like a lot of the Bible. And maybe I've said this before in the podcast. I don't know. But, you know, if if there never had been any real problems among God's people, the Bible would be an extremely short book. Right. You take out all this history, you take out all of these these books of the prophets, you take out a whole lot of Paul's epistles. Yeah. I mean, if the church was, you know, basically a pretty good place and the people of God didn't really have a lot of issues. issues and the bible would be like what you know 50 pages long so instead we got all these books

because there's all these problems that take place in the church so uh uh you know nothing nothing new here that's for sure so yeah the 40 years is not what was supposed to happen uh they were supposed to go from egypt to sinai from sinai to the promised land and uh and that that didn't work out but it's our it's to our benefit in many ways because we get to see what happened to them and we see what happened to them happening in our own lives a lot of the time and so we we see ourselves in their story we see how they acted how god interacted with them and we end up learning and we end up seeing that uh the fidelity of god to israel is the same fidelity that he has to us as well you know i've heard um conflicting information

uh and have never really thought to do the actual research about uh how long this journey should have taken if it was just sort of a straight line from the red sea to sinai from sinai to the promised land done uh do you have an opinion on how long about that should have been you know i've read that before but i have uh in my uh in my old age i've forgotten forgotten that the uh the average travel time would be about i mean the average travel per day is about uh with a large group you're looking at 10 to 15 miles so uh this i'm i'm just taking a guess here but uh just a matter of months they would have been there yeah if of course that's that's taken into account the fact that they stayed at sinai for for a while it's not like you know they arrived

there god gave commandments they left the next day moses himself was on top of the mountain for 40 days so they were there for a while uh but yeah i mean well let's just say easily within one year of leaving egypt and then staying for a while at sinai uh they would have been in the promised length yeah so it's about it's at least 40 times longer than it should have been yeah at least 40 times longer than it than it should have been yeah you know this is uh i was thinking about this uh looking over the stuff this morning that uh this is kind of like what you might call the uh the teenage years for israel in fact uh hosea i was looking at this passage in hosea i think it's chapter two where he talks about he actually uses that language he talks about israel being in the

wilderness in the days of her youth uh-huh i mean it's kind of a i think it's a good way to think about this whole episode in in israel's long long history but these are kind of like you know the days of her youth these are her teenage years and you know anyone who's a teenager or been a teenager or raised teenagers, knows that, you know, there's a lot of testing. There's a lot of rebellion. There's a lot of heartache. There's just a lot of growth that takes place in those teenage years. And that's kind of where Israel is at.

I mean, yes, yes, Israel has existed well before this because, you know, you trace it all back to Abraham and his sons and grandsons and so forth. So you had Israel before this point. But it's only in Exodus that you really see Israel becoming not just kind of this extended family, really a nation with a leader in organization. And as we'll see as we go on, a very organized kind of liturgy or worship with the tabernacle and all that stuff. So the national status of Israel, as they perceive themselves and as really other nations perceive them, really doesn't happen until you get out of Genesis and into Exodus. So anyway, yeah, so this is kind of like their beginning of national history, their teenage years before they get into the promised land. And so there's going to be a lot of grumbling, a lot of heartache, a lot of testing and tribulation and a lot of other sufferings along the way.

But this is Israel growing up. This is them experiencing what we all do. It doesn't have to happen when we're teenagers. It can happen when we're in our 20s or 30s or 50s or 60s, for that matter. But whatever those times in our life when we seem to be kind of pushing things and rebelling and God is testing us and kind of stuck in this wilderness, that's really what Israel is going through now. I think that there's a parallel to where, you know, these aren't people that have ever known what it's like to be free. I mean, these are people that have been born into slavery. And they have no idea what to do with freedom, which I think is sort of the way we are.

is uh when we are uh delivered uh by god and and set free uh we don't we don't always use that freedom in the best way we sort of flounder around in it and misuse it and don't trust god and uh and part of that's just that uh and we we almost have to be instructed in our freedom um because we've never been free before and we have we the only thing we know are slavery and leeks and onions and the reason we we want to go back to that stuff is because uh freedom feels foreign and and we've never we've not learned how to how to wield it well at all we don't we don't have it we have no how could we we've never never been free before our fathers weren't free uh you know i mean there's no they they have they have no basis for like how to do this man that's that's

a great point uh you know it's it's almost like you could extend this out really to the whole christian life that the the entirety of the christian life is is getting accustomed to the freedom that we have absolutely i think paul is like an absolute theologian of freedom and i think you see him over and over again do this i mean when when you look at israel as as a type of of the church and so the individuals as types of Christians Paul talks all the time about

the freedom of the Christian even to the point of after like an insane gospel rant in Romans 5 when he does that famous thing at the beginning of Romans 6 where he asks the question so should we send in that grace when we abound

and he says by no means the reason he gives is not yeah don't do that because you know you know god will hate you or god will be mad at you or or any or anything like that like the reason he gives is like well that that sin is a really bad use of freedom that's that's what he gives that's what he says he says like no the reason you don't the reason you don't sin that grace may abound is because sin is slavery and like that and and so you're tying yourself back up to your slave master and taking a beating and that and you know that that's terrible yet that's

what we find we do that a lot uh and you see israel doing that a lot too like they just they don't know how to handle freedom uh we're not we're not used to it uh there's there's part of slavery that we have a uh an affection for for whatever reason and uh yeah so i i think absolutely you can scan the entirety of the of the bible and say and see that people are have a hard time being free. They have a hard time getting used to it. They have a hard time learning how to live like that. That is the Christian life.

Yeah, I mean, that is how we were conceived and born. Just like Israel comes out of the womb of slavery in Egypt into this freedom that God gives to them.

That's how we all start. We're conceived and born in sin. David says in Psalm 51, that he was a sinful from the time his mother conceived him so that's that's where we all come from that's we all emerge out of slavery and so that is that is our default uh position when we're making decisions when we're trying to figure out what to do we all tend to revert back to that servitude under the law to that slavery because we don't know what to do with our freedom absolutely the first thing i guess someone does the first thing a free man does is is uh carve an

idol he always does like like he's like you're free you're like sweet i'm gonna need something to worship yeah let me make myself a slave of something yep something false yeah yeah so i mean it really is phenomenal that uh what happens here to israel is is as contemporary as it is absolutely this is this you know that is one of the beautiful things and hopefully if you've been listening for a while you realize this that uh reading through in genesis or exodus or any part of the old testament is not like visiting a museum you know it's more like walking into a family reunion yeah this is this these are my people you know and there's my crazy drunk uncle over there and there's my cousin who's been in all kinds of trouble, and here I am,

and I've got all these skeletons in my closet. I mean, walk in the Old Testament is like that. You're surrounded by people who have all sorts of scars and problems and addictions and temptations, and you see that same stuff within you as well. So all this is utterly contemporary because human nature hasn't changed. We see ourselves reflected in these biblical stories, and the same God, of course, reflected in them as well. So there's a lot to learn. Yeah, yeah. Does this mean we just skip right to Sinai and just jump, go ahead and jump?

Just about. Just about. Let's see what happens along the way here. This is one of those hard transitions that the Bible often gives us where you go from like the mountaintop and you plumb it off into the valley just like that with the snap of the finger. So you're – just kind of picture this. You're at the Red Sea. You've just seen God do this awesome deliverance where he crushes the Egyptians and their bodies are floating up on the shore. And everybody, all the Israelites are joining together, singing their lungs out, praising God for what he's what he's just done. You've got Miriam and and the women, they've got their musical instruments. And I mean, this is like a this is like a victory party that's going that's going on.

OK, this takes us all the way through verse 21 of chapter 15. And then it's like we jump from the party to the funeral. we jump from this this you know these songs of rejoicing to murmuring and and complaining and we we go from this place where there was almost too much water to a place where there's there's no water at all and the water that is there is is bitter so bitter that you can't drink it so this like i said is one of these hard transitions that you often have in the scriptures where you go from everything's fantastic to everything's horrible so i'm looking at verse 22 of chapter 15 it says right after right after they sing right after the red sea it says then

moses led israel from the red sea and they went out into the wilderness of shur and they go three days into the wilderness and they find no water so uh not looking good so far this three days by the way could be literal it could be uh just kind of a a standard kind of literary usage of three days being like a long time not quite a week but several days i mean you have that often often in scripture sometimes it is a literal three days sometimes it's like you know we'll say yeah i'll see you in a couple days a couple days might be four it might be two it might be five but we don't mean that literally as two days when it's a couple days and often scriptures do that as well they say three days and really what they mean are a few days well

i think that i mean i might get called a heretic here but uh the uh i mean i had someone ask me just just the other day about um we're approaching easter and so you have the you have like the you have the passion week and i was and i was talking about having the the good friday service and they were like uh just so you know friday to sunday is not three days i'm like yeah it's friday saturday sunday they're like yeah but friday night to sunday morning not three days that's like not even two days like yeah it's not 72 hours yeah and so and and uh but the bible does that right i mean it's like that's three days are represented there uh it's you know it's not it's not uh doing things the same way we do it yeah the bible especially when it comes

to numbers does not have kind of this uh exactitude mathematical exactitude that we do yeah when we say three days well we expect it to be three days right 72 hours no this is this is just the the idiom that the that the scriptures use over and over and over i mean they use it with 40 they use it with 12 they use it with with three uh and it this is just this was accepted no one would have thought oh well that's wrong because it's not exactly three days well they just this is the way they talk just like i said earlier you know and we actually do this in english you know i could tell you you know there is a million things wrong with this situation and not for one moment

I mean not for a minute I'm a literalist I'll be like list them I'm a one through a million not for a moment does anyone actually take that literally and think oh man really there's a million things not just a thousand

so we even we exaggerate like that all the time with numbers and everybody realizes this because this is part of the idiomatic usage of English It's like that with Hebrew as well, so three days. Well, that's one of the reasons too why you ought not get distracted with numerology with the Bible where you're trying to make – you're trying to like crack the biblical code with all the numbers and stuff because these numbers are a little bit rounded off, let's say. I mean, you see this by, like, the, I mean, look at the, if you look at the amounts of, again, we do this, but you see people do this, like, you have 8,000 plus 4,000, and you're like, okay, but, like, dude, it wasn't, like, exactly eight and exactly, like, what are you talking about?

Like, you think, like, literally exactly 8,000 dudes died in this battle? Like, exactly 8,000. Or is it like when we say, like, oh, there's this battle in World War II and 9,000 guys died? We don't mean that, like, actually. 9,001 or 8,999. No. It's like it's around that many. Yeah.

Yeah. So, like, that's why I don't play the numerology. Yeah, that's ignorant. it's just yeah don't do it that's the way numbers work in the bible yeah i mean there's some symbolism there of course you know with 12 and three and some other things yeah but it's not a it's not a code for you to crack numerology is is very different you're not going to figure out the date that jesus can return by cracking the uh children in the wilderness code of the numbers no they get it a good app so they go a three day they they go a few days three days in the

no water all right now we got we got an issue because of course that's a long time to go without a water source and then they come to a place where there is water but they can't drink it it's a place called uh mara mara however you want to say it which means bitter by the way says they came to mara and they couldn't drink the waters of mara because they were bitter they were uh they were marine and therefore they call it mora so first of all there's no water and then when they finally find some water it's it's uh it's undrinkable because it's so it's so bitter so this this begins kind of a uh this this first episode that we're looking at now is really kind of the uh what's where i'm looking for that i guess the pattern the template

for what's going to happen over and over in the wilderness. You'll have a certain sequence of events that will happen. You'll have something bad happens. It could be a lack of food or water. It could be that you have enemies attacking. It could be you're trapped. I mean, there's lots of things that can happen, but something bad happens,

and then the people generally react negatively. they grumble or they murmur at god or at moses or at both of them so they react in that way and uh then sometimes there's a penalty that's imposed by god like when the people grumbled and he said the fiery serpents sometimes there's not uh then you have some kind of crying out that takes place and often that's moses praying that god will bring some kind of deliverance and then god does so you have this this template of these sequence of events that happens over and over again and this is the first episode of these so there's no water when they find some it's bitter at mora so the people grumble at moses and they say what are we going to drink

and uh he he cried then moses cries out to the lord and now and now we have a little uh Hebrew that we have to throw in. It says, and the Lord showed him a tree. Now, the verb, the verbal root there for show is yara in Hebrew. And yara means to show, to point out, to throw something. It also is the verbal root for to teach.

in fact this the the root for show and the root for teach are exactly the same like we say we show someone something that means we're you know we're we're teaching someone something we're showing them something we're opening their eyes to it so that's what the lord does here you could say that the lord taught him this tree that is in the sense of showing in this tree now the reason this is important is because what we're going to get to it in a minute but i just want to point it Point that out now. There's kind of the root of teach or Torah that's already in the showing of the tree. I'm going to come back to that in a minute. So he shows him a tree.

And Moses throws this tree into the water. And lo and behold, the waters which had been bitter now become sweet. Then we have this added. And this is where the whole bit about teaching in Torah becomes important. He goes on to say this, there he made for them a statute and a regulation, and there he tested them. And he said, if you will give earnest heed to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his sight, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians. For I, the Lord, am your healer.

now what's going on here with uh what god says afterward and then the showing of the tree is is i think this god is using this first instance of deprivation where they're thirsty and complaining to show them that throughout the years of their wilderness wanderings that they are to live solely by his word so god teaches moses this tree he shows moses this tree which then sweetens these bitter waters and then he follows that up with this talk of listening to his voice giving ear to his commands keeping all his statutes as a way of reminding them that they don't live by bread alone nor do they live by water alone as far as that goes but they live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of of god so this first instance is god's way

of emphasizing that they live by what he says that his word is going to is going to be their their daily their daily bread it's interesting too that we have here really uh the first instance of where you kind of have a swap that takes place. So when we were in Egypt, you had all of the plagues happening. And what you're going to see happening, beginning here and in other places, is sort of the opposite of the plagues. So you remember the first plague. The first plague was where Moses puts his staff over the Nile,

and the Nile turns into blood so that the people weren't able to drink. but here you have the people unable to drink and so moses he doesn't use a staff but he uses in this case a tree or a branch of a tree and the waters which were undrinkable are now drinkable as a result of this tree that that god pointed moses to so it's the exact opposite in egypt the egyptians were deprived of the water of the nile to drink but now that we're in the desert in the wilderness just with god's people he's going to use wood this tree or this branch in order to make waters drinkable for his people and we're going to see this time and time again in fact in the next chapter uh we're going to see quail that come up and cover the camp which provide

food for the israelites and the same two hebrew verbs for come up and cover are the two hebrew verbs that are used back in the, uh, the plague where the, uh, in the, in the plague where the locusts came up and covered the ground and ate up all of the, all of the vegetation where the people didn't have any, any food. So this is kind of the, the, uh, the reversal of the plagues that happen in, in the wilderness where God is doing for the Israelites good as opposed to the bad that he did to the egyptians back in uh back in captivity so he uh he changes the waters from bitter to sweet he shows them that uh they they live by his by his word alone and then he finishes it all out by saying that uh he is their he is their healer i the lord am your healer so he's

the one who changes bitterness to sweetness death to life lack of water to abundance of water lack of food to uh to lots of to lots of food and this then is also striking the same note that we're going to see throughout the rest of these uh testing periods and deprivation episodes in in exodus yeah so that's uh that's chapter 15 well you know i don't think it's uh i don't think it's accidental that uh god chooses to uh i mean okay god could have you throw anything he wants into the water and i don't think it's accidental that you have this like this this show or reveal or this teaching of the tree and that he's going to use a tree to turn the bitter to sweet But when we know that, I mean, many times in Scripture, the cross will be referred to as a tree.

So you have things like cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree, this kind of thing, right? I mean, I would go so far as to say that the tree of life is really just the cross. I mean, it's there in the garden because Jesus is the Lamb of God who was slain before the foundation of the world. and the tree of life is sort of uprooted from Eden and planted on Calvary and the fruit that hangs off of it is the body and blood

of the Son of God which is what you must eat and drink to live forever I mean hey just saying but I don't think it's also accidental that Moses is instructed like hey you want to make that bitter

sweet you want to you you need water to live you need you need some you need some living water but like the water's all polluted tell you what you do is i'm gonna purify that water i'm gonna do it with a tree which i think is the reason it doesn't say you know hey take you know whatever it is i mean like it even even if you're talking about a branch i mean like you were saying like the word there is tree and i think the reason the word there is tree is because the way that god makes bitter things sweet uh or things that uh you were were not able to uh can you know partake of things that you can partake of the way he's going to give you life ultimately is is through a tree

he's going to pure that's where he actually purifies stuff yeah that's a that's a fantastic point and i love as you were talking i was thinking and i love what what you're doing is because it's it's a great it's a great uh example of how we we don't of how to read the scriptures that's what i'm trying to say we don't read the old testament as if the new testament didn't exist right you know we so we don't we don't read this and say to it but the reason i point this out is because i think sometimes people are are inclined to do this they read exodus 15 for instance and they play mind games with themselves they'll save themselves okay okay all right i'm just going to read this but i can't think about the tree of the cross

i can't i can't think about the new testament because i i've just got to put myself in this particular historical situation i've got to build walls around myself and pretend like this is all that i know well no that that is not the way that we read the scriptures that's never been the way that the church has read the scriptures in fact that's not even the way that the jews read the scriptures in fact the the rabbis have this principle they call it uh that there is no there is no before or after there is no earlier or later in the torah that is they don't read things like in genesis 1 as if they don't know deuteronomy right they don't read things in exodus as if they don't know leviticus because they're they're reading this all as a kind of

an organic organic whole and that's that's the same thing that we do i mean it'd be kind of like if if if it's good friday and we're talking about the crucifixion of jesus it'd be like us pretending that we don't know that there is an easter right but yeah you don't read the bible you don't read the bible it was with the idea that god isn't trying to tell one story because he is and i mean okay so if you if you take exodus i mean exodus is about the deliverance of God but the salvation of his people

it is no stretch I mean we're going to see this again I mean you're going to see this serpent be raised up on what like up on a piece of wood like I mean this happens over and over and over again you see the Red Sea

and like the New Testament explicitly talks about that being a type of baptism and all this kind of thing right so um no it's it's like it's all there so it's it's no stretch to be like okay so you're gonna do this and do like like what are what are you showing us you're showing us pictures of what of where this story is ultimately going which the entirety of the old testament is ultimately going to the cross i mean all of it is so that's what theologian of the cross does i mean it it reads the Old Testament and the entirety

of the Bible through the cross. That's not just where we're going. Again, Jesus is the Lamb of God who was slain before the foundations of the world. In other words, before the world had its foundation, before God spoke

everything into existence that is, that's still the identity of Christ. Still the identity of the Word. The Word is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of a world not yet created he's the lamb of god slain for a world that does not yet exist but that doesn't change the fact that that's who he is that's how that's that's his identity that's who he

identifies himself as and so uh you you all of this has to be read then uh not just in light of where we're headed in the cross but as the cross is at the beginning in the middle and at the end Which is why I think you have the tree of life In the garden You have the tree of life In the crucifixion And I would not be surprised Now this is speculation

I would not be surprised We know in Revelation We have The tree of life is present In the new heavens and new earth I personally do not Believe that that's an actual tree But I actually think that the cross is there

as people who sing worthy is the lamb who was slain for all eternity that's the song we sing we never we never get oh even in even when we're recreated we still don't get over the cross we're singing about it like forever and ever and ever um and so i don't think that there's a tree there that we that we like oh we got to eat from this if we want to continue to be immortal but instead I think that there will be actually the cross is there as a joyous reminder

of how this redemption was obtained for us because ultimately I think that's what the tree of life is about yeah it's the center of the Christian's life it's the center of the church's life and it's the center of it's crazy but it's the center

of the new heavens and new earth which is nuts yeah yeah so everything from that down to the center of our of our reading of the scriptures it becomes the way it's the way in which we understand who god is it's the way we understand who we are to him and so it becomes the lens through which we read every every part of the scriptures yeah and by the way that tree of life if it indeed isn't is the cross there is there is like water flowing by it because oh yeah because it just does happen to make things clean yeah yeah i mean that's all that all flows from uh the vision that ezekiel has ezekiel is taken to this

this new temple in this vision and water flows out from underneath the side of the temple and as it goes it deepens and it deepens and trees of life grow on either side of this uh this river so you and then john expands on that in revelation 21 and 22 in what what you've been talking about but all and all this comes from of course genesis so you got genesis the tree of life the river that flows out of eden you've got ezekiel's vision with the temple the water flows out of the trees of life then you got revelation where the lamb is the temple and from him flows out this stream of living water and the trees of life that are that are there so even in the scriptures themselves from beginning to end and the middle you've got the tree of life which is

the image of the tree of the cross which is our which is our true true tree of life this informs all these other stories about trees and water like we see in exodus 15 yeah i mean it's just like god uh for us to to look at the cross and say that is an instrument of death and for him to say no son that is the tree of life yeah that's uh uh that's ultimately where where he leads us it's it's it's the great reversal uh and this i uh i think i've written about this before where uh golgotha the place of the skull is uh is known at least traditionally because it was understood that the that the tree of the cross was over the the burial place of adam so the skull was the skull of adam and there you have the tree of life the true tree of life the cross over death itself

The death that we have in Adam And we have the new Adam With a new tree of life Bringing life to all of us Because of the blood that he sheds I don't know if you know this Chad But to throw a tree Into

A river or a stream Or whatever you gotta chop it down And to make A tree into a cross You also have to chop it down It's not like you can throw a tree in fill the water without cutting it down.

It's not like they didn't chop to have a cross. They didn't just find a tree and nail you to it. They cut that thing down and fashioned a cross out of it. There's even death. There's a death of something in God's creation in the

making of these instruments of salvation, of these instruments of life. God just works like that. This thing's going to die and this thing's going to be brought to life? Yeah, with God, life always comes out of death. Light out of darkness.

That's the way he works. And so you take a dead tree and it brings life to these waters. And ultimately, it's the death of God in Christ that brings life to all creation. Yeah, it's pretty rad stuff, dude. It is. So are you trying to tell me, or am I trying to tell you, are we trying to tell each other and the listener that ultimately the Old Testament is about the cross?

I do think that's the conclusion we've come to. I think it is. I think that is the conclusion. And that is the conclusion because that's it. That's it. That's the end of the 40 minutes. Well, we bunny-trailed around a little bit there, but hey, I mean, the cross is always a good rabbit hole to go down,

So, no, I'm not going to apologize this week. Hey, guys, I don't know if any of you guys are around in the Detroit area, but if you are and you want to come hang out, May 6th we're going to be doing a city event out near Detroit at Faith Lutheran Troy, Michigan. You can go over to Christholdfast.org and go to the events page and see what we're doing there. Also, you can check out the Here We Still Stand conference in October

to celebrate the Reformation with us. That information there as well. So, Chad, thanks for hanging out, man. Hey, loved it. All right. We'll see you guys next week.