Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - When You're Questioning God's Goodness | Torah | Exodus 15:22-27

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

When is it hard to trust that God is good? Do you ever doubt God's character? What do you think about God when life is hard? In today's episode, Patrick uses Exodus 15:22-27 to share how to remember God through trials. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Exodus 15:22-27 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller, and right now we're going through the Book of Exodus. As a pastor, I'm party to a lot of tragedy. In many ways, I feel like I see a lot more sadness than maybe the everyday person does. I've known more people than I can count on one hand who've had children die of cancer. I know people who've lost fathers and mothers at a young age, leaving children without a parent or one parent at home. I've seen in so many different ways how this world and its

brokenness and its hurt and suffering can make all of us question the goodness of God. Is he present? Does he care? One particular example has stuck out to me for a long time. This was a family at her church who had a little girl. She was 10 and she was going through a prolonged battle with cancer. And at the age of 10, she ended up dying. And I've got a little girl. She's not 10 yet. she's six, but it's so easy for me to imagine what those parents were thinking. I mean, as a parent, you never expect to bury your child. You certainly never expect to bury them before they're even a teenager. And that's what these parents were going through.

And I can't imagine the question that they had internally. I mean, God, why would you allow this? God, where were you when we needed you to show up and heal our daughter? God, how can you be good in childhood cancer be a thing? How are we supposed to go on? How are we just to trust you in the future? I know those are the questions that I would be asking, and I know it's the questions that those parents were asking. But after their daughter died, they found her diary, and they were reading through it, looking through it, and she was writing down her experiences.

And as it turns out, she had a lot of those exact same questions. But they noticed something. On every page, or a lot of the pages, there was a little note, a little personal memo written. And it was the exact same phrase over and over and over again. the moon is still round. It's kind of a weird phrase, and they honestly didn't know what it meant until they put some puzzle pieces together. And I want to tell you what it means, but before I do, I want to shift over to the story of Israel. Because in a lot of ways, Israel was going through something similar after the Exodus.

You see, they had just witnessed God do something miraculous, stupendous, absolutely impossible. He had just liberated them from the most powerful military force in the world. And now they were free. They weren't slaves anymore. But as they leave Egypt, as they leave the Red Sea behind them, with all of Pharaoh's armies drowned beneath, they came up against a problem. Thirst. See, they were in the middle of a desert. And as anybody knows, there's no water in deserts. There were no wells. There were no rivers. They had no way to quench the thirst that they all had. And you die if you get thirsty. You especially die in the desert. And so in the midst of that, understandably, they began to doubt and question God. God, have you rescued us through the Red Sea just to let us die of thirst here in the desert? You can imagine the questions they're asking, and not just for themselves. I mean, these are parents with young children. Their children are thirsty. Their children are on the edge of death, and they're wondering, God, where are you? God, what are you doing? Let's pick this up in Exodus 15, verse 23. When they came to Mara, they could not drink the water of Mara because it was bitter. So they

find a place, finally, and you have to imagine what this is like, we need water. Oh, there's water in distance we arrive and it's bitter water. In other words, it's brackish water. They can't drink it. It would make them sick if they did. And therefore, the Bible says they named it Mara. Mara is the Hebrew word for bitter. And the people grumbled against Moses saying, what shall we drink? Again, they're asking, what are we supposed to do? How are we going to live? Where is God? I mean, has he rescued us just to bring us here? And again, as I read this story, I couldn't help but think of parents who lost kids who say, look, Jesus, I know what you did for me. I know that you died for me. I know that you rescued me. And yet you rescued me for this? Just to watch my child die, just to watch my child

hurt? This is what it's all for? The passage goes on, and it says, and he, Moses, cried to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a log, and he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet. There the Lord made for them a statute and a rule, and there he tested them, saying, if you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes. I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians for I am Yahweh, your healer. It's the ending that we all want, right? I have a need. Something's going terribly wrong and God shows up to heal it. And that's what every parent wants when their child is sick, and yet that's often not the answer that we get. And so, of course, the question becomes,

why does Israel get God's rescue, the physical rescue that they needed? And the passage lays it out. God's saying, I allowed you to get thirsty so that I could test you, so that you would turn to me in your moment of need and see that I do ultimately provide. But here's what we don't get in the story. We don't get that this is not going to be the last time that Israel struggles because they need food, that Israel struggles because they need water. And in all of those instances, God is challenging them to say, remember what I did back then. I will provide a, for you now, if not in this life, and the life to come. God is saying, look back at what I've done here in the past and remember in the future. I am with you. I have not abandoned you. I have not let you go. Of course, Israel is a lot like us. When these moments repeat, they don't remember God rescuing them from Egypt. They don't remember the Red Sea collapsing on Pharaoh's armies. They don't remember God

making the bitter water drinkable. They forget all of it. And they say, where's God? He's not present. He's not here. He won't help us. He's abandoned us to our situation. And this takes me back to that family whose little 10-year-old girl died and the insight that she had inside of her journal. See, remember what she wrote? She kept writing, The moon is round. The moon is round. The moon is round. Finally, her parents put together what it meant.

You see, if you look up in the sky and you see the moon, depending on the time of the month, it doesn't actually always look round. In fact, most of the time, it doesn't look round at all. And so if all you have is the evidence of your eyes, which you see right in front of you, you might draw the conclusion. that the moon is not always round. But the truth is, of course, what she wrote in her journal, the moon is always round. No matter what it is you see, no matter what it is you experience with your eyes,

the truth is, the moon is always round. And she was telling herself that about God. She was saying, if I just look at my situation right now, it looks like God isn't good. It looks like God isn't here. It looks like God's abandoned me, and he's left me to this terrible fate.

but the moon is always round. God is always good. I might not be able to see it. My circumstances might obstruct my ability to understand it. And yet the truth behind what I'm experiencing is that the moon is round. God is good. And that's what God wanted the Israelites to see in this moment. He was saying, look, see the truth.

The moon is round. I am with you. I will keep you. I will walk with you for the rest of your days. God did the exact same thing for us in Jesus. When Jesus came to Earth, He became a human. He took on flesh.

He took on pain. He took on a poor and in many ways miserable life and existence. And he didn't stop there. He obeyed God until the point of death. Death on a cross, one of the worst deaths imaginable. And he did all of this for you. He did all of this so that he could rescue you from your sin. So that he could spend the rest of eternity with you.

And so, yes, there's going to be things in this life that will make you forget what he's already done. They'll make you forget that the moon is round. died for me. Jesus loved me. Jesus gave up everything for me. There's things that will obstruct your view and you'll look and you'll look at your life circumstances and the pain and the hurt and everything else that you're going through and you will think, ah, the moon isn't round. It's a crescent. My situation proves that God isn't good. Don't let circumstances obstruct your view of the goodness of God. Don't let the circumstances convince you that the moon isn't in fact round. That's the lesson that a 10-year-old girl learned in the midst of cancer. And it's a lesson that so many of us is

teenagers and adults as the elderly have to be reminded of again and again when circumstances seem so dark. The moon is round. God is there. He is good. He will be with you. And even if things don't work out in this life the way you would want them to, he has you protected, totally secure, and the life to come.

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