Time to Cooperate
‘Next time’ was not long coming. ‘Drought’, and here we are again. Post crisis solutions may be short lived and trust in leadership can be very ephemeral.
But why, in a desert, were they so put about by a shortage of water. (vv 2,5). Had it never happened before? Or had they experienced it before and found ways of dealing with it, but learned nothing from the experience about the desert’s hidden water resources?
To appreciate the spiritual (as well as the practical) element of this story it helps to move beyond gasping at the miracle. How much of a miracle was it and how much a story of learning to recognise the miracle behind the miracle? God doesn’t provide water out of thin air. What he does is to work through nature to provide for his creatures. In the desert water courses through rock formations, a very real and natural part of his creation. Survival is learning to cooperate with God’s creation and miracles happen when we learn to recognise that and work with it.
So why didn’t these people do it? Answers can only be speculative. Possibly because they had grown up in Egypt where, though slaves, water and food could be taken for granted. It was just there and they didn’t have to think about it. What they learn at Meribah is that it is not like that everywhere. It hadn’t always been like that even in Egypt. What brought Joseph to Egypt in the first place may have been a mixture of his arrogance, his brothers; jealousy and the slickness of the slave traders but what gave him his opportunity to get his family there as well was his perception that years of plenty followed by years of famine demonstrated how God’s resources were more than adequate but always needed careful husbandry. God still works like that. His world is rich in resources. Food and energy enough for all our needs. But not if too many keep it for themselves nor if we fail to husband our resources wisely.
In their ‘Meribah moment’ these former slaves need another Joseph. Next time there may not be another Moses on hand to strike the rock. What we have here is a crucial lesson in how better to cooperate with God and his creation and the crucial importance of doing so.