Into The Rest of God

This morning we are going to focus on two stories of people residing in the chaotic wilderness of their lives, and yet experience the unsurpassable and unmerited grace of God who opens up the sustaining powers of creation and salvation.

We’ll begin  with the people of Israel in Ex 17:1-7 where we find them wandering the wilderness of the desert stuck between promise and fulfillment.

In some ways, their frustration is understandable. The people most likely thought the journey to land God promised would take a couple weeks, a month at the most. But by the time of Ex 17, weeks had turned into months, months turned into years.

Perhaps you know this feeling. The feeling that the FULFILLMENT of your prayers and hopes only seem to get further away no matter how much you pray or how much you believe. Like the people of Israel, maybe the wilderness has become not just a place for you, but a state of mind.

For the wilderness is where lifelessness rules over life, where the gifts of God’s creation such as food and water are scarce, and the fruits of salvation like joy and CONFIDENCE are meager.

Now why did God choose this path of wilderness for the people as it says in v.17? Well if we recall our vacation bible school, you remember that God greatly desires Israel to be obedient to his commands. But obedience is the one skill that Israel can’t seem to grasp.

Parents know that just one act of obedience isn’t the remedy for a child’s defiant behavior. Thus, God uses the wilderness that move the people from one opportunity of obedience to another.

And the more one shows faithfulness to the relationship, the more natural the response of obedience becomes and therein loses the feeling of being a test. But having grown tired of being tested, the people in v.3 decide to take on the role of tester. Now testing God is always a risky proposition. For it seeks a way in which God can be coerced to act or show himself.

How does God respond? Well he doesn’t end their wandering. Instead, he does something far greater. He brings life and order into the midst of their chaotic wilderness.

See God work in and through Moses, his staff, and the rock. Taken together they manifest the continuation of what God had started in Genesis. See God bring water into a part of the world under the control of chaotic forces.

You see this is not just an act of providence, but an act of creation. It is meant to show God’s original intention for creation in the midst of chaos. Though the wilderness was not what God intended, we still see God’s creating power breaking through.

At its core, putting God to the test is a self-centered demand for signs and wonders, as though God’s creation and salvation were not enough reason to trust in him alone.

Moving on to John 4, we find that water yet again plays an important role. At the outset, everything about the story seems inappropriate. First, this well is located in what for a Jew like Jesus was considered to be enemy territory.

Second, he dares to strike up a conversation with a woman. Lest we think Jesus meets this woman by coincidence, we must remember that Jesus never approaches people randomly or casually, but as potential witnesses of him to the whole world.

Not only does this woman come from a people despised by the Jews, she comes from a life lost in the chaotic wilderness of polygamy. Regardless, Jesus begins to speak about the “living water” that he offers.

Now the “living water” Jesus offers not only has the power to inject life where there is death, bring order to chaos; but in this story we learn that it also possesses the power to undo the consequences of chaos. The power to heal old wounds, the power to mend long standing divisions. And it is God’s unmerited grace as seen in Ex 17 and John 4 that makes all of this possible.

In Ro 5:1-11, we read about God’s redemptive strategy including the shape, meaning, and power of God’s grace. It makes the case for the impossibility of reconciliation and salvation apart from the death and resurrection of Christ.

Without Christ, time as we would know it would be confined to a sinful and pain-filled present.  And if Christ’s resurrected body created for us a future, then surely it was Christ’s broken body that fashioned our past so that it could be just that… The past. Where that which was will never be again.

Prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah could only promise what Christ brought into reality and thereby allowing us to achieve peace with God. In addition to peace with God, Jesus’ death and resurrection instill in us a hope for the future that can withstand our weakest moments and our darkest nights. A hope that only emerges stronger on the other side of suffering and tragedy.

As Paul says here, those who’ve come into the knowledge of God’s grace understand that out of suffering come new measures of patience that our hope needs when tested. Though suffering and tragedy are all too familiar in the life of a Christian, the Christian hope overcomes the tests of suffering because it is a hope grounded in God’s love, which comes to us through his Holy Spirit made possible by Christ’s death for sinners.

Whatever tough questions suffering and tragedy rest in your mind, you need to know that their answers are found in this hope, born of assurance of the divine love Christ showed to his enemies, to sinners, to us.

Here we see an added dimension of God’s righteousness in his desire to reconcile his relationship with sinful humanity even if it meant the death and resurrection of Jesus to achieve it. Even more amazing is that God acted to redeem humanity before it had any real awareness that such deliverance was possible or necessary.

It’s the unmerited nature of God’s grace which breaks the power of sin and opens the way back to God. And much like an infant has done nothing to earn the love of a parent, so too the grace of God comes to all of us before we’ve undertaken anything to deserve it.

At some point all of us will find ourselves in the wilderness. That place where faith runs dry, hope feels barren, and chaos reigns. For myself, that moment came one October morning when a NYPD detective called me from Marcus’ phone to inform me that Marcus had expired at the scene of a bike accident.

For months afterward, my family traveled the wilderness looking for a way out of the chaos, searching for the peace and rest we had known before I got that phone call. Later that spring, an idea began to form of how we might use God’s creation to inject life back into our hearts and regain much needed stability underneath our feet.

By the fall this idea became a reality. And though every October is now a time of wilderness, we can still God’s creating power breaking through. I think it’s better if I show you. Let’s watch the video and then we’ll offer the invitation. SHOW VIDEO

In PS 95:7b, the Psalmist pleads for us not to make the same mistakes of Israel in Ex 17, but to instead “heed his voice.” By trusting him over our doubts and anxieties, and in doing so, enter his rest.

Just as wilderness can be both a place and a state of mind, so too is rest a place and a state of mind. But more than that, rest is a state of the soul. You can live in a big house with all the amenities free from persecution; and still not be at rest in your mind, body, and soul.

V.10 warns that refusal to heed God’s voice is what keeps one’s heart from finding rest as it wanders in the wilderness. If God’s rest seems to only get further away, then I want to encourage all of us to identify and overcome those things prolonging our journey towards God’s rest.

If it be grief, doubt, anger, revenge, isolation, or depression that confronts you; hear the voice of God calling out from the crucified and resurrected body of Jesus Christ. Calling out with an offer to lift you, your suffering, and your tragedy out of the dry wilderness and place you beside the teeming waters of grace that run into the rest of God.

CJE