Stricken

And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, and water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their livestock. And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.” These are the waters of Meribah, where the people of Israel quarreled with the Lord, and through them he showed himself holy.

Numbers 20:11-13, ESV

 The story of Moses striking the rock and thus, due to his pride, losing the chance to enter the Promised Land always brings me fear. I struggle with the tension of this fear in light of the God whose perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18).

A fear is appropriate in light of the greatness of our Lord. Will I truly see what an egregious affront pride is to the Lord? Will I truly let it move me to tears, to a tenderness of love for him, for a reverence? Timothy Keller uses the illustration of a Chinese Ming vase to capture the sense of the fear of the Lord:

“[We] the recipients of undeserved but unshakeable grace—grow in a paradoxically loving yet joyful fear. Because of unutterable love and joy in God, we tremble with the privilege of being in his presence and with an intense longing to honor him when we are there. We are deeply afraid of grieving him. To put it another way—you would be quite afraid if someone put a beautiful, priceless, ancient Ming dynasty vase in your hands. You wouldn’t be trembling with fear about the vase hurting you but about your hurting it. Of course, we can’t really harm God, but a Christian should be intensely concerned not to grieve or dishonor the one who is so glorious and who did so much for us.”(1) This is the kind of fear that Moses was to have had before the Lord’s command.

Yet, there is an element of my fear that is pure fear, not the fear of the Lord. My pride comes out in my very fear of this story.  "Lord, can I (capital I) screw up so badly? Can I miss out on what I think is best for me, my idea of a promised land?" Pride centers on what I do, don’t do, how I behave. As if I could be good enough, humble enough, righteous enough, whateverenough to toe that line.

Grace is sufficient for all my pride, for all my fear. The "fear-casting out" of the perfect love is recognizing Christ is my all, Christ is all I have. I have fallen in pride and I will fall in pride (and in other areas), but Christ himself is my promised land. I may reap consequences here, but in grace--which requires a humble heart to receive--in grace I will not miss my Savior. It is all on him. All is centered on him and his performance. He is the true Moses who did not fail at that crucial moment--for us. He was stricken, allowing himself to be humbled. He was the Rock that was struck.(2)

Yet grace does not only cover, but its very nature causes me to be humble. Awe before my Lord, the Rock, the Stricken, the true Moses.

(1) Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (New York: Penguin, 2014), 99.

(2) Some scholars do speculate that the rock Moses struck was symbolic of the presence of God and representative of God (in Christ). Thus Moses was not only guilty of pride that gave rise to anger, pride that gave rise to disobedience and doing it his way, but in sacrilege: Paul mentions this in 1 Corinthians 10:4, “and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.” Gordon Wenham writes, “De Vaulx suggests that there was an element of sacrilege in striking the rock, for it symbolized God. The people were gathered in a solemn assembly (10) before it as though before the ark. An additional argument is favour of this suggestion is that elsewhere God is often likened to a rock.”