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And he called the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites quarrelled and because they tested the Lord saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’

Alec Motyer writes so helpfully about this in ‘The message of Exodus’, p.182, and I simply want to quote him today:

‘The people ‘tested’ the Lord, and he ‘tested’ the people, which according to the Bible are two sides of the same thing. At the place named Massah and Meribah, Psalm 81: 7 (8) says, ‘I tested you at the waters of Meribah, whereas Psalm 95:9 says, ‘your fathers tested and tried me.’ ‘Testing’ God involves putting him on probation, withholding trust pending evidence. For the Israelites it meant doubting whether he who had proved sufficient in the past was still sufficient, now that things had taken a different turn (17:2-3). There is also an element of challenge to God, demanding that he prove his worth all over again: if, against all probabilities, he gets us out of this mess, then we will consider believing, but in the meantime we will suspend faith and obedience. For these reasons ‘testing’ – or in the older translations ‘tempting’ – God is deeply sinful.

When God ‘tests’ us, however, it is a different matter. He does so by bringing us into situations which call for trust and the endurance and obedience that proves our trust is real, so that by the exercise of faith in the face of new challenges, our trust in him can develop and mature until we come to see that everything that happens to us is under divine supervision and is brimful of divine purposes for good.’

I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.’ So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel.

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. 2 They were all baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. 3 They all ate the same spiritual food 4 and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. (1 Corinthians 10:1-4).

Paul, writing about the wilderness journey of the Israelites in 1 Corinthians, states that Christ was with them and was their spiritual nourishment and sustenance. Even though they did not know it at the time, Jesus was with them. In fact, the rock Moses struck has regularly been seen by spiritual writers as  foreshadowing Christ, whose side was pierced (John 19:34) and the water coming from the rock as foreshadowing the giving of the Spirit (John 7:37-39).

For us, on our Christian journey, Christ is our nourishment; He is our sustainer. All we need is in Him.

Nevertheless there are warnings we need to heed, and this is what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10. It is sadly possible to feed on Christ, and to drink from Him, and yet still disobey and displease God (1 Cor.10:5-11). We can live well below the level of our privileges.