Even when the bitter places sink down deep into our bones, the Restorer never relinquishes his grip on you.
If one is eager for evidence that corroborates the fact that the Bible is a divinely-inspired book, the juxtaposition found in Chapter 15 of Exodus is a good place to start. Throughout the first twenty-one verses, a sense of euphoria surges through God’s people, as they sing at the top of their lungs about how the Lord “triumphed gloriously” for them (Exod. 15:1). As Moses waxes rhapsodic about God and the uncanny grace by which and through which he rescued them, it’s not hard to imagine the exhilaration that coursed through that Israelite congregation as they joined the victory chorus. And if we had our way, we’d put a bow on their story and say they lived happily ever after, and call it a day.
1. There Are No Hallmark Movies in the Wilderness
The Bible isn’t a man-made book, though. It’s God’s revelation to us, wherein he meets us and finds us right where we are, even in life’s bitter places. The irony is, if God’s Word were merely a series of euphoric songs and stories, you’d probably dismiss it for not being realistic enough. It’d be regarded in the same vein as Hallmark’s filmography, panned for its saccharine storytelling and apparent lack of risk. Thus, one of the ways we can know that the Bible isn’t an offshoot of human imagination or religious fantasy is the fact that it includes and sometimes even highlights the nasty, gnarly stuff of life — the stuff we loathe to think about.
It’s not all “David slaying his giants” without also “David covering up his affair with a murder.”
It’s not all “Elijah on Mt Carmel”; it’s also “Elijah depressed and on the run for his life.”
It’s not all “Peter saying he’d die for Jesus”; it’s also “Peter denying he ever knew Jesus,” and cursing as he did so.
Or take the scene at the oasis of Marah where God’s people go from praising God to despairing their lives in a mere seventy-two hours (Exod. 15:22–24). After trekking across the Red Sea on dry ground, the Israelites promptly revert to grumbling and treating Moses as their national punching bag. All it took was three days for the masses to forget what their Lord was capable of. After being brought through one dead-end, they find themselves in another cul-de-sac of doubt and uncertainty, where God’s will and Moses’s leadership are once again called into question.
2. Learning to Walk According to What’s Promised
If this feels familiar, that’s because they’ve already tried this formula (Exod. 14:11–12). And buckle up, because this pattern becomes a predominant part of their story for the next four decades, as demonstrated by the preponderance of the word “grumbled,” which occurs fifteen times throughout the rest of the Old Testament, fourteen of which describe the attitude of the Israelites (Exod. 15:24; cf. 16:2, 7–8; 17:3; Num. 14:2, 27, 29, 36; 16:11, 41; 17:45; Josh. 9:18). In other words, if you’re hoping that this crisis at Marah will be one where they finally put it all together and figure out what it means to walk by faith, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
Walking by faith and not by sight is a lifelong seminar, a class from which we never graduate. Among the many things we can learn from Israel’s sojourn through the wilderness is the fact that we’ll always be in need of grace to walk by faith. This is what Israel was about to learn; it’s what all of God’s disciples are in the process of learning as well. “Saved by grace through faith,” to use Paul’s summation of it, likewise means being led, sustained, and carried by grace through faith, too (Eph. 2:8). It’s grace all the way down and all the way through.
Walking by faith and not by sight is a lifelong seminar, a class from which we never graduate.
We need God’s grace to give us the faith to keep moving forward by faith. And from now till we’re on death’s doorstep, we’ll always be struggling with that — with structuring our lives around what’s promised instead of what’s seen (cf. Heb. 11:1). This is because when life punches us in the gut, when reality deals us a devastating blow, or even a series of them, we instinctually look to take matters into our own hands. When a crisis strikes, we look for solutions; we rush for explanations, reasons, and parties on whom to dump the blame. Sort of like Israel pinning the lack of water on Moses. And if we aren’t careful, what happened to them can easily happen to us.
3. What Shall We Drink?
The Marah “catastrophe” involved a very real crisis: a crowd of two million with a scant water supply. Nursing moms and frazzled parents of toddlers experience a new level of stress as they try to soothe their young, not knowing when they’ll be able to quench their thirst. I can’t imagine that lasting for three hours, let alone three days, especially when, on any given Sunday, one or all three of my kids murmur and moan as if they’re on the verge of starvation or dehydration during the eight-minute drive home from church. This isn’t that; Israel’s impending disaster is very real, resulting in very real misery.
Marah, therefore, isn’t a moment for “Ah, just suck it up” words of wisdom or tough love. Rather, it’s a moment for Israel to do what Moses eventually did: “The people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What shall we drink?’ And [Moses] cried to the Lord” (Exod. 15:24–25). The former prince of Egypt here models what every follower of God is invited to do when faced with a crisis of faith: bring that crisis to God. His first resort is to plead with Yahweh and desperately appeal for his divine aid. Out of his distress and the collective distress of the entire congregation, Israel’s leader turns to Israel’s Lord for help.
And of course, the Lord was listening because he’s always listening. While God delights to hear from us at all times, his ears are especially attuned to our sorrowful, painful, guttural cries. When Moses petitions the Lord to intervene, that’s exactly what he does, motioning toward a tree that was protruding on the banks of the waters of Marah and giving the command to toss it into the bitter pool. And as soon as he did, that bitter spring suddenly became sweet. Israel’s terribly bitter circumstance turned favorable, cheerful even.
4. The Name of God in Those Bitter Places
In the bitterness of Marah, Israel was being introduced to Jehovah Rapha, the Lord who heals (cf. Ps. 103:3; Jer. 30:17). This is who was with them and for them throughout the barren wasteland that lay ahead of them. As they trudged through uncertain terrain, filled with unknown challenges, they were assured that accompanying them all along their way was none other than the Healer and Restorer of all things, for whom nothing is beyond repair. There is no situation so dire, so crippling, so grievous that Jehovah Rapha can’t mend it.
To press the matter even further, amid the bitterness of Israel’s frustration and unbelief, God had already created and appointed the means of their healing. “The Lord showed Moses a tree,” we’re told. Not a random, nondescript clump of trees, but a specific tree that had been there all along. The one who breathed the world into being, speaking forests into existence with a word, seemed to have this moment in mind, planting a tree by the riverbed of Marah so that when his people got there, the way to be restored would already be provided.
He who carved a path through the Red Sea is the same one who fortified the waters of Marah. And after healing that oasis, and offering his people plenty of refreshment, the Lord not only divulges what he was doing there, but he also covenants with them ” (Exod. 15:25–27).
5. The Artist and the Test at Marah
Although we aren’t at Mount Sinai just yet, God is in the process of making a people for himself, “chosen and precious,” fashioning a “spiritual house” out of them (1 Pet. 2:5). In other words, he’s showing them what it means that they were his people, his church., It means hearing and heeding the Lord’s words despite whatever test or trial comes their way. As God speaks words of covenant blessing and promise over them, he lets it be known that this was a “test.” (He gave them quite a few of these, in fact, cf. Exod. 16:4; Deut. 8:2, 16; Judg. 2:22, 3:1, 4; Ps. 66:10.) The very faith they expressed in the Song of the Sea is the faith that’s being proved and examined, much like a hunk of metal is proved in a furnace. And if you have Peter’s words (1 Pet. 1:6–7) in your head right now, that’s a good thing, because that’s what’s happening here.
That image of a metallurgist placing a slab of gold into the smelter is helpful for understanding what transpired at Marah. Just as the metallurgist tests the genuineness of the metal by blasting it with fire, so, too, does God test the genuineness of our faith by putting us through trials. This isn’t because he harbors any smidgen of ill will towards us. The metallurgist isn’t mad at the gold, and that’s why he’s throwing it into the inferno. Instead, because he loves and cherishes the gold, he puts it through a proving process so that he can shape it into what he already knows and sees it can become. As the flames burn off all the impurities, the hunk of gold is ready for the artist to mold it, form it to his design.
God the Father is no exasperated artist. He doesn’t toss those whom he cherishes — those whom he “purchased” (Exod. 15:16) — into the furnace out of anger or because he’s annoyed at them. He brings his people to Marah so that they can see and know what kind of people they are and what kind of God he is, and how desperate they are for him; so he can shape them into his image. He leads them to the place of bitterness to reveal the bitterness that still lurks in their hearts, all to show forth how he is the only one who can turn all that is bitter into sweetness with a mere word.
6. The Healer Holds Us Fast
What he’s showing them is that life isn’t without its moments of bitterness. Those are ineludible. Not only is he sovereign over the bitter moments, but he is also with us through the bitter times. Trudging along through those terribly bitter days means trusting and obeying the Lord’s words above everything else, much like the Preacher of Ecclesiastes says, “Fear God and keep his commands, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccl. 12:13). And at the end of Israel’s long passage lay a true oasis, an abundant spring that could rightly be deemed a paradise, complete with a spring for every tribe and a palm grove for every elder (Exod. 15:27).
God’s message to his people is that what makes life’s bitter places sweet is who is with us. With you and for you is Jehovah Rapha, the Lord who heals and restores. And whether that healing comes in this life or the next, I can’t say — whether you’re led to a version of Elim on earth or in eternity, the point is that the Healer is the one who is holding onto you. Through Marah and beyond, and everywhere in between, he will hold you fast. Even when the bitter places sink down deep into our bones, the Restorer never relinquishes his grip on you. His word of promise is that all that’s torn will be mended, and all that’s shattered will be repaired (Hos. 6:1).
7. Where Bitterness Was Drunk to the Dregs
Marah’s tree preaches to us the good news of the Lord who heals by being afflicted, restores by being crushed, and mends by being wounded.
And this promise is no “pie in the sky” hope, nor is it merely wishful thinking for downcast sufferers. Rather, we can say, and we can know that the bitterness of our days will be made sweet because God in Christ has already drunk the bitterness of sin and death for us (John 19:28–30). The bitter water that God’s people can’t bear to drink is the very bitter draught that God’s Son drinks to the dregs for us. Golgotha works backward to repair not just the bitterness of Marah but of sin, death, and hell, turning every grave into a place of life. Far from being some sort of divine contingency, the cross was God’s foreordained method for replacing the bitterness of sin with the sweetness of his salvation and union with him (1 Pet. 2:24).
Marah’s tree preaches to us the good news of the Lord who heals by being afflicted, restores by being crushed, and mends by being wounded (Isa. 53:4–6). “The tree at Marah was just a shadow of the cross,” Michael P. V. Barrett notes, “not because it was a tree or wood but because it pointed to God’s provision to reverse the curse. As the tree in the wilderness removed the bitterness of the water, so Christ removes sin, the bitterest of all curses.” [1] While at Marah, God miraculously changes the water; on the cross, he mercifully absorbs the curse. At Marah, God showed Moses a tree that had been prepared beforehand to restore what was bitter. At Calvary, God’s Son was nailed to a tree that had been prepared beforehand to restore every broken and bitter thing in the world, including you.
