Numbers 20:1-13 "The Inside Out" Scott Hoezee

Although we have a long way to go, already we are seeing in this presidential election year something that has become a staple of politics in this nation: namely, the utterly close scrutiny of each candidate's character with particular attention being paid to whether or not a given candidate lives consistently privately and publicly. Is there a clear and consistent link between what he says about his past and what really happened back then? Is there consistency between what he says he supports in terms of policy and his past voting record? Seen from a certain angle, this intense desire to ensure that our would-be leaders are consistent in public as well as in private could seem a bit odd.

After all, we are also a nation that generally does not hesitate to separate private morality from the public sphere. Over and again religion is made out to be like a private little hobby not allowed to impinge on debates and decision at work or anywhere else in the public square. Everything from abortion to sexual orientation and practices are said to be personal choices that no one else should presume to stick their noses into. In short, and as ethicist Gertrude Himmelfarb has often noted, there is a whole lot of relativism rampant in the land. Even so, woe betide the politician who is revealed to be an inconsistent hypocrite who does not walk his own talk.

As Christian people, we have (or should have) our own distinctive viewpoint on such matters and this evening I think Numbers 20 may help to draw all this into focus for us a bit. This incident involving Moses may provide a bracing reminder that what goes on in the precincts of our hearts matters a great deal to God. Indeed, as this story shows, sometimes what's true in the privacy of our hearts is more important to God than what shows on the visible surface of our public lives.

To see all that, let's take this story apart so as to determine just what's going on here. By the time you get to Numbers 20 you are accustomed to hearing the people of Israel complain. As a matter of fact, such full-throated moaning and groaning has by now become sickeningly routine in this book. How often haven't we seen this all-too-familiar pattern? First the people complain about something--in this case a lack of water. Then they wish either that they were dead or that they had never left good old Egypt. Finally, Moses and Aaron respond by falling flat on their faces before God.

Numbers 20:3-5 fits this pattern with monotonous predictability. But then comes a surprise: this time God does not respond in anger. This time Yahweh agrees that the people need something to drink and so he gives Moses instructions for how to meet this need. First, Moses is to fetch the staff of God out of the Tabernacle. This is probably the same staff with which Moses turned the Nile to blood and which he held out in the parting of the Red Sea. Then Moses is to take this staff to a certain rock, speak to the rock, and then stand back to watch fresh spring water burst forth.

Now if any of this gives you a sense of deja vu, there's a reason: you can read an almost identical story in Exodus 17. Shortly after crossing the Red Sea, the people of Israel needed water. At that time God told Moses to take his staff and use it to whack a certain rock after which water would gush out. In Numbers 20, however, God alters the equation just a tad by telling Moses to talk to the rock, not hit it.

So Moses and Aaron go to the appointed rock, gather the people before them, but then instead of talking to the rock, Moses first addresses the people. "Listen up, you miserable rebels: shall we bring you water out of this rock!" Moses then takes the staff of God and gives the rock two cracking blows with the result that streams of precious water bubble forth for the people.

Obviously Moses deviated from God's script. Just why he did so we don't know, although it sure looks like Moses lost his temper--the poor guy had had it with these folks and who could blame him after all he'd been through? So first he sneeringly calls the people "rebels," then he strikes the rock in what appears to be something of a tantrum. Although perhaps we should not ignore one other detail about this story: in verse 1 we are told that Moses' dearly loved big sister Miriam died. It's possible that Moses was grieving and feeling quite brittle emotionally at the very moment that the people carped to him about water yet again, even using talk about wishing they were dead as part of their lament. Maybe it just hit Moses the wrong way. Even in his sorrow these people would not clam up!

In any event, by the time you get to verse 10, Moses is acting a bit oddly. No one is quite sure how to take Moses' words in that verse--in fact, there are at least five different schools of thought for how to read this. Some, think that with the people before him, Moses said, "Well, shall we make water come out of this rock?" only to have the people respond with an affirmative cheer. In that case Moses was just trying to whip up enthusiasm for the miracle at hand.

But others think that the fact that Moses said, "Should we bring water out of this rock," indicates that Moses was stealing God's thunder. You see, God had told Moses to bring the holy staff along, not to hit the rock with it but to serve as a visible reminder that this miracle was going to be Yahweh's doing. The staff symbolized God's presence at the rock. But in verse 10 Moses may be guilty of shifting the focus away from God to himself. Moses is so wrapped up in his own emotions that instead of using the staff to give God the glory he uses it for his own purpose in venting his frustrations.

Curiously, the miracle still happens. As far as the people are concerned, God has worked yet another wonder of providence for Israel. However, while the people are busy lining up at the rock to fill their jars, jugs, and buckets, God calls Moses and Aaron aside and lowers the boom. Because Moses did not follow God's word, both Moses and Aaron are banished from the Promised Land.

To put it mildly, this is a most unanticipated turn of events. Granted that Moses disobeyed God. Granted that Moses may have let his personal feelings get the best of him. But it still seems like God's response is disproportionately harsh. After all that Moses has done in near-perfect obedience of God, after all that Moses has had to put up with from this most nettlesome group of people, is it right or just that God would so severely slap Moses down for one lapse?

There are surely some who would say that this story confirms their worst fears and suspicions about God. For there are those who picture God as the cosmic disciplinarian who stands in heaven with a rolled-up newspaper, just waiting to swat us for the least little infraction of the rules. Where is the grace of God in this story? How could one little sin be so important that it ends up outweighing the incredible backlog of goodness that Moses had accumulated over the years?

Well, if you ask those questions, you are not alone. The commentators I consulted said that figuring out the whys and wherefores of this punishment has provided one of the greatest puzzles ever in the history of biblical interpretation. I myself do not have any explanations. True, we could point out that although Moses will not enter the Promised Land, that does not mean he's been damned to hell for all eternity--Moses remains a beloved and chosen servant of God. We could recall that in the Book of Deuteronomy, after Moses has reached a very advanced age, God does show Moses what the Promised Land looks like and then tenderly buries Moses personally. And we could point out that Moses has remained one of the most honored figures in salvation history--remember that he was one of the people seen chatting with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.

So although Moses gets his wrist slapped pretty hard in this story, this is not the final word on Moses' ministry, life, reputation, or status in God's kingdom. Still, the precise reason why this failure resulted in God's intense displeasure remains a mystery--one that even the text of Numbers does not spell out or explain for us.

What we can say with some certainty, however, is that this story is one of many biblical examples that God really does examine our hearts. God is interested not just in how we look to other people but in how we operate in that most private sphere of our lives: our inner thoughts and feelings and intentions. After all, keep in mind that as far as the people were concerned, Moses had not done anything wrong. They didn't know God had told Moses to talk to the rock--for all they knew God had commanded Moses to strike the rock just like he had done back in Exodus 17.

Moses was not flagrantly disobedient to God here--not in public anyway. Indeed, even though Moses did not follow God's instructions, the miracle still happened as though he had. So far as the people were concerned, God granted their petition through Moses. Although there are some questions surrounding Moses' words in verse 10, for the most part it is clear that Moses' actions did not detract from the glory of God in this miracle. The final word about this incident comes in verse 13 where it is stated that the Lord proved himself holy to the people through this miracle. God did get the credit. On the surface, all was well.

It looked for all the world like Moses was every bit as faithful a servant of God here as he had been countless times before. But on the inside, in his heart, Moses had not done it right because he did not have the right attitude. Just because everything turned out OK, just because no one else knew the difference, did not mean that all was well with Moses.

In other words, the real issue here is Moses' moral integrity. And it is just here that this story may provide a bracing reminder for us. For today people seem to believe that what you think on the inside, what you say or do in the privacy of your own home or bedroom does not matter. So long as no one gets hurt, so long as you do not infringe on anyone else's freedom, so long as whatever you happen to believe or practice on the side does not affect your job performance, then it doesn't matter and anyway, who is to say whether you are right, wrong, or otherwise on such private matters of the heart? That's your own business.

A couple of years ago a few more of Richard Nixon's famous Oval Office tapes were made public. On one particular recording the evangelist Billy Graham was speaking with President Nixon and in the course of his remarks. Rev. Graham made some horribly dismissive and apparently anti-Semitic remarks. At one point he even said that he has lots of Jewish friends but lucky for them they don't know what Graham really thinks of them. This was, of course, deeply distressing for any of us to hear and terribly devastating for Rev. Graham. But then he got the kind of help that maybe no Christian should want. Writing on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, former Nixon attorney Leonard Garment defended Billy Graham by saying that whatever the good reverend had said in private should not matter and it surely should have no bearing on how we judge the effectiveness of this man's public work and ministry. The problem for Mr. Garment was not that Rev. Graham harbored private anti-Semitism but that something like Mr. Nixon's tapes cause the rest of us to erode the boundary between the private and the public. But that is a boundary that needs to remain thick and inviolable. We should let public actions speak louder than private words because the private is none of our business and has no bearing on who we are in public.

I don't know how Billy Graham felt about that article, but if it were me, I think I'd ask Mr. Garment not to help me anymore! Yet even within our Christian circles, more than we know we also sometimes apportion our morality to what we think we can get away with. If we're honest, we would have to admit that sometimes what prevents us from committing a certain sin is not simply love for God but rather that we're afraid of getting caught. Sometimes it's not a pristine attitude toward sexuality that keeps us from quickly thumbing through that glossy pornographic magazine on the rack as it is the fact that we're afraid someone we know will suddenly come up from behind and catch us.

One of the scariest questions any of us can ask ourselves is this: what would I be willing to do if someone gave me an up-front, iron-clad guarantee that I'd never be caught? Of course, that question is just another way of asking how much the divine gaze of God matters to us. It's a vital question because there are many things we can engage in for which we will never receive public scorn or censure. As a matter of fact, some of the most dire sins--including nearly all of the "Seven Deadly Sins"--don't show on the outside. In your heart of hearts you may be deeply angry or torn up with envy or riddled with pride or spiritually slothful or consistently greedy, and yet you can mask all of that so well in public that no one will ever know. Like Moses in Numbers 20, it can look for and to all the world like you are doing everything right in perfect piety and yet in your heart you may be far from having the mind of Christ.

The core of integrity, of being a person after God's own heart, is recognizing that who we are on the outside must be transparent to who we are on the inside. A case could even be built that what we do in public matters to God only if it is matched by what we feel and believe in private. Unhappily, in our current cultural setting, the very concept of integrity withers if you think that neither God nor anyone else should even be concerned with what we say, do, or believe in private. Once you blockade your heart from the divine gaze, then you cannot even access the topic of moral integrity.

Well, by now it may seem that we have wandered far from Numbers 20. Yet I would suggest that God's displeasure with the private Moses despite a good public appearance tells us something about the biblical definition of integrity. Integrity is internalizing God's design for life, loving that design, and then living consistently with it. To have integrity is to be integrated--not integrated merely within the confines of a little universe of your own devising but integrated in the sense of fitting happily within the patterns of God's creation.

Unhappily, we none of us are fully integrated in this sense. Only Jesus can claim such integrity and in that sense he is the most real human being who ever lived. Jesus is the ultimate realist--he knew what was real, loved and respected that reality, and then carried it out in his every action, word, and intention. As the Son of God, that came naturally for Jesus--the rest of us struggle and fail again and again. The grace of the gospel assures us that our sins are covered. But that same grace exists not merely to forgive but to re-form; to re-mold us into a shape that fits well in God's good world.

In an age when we are told that "image is everything," it is instructive to recall that when God through the prophet Jeremiah looked forward to the era of the church, God did not predict a day when he would make his people look good on the outside. No, God said that Step One would be to put a new heart within his people. This new heart is to be the integrated creation center out of which we live to the glory of God--the same God who again and again desires to show himself holy in our midst. Amen.