INTRODUCTION
Good morning everyone; welcome to our service of worship this morning.
“O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!”
The familiar opening words to Psalm 95, our psalm for today. God is indeed the “Rock of our Salvation”, as the psalm says – but what exactly that means – what God actually saves us from – we’ll try to work out together in our Message today. The latter part of Psalm 95 references the famous, “Water from the Rock” incident, from Exodus 17 – so we’ll also read that story today to get the context.
Speaking of rocks – there, on the screen, is that amazing red rock, our very own Uluru – it really is, as I’m sure you know if you’ve been there, that red – the exact colour changes depending on the time of day and atmospheric conditions, but it is typically a rich, vibrant, orangey-red – one of the wonders of the world right there in the centre of our little island. So, today: God is the mighty red Rock of our Salvation!
EXODUS 17:1-7 WATER FROM THE ROCK
17:1 From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink.
17:2 The people quarrelled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?”
17:3 But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”
17:4 So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.”
17:5 The LORD said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go.
17:6 I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel.
17:7 He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarrelled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”
PSALM 95: ROCK OF OUR SALVATION
95:1 O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
95:2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
95:3 For the LORD is a great God and a great King above all gods.
95:4 In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.
95:5 The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.
95:6 O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!
95:7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice!
95:8 Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
95:9 when your ancestors tested me and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
95:10 For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.”
95:11 Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest.”
RFLECTION
Well, Psalm 95—God is the Rock of our Salvation—but, yes, the great question we want to find an answer to today: salvation from what exactly?! Let’s now go through the psalm with a fine-toothed comb to see if we can work it out; we’ll bring the Exodus 17 “Water from the Rock” story into it as well, of course, to help give us the context.
Importantly, we need to remember that this is all Old Testament stuff, written centuries before the time of Jesus, so it presents a pre-Gospel view of God and how they operate in the world. The key to understanding it, therefore, will be, as we’ll see, to use that most important of all hermeneutical, interpretive principles—namely, to view the Psalm through the lens of the Gospel itself, the radically new conception of God, and God’s kingdom, that Jesus presents. This will be, by the way, in lieu of our lectionary Gospel reading today, although we will reference it—the story from John 4 about the Samaritan woman at the well—later in this Message.
************
So, Psalm 95 through a Gospel lens. Psalm 95 is really a psalm in two parts—you might have noticed this. The first seven verses, as we heard, have the psalmist wholeheartedly singing God’s praises:
“For the LORD is a great God and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.”
And so on. The final four verses, however, have a complete change of voice; now it is God himself speaking through the psalmist, reminding the people of their past deviation from the great Covenant he has made with them, in the Exodus 17, “Water from the Rock” incident:
“Do not harden your hearts”, God says, “as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.”
A fairly mild admonition to start with. But then we have words coming out of the mouth of God which probably made you wince when you heard them, even though you might have read or heard them many times before:
“For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.’ Therefore in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
Yes, a God who loathes as well as loves, and swears terrible oaths of punishment in his anger! Yet such behaviour is completely consistent with the picture of God the psalmist paints in the first seven verses, as a mighty God-King above all god-kings; creator and ruler of the world who then, naturally, judges it uncompromisingly. And specifically, in relation to the Israelite people at this time, God judges them, yes, through the Covenant, the deal he had made with them through their leader Moses, the so-called Law of Moses. Deviate from this Covenant or Law, God threatens, and you’re goners—forty years in the wilderness for your troubles, a whole generation dying there: “they shall not enter my rest”!
Right now we’re in a real pickle! This Old Testament, pre-Gospel view of God, expressed by the writer of Psalm 95, possibly King David, is a real turn-off! It is just the sort of picture of God, as an omnipotent, controlling creator and judge of the world, that has turned people, in the modern era, away from the Church, Christianity, anything to do with God, in droves—as I’m sure you’re aware.
Jesus to the rescue, however! Psalm 95 is a perfect example of what I’ve noted already: our critical need to interpret all scripture through the lens of the Gospel, the radically new picture of God, and God’s kingship, that Jesus presents.
Jesus’ God is not a controlling, judging super-king, but a loving, Divine Parent. The father in the parable of the prodigal son is, I think, the clearest picture Jesus gives us of such a God. Like a good parent – the best possible parent! – God gives us our life and our freedom, knowing full well we’ll probably just squander it and wind up on skid row with the pigs. Then when we finally come to our senses and come back grovelling to them, it turns out they have been ready and waiting all along, hoping for our return. And instead of punishing us further by allowing us back only as a hired hand—as if we hadn’t punished ourselves enough already!—they accept us back with our full rights as son or daughter, and throw a big party to celebrate! Behaviour quite unlike the God in the psalm, you’d have to concur!
What about the Covenant, the Law, that the psalmist’s God uses to judge us, then? The old, pre-Gospel way of thinking has God simply imposing Law on us, seemingly just for the sake of controlling us, then judging us mercilessly when we dare to break it. Through the lens of Jesus’ new idea of God, however, we can see that Law is something that is freely offered to us, a gift, or grace, we can accept or reject.
We need to think about what Law is actually for. It is the same now as it was back then: the laws of the land we live in now, wonderful democratic Australia, exist to help us live together safely, harmoniously, creatively in community and society—they are the medium through which we selflessly consider and care for each other. Obviously, laws are never perfect, they might be discriminatory, oppressive, so we should always work together to keep improving them. But Law, generally, is a good thing, a gift or grace that God—Jesus’ God, our Divine Parent—freely offers to us.
So, it was to the Israelite people back at the time of the Exodus. Yes, it was pictured, by commentators who wrote down the stories, possibly up to a 1000 years later, as the mighty super-king God thundering on the mountain, tablets of stone, God themself dictating every last jot and tittle of the Law. But really, the Law Moses brought to the people was a gift freely offered – remember Moses was not your typical despotic king or ruler trying to impose his control on the people, rather, as we know from the biblical stories, he was a most reluctant leader. The purpose of the Law was to help the people, firstly, escape from terrible slavery in Egypt, then build a new life for themselves back in what they believed were their ancestral homelands; a life of freedom and justice, living together safely, harmoniously, creatively—as we now aim to do also.
What we see, therefore, in the “Water from the Rock” story in Exodus 17, is not the people, as the psalmist puts it, intentionally defying and testing God, putting God to the proof; rather, as we actually read, the people complaining, quarrelling with each other, distrusting Moses’ leadership, not working together selflessly, rather everyone thinking only of their own self-interest. Yes, this is a terrifying predicament they are in, trying to escape to freedom through a parched desert wilderness, all the while being opposed by nations—Amalekites, Amorites, Moabites, Edomites, Canaanites all feature in the story—who were hostile to their passage. But all the more reason for them to pull together, support each other, as the Law provided, to give themselves half a chance of making it through to what they saw as their “Promised Land”.
And so, yes, forty years, or at least a very long time, to complete a journey that might have taken only a few months, if they’d had greater unity of purpose. I’m only speculating, of course, but, given the new, Gospel understanding of God that Jesus presents, I think it is a far more plausible explanation of what happened back then, than the notion that the forty years wandering in the wilderness was God’s punishment for breaking his L-A-W Law!
*****************
Back, finally, now—enough of me wandering around in the wilderness, beating around the bush—to our original question: God is the Rock of our Salvation—salvation from what exactly? The Psalmist might have had in mind the literal rock, at Massah and Meribah, which poured forth water to sustain the Israelites in the desert wilderness while they inched their way painfully to the Promised Land—that is truly a great image. And it feeds into the image Jesus uses in our lectionary Gospel passage for today, which we didn’t read directly, the story of the Samaritan woman at well, where Jesus describes salvation in terms of the “living water” he offers us—you might notice this image in our liturgy today.
But, literally, God saves us not from thirst in the wilderness, nor from our enemies, nor indeed from their own terrible judgement, but from, of course …. ourselves! From the folly of our own natural-born selfishness, which might have us wandering around in the wilderness for what might seem like forty years at a time, almost any day of the week! God does this, yes, through the gift of Law, through the “living water” they pour into us, through the Spirit, to help us break free of our very natural propensity and predilection for putting ourselves first all the time, mucking up our relationships with each other and our own lives, in the process.
So, thank you Lord, and let us indeed make a joyful noise to you, the rock of our salvation. Amen!
