Then came Amalek, and fought with Israel at Rephidim."
So with startling abruptness, the Bible narrative carries us from one crisis in Israel's experience to another.
How like life it is! Hardly have we recovered from three blows than life deals us a fourth. Moses might have been pardoned if, after the bitter disappointment he had had to swallow already at Rephidim, he had flung up his hands in despair, and said, "Lord, it's too much. It's just too much. If it isn't Marah where the water's bitter, it's the wilderness of Zin where there's no bread. If it isn't the wilderness where there's no bread, it's Rephidim where there's no water. And no sooner has water been found than Amalek is upon us. It's too much, Lord! I quit."
But Moses does not quit. He knows what he must do in this fresh crisis, and just gets on and does it. Instead of weakening, every crisis seems to strengthen him to face the next one. As the old hymn has it: "Each victory will help you another to win"
"He endured, as seeing Him Who is invisible." (Hebrews 11:27) That is what marked him apart from the people.
Their fault, at Rephidim, as we have seen, was that they had no eyes for God in their midst; they had eyes only for their threatening circumstances. As a result, every fresh crisis floored them.
But not Moses. Not because he was a tough man; he was not. He was as vulnerable to dismay as his people were. The cry, "Lord, what shall I do?" was more than once on his lips. What kept Moses on his feet when all others around him had fallen was simply that he kept looking for God. The natural man puts circumstances between himself and God, and loses sight of God behind them; the man of faith puts God between himself and his circumstances, and sees his way through them.
The Israelites looked out, saw only the looming menace on their horizon, and gave in; Moses looked up, saw the God of Heaven watching above His own, and expected deliverance. He had learned what Jesus would have us all learn, who are His disciples: "When you see all these things beginning to take place" - threatening things, things so terrifying that men's hearts fail them with fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world - "then, look up, and raise your heads high, for your redemption is already near." (Luke 21:28)
Do we do that? Or do we, like Peter, look only at the threatening waves, and begin to sink? If we lifted our eyes to the Christ Who rules above all circumstances, Who bestrides all storms, and reached out our hand for Him, we should find, as Peter found, that the very waves we fear will engulf us become a path under our feet. The storm may not at once abate; but the Lord Himself "makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters." (Isaiah 43:16)
Wrote Soren Kierkegaard, a man for whom faith was by no means always an easy thing: "Picture a man, who with all the shuddering of a terrified imagination has represented to himself some horror as a thing absolutely not to be endured. Now it befalls him; precisely that horror befalls him. Humanly speaking his destruction is the most certain of all things. The despair in his soul fights to get entire possession of him. The believer is not blind to this threatening destruction ... but he believes. Therefore he does not succumb. He leaves it wholly to God how he is to be helped; but he believes that with God all things are possible: so that instead of believing in his own destruction, he believes in God and in the unimaginable possibilities that lie in God's open hand." ("Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death", translated Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, 1954, pp. 171-172.)
When I first read that, I found myself wanting to write it on a piece of leather and wear it, like the Jews of old, as a frontlet between my eyes! Always, there is God. Paint the future as black as you will, always, there is God. What He will do, I do not know. But what He will do, He will do gloriously.
The man of faith does not shut his eyes to the harsh realities of life, he does not; he feels them as keenly, as disturbingly as any other. But neither does he shut God out of his view. And so, like Moses, he endures as seeing Him Who is invisible. So to walk with God is the life of faith. To such a life of faith, God wishes to bring His people - all His people - His whole people.
Until now in the story, such faith has been found only in Moses. But now, the same faith is to be kindled at last in the hearts of his people.
We shall miss the whole point of this episode unless we see this, for I am persuaded that the chief lesson it carries is not, as is commonly supposed, a lesson in prayer, but a lesson in faith. Prayer is not once mentioned in the story. To be sure, it may be adapted as an illustration of intercessory prayer: Moses on the hilltop lifting up his hands to heaven. It is a nice picture. But it is not said that Moses was praying as he lifted up his hands. What it is said he was doing was that he was holding up the rod of God.
We are still at Rephidim. As we have seen, this was the place where the faith of God's people was to receive its sure support. God had planned such an experience for them here as would ensure that from here on in their faith would hold up. The supply of water that God had here stored up for them, had they only believed, would have confirmed and established their faith. Its concealment when they arrived there, which had been intended as a spur to faith, they interpreted as a slur on God.
We are all tempted to do that. Life's setbacks, which God intends should supply us with raw material for the exercise of faith, we interpret as grounds for unbelief. We are more ready to conclude that God has let us down than to expect Him in some new way to lift us up. "These things are sent to try us," we bleat; they are not - they are sent to train us.
So God's purpose failed that day, apparently. Faith was not begotten in their hearts. Moses even changed the name of the place from Rephidim (which means supports) to Massah and Meribah (meaning impertinence and contention).
But our author stubbornly insists on calling the place Rephidim nonetheless! In verse 8, he introduces this second episode with the words: "Then came Amalek, and fought with Israel at Rephidim." He would have us understand thereby that in this second episode at the same place, God's purpose for His people will be fulfilled after all. God is not finished! The place will yet merit the name of Rephidim.
God was not defeated by the first setback, as His people were. As Paul observed to Timothy, "even if we are faithless, God abideth faithful, for He cannot deny Himself." (II Timothy 2:13) It would be very surprising indeed if God were as easily defeated as we are. He must act worthily of Himself. So He persevered with His people here. It is as though He looked down on them, watched them laughing as they splashed in the water and drank of the stream He had made to flow for them in the desert, and communed with Himself in His own heart and said, "It won't do. They have eyes only for the water I have given them, and they are blind still to my presence in their midst. They have not turned in their hearts to Me, the fountain of living waters. Until they drink of me and my fellowship, their spirits are parched and dead even while their bodies live. But I love them, and they shall know me. They shall know, even yet, that I am the Lord, their Redeemer, and it is as their Saviour that I am among them. So ... we shall not hold back these Amalekites from them any longer."
And He loosed Amalek upon them!
If the blessings God showers upon us do not teach us to trust Him then He will let loose troubles on us to do it. If gratitude does not hold us to Him then He will arrange for fear to drive us to Him.
Now we must see in our mind's eye what happened - in imagination, climb inside their skins, and live that day with them.
First, Moses took the rod of God with him, climbed the hill, and stood with it in his hand, held up against the sky.
The Rod of God
Recall the part that rod had played in their experience and what it had already meant to them. It was here at Rephidim, way back at the beginning of the venture when Moses met God in the burning bush, that it had first been given significance. God had commanded Moses then to fling it on the ground, and it had become a hissing serpent. The serpent was Egypt's national insignia, as the lion is of England or the bear of Russia; so that rod became for a moment a symbol of Egypt's imperial might. "Now grasp it by its tail," God had said, and when Moses had trusted Him enough to obey, it had become a docile rod again. All Egypt was as nothing before the power of God. From that day, the rod in Moses' hand had become a symbol of God's power.
It became God's banner, so to speak. In those days an army's banners were not flags, but poles, surmounted by an image of the god worshipped by its warriors. What more fitting banner could the army of the Lord be given than a simple pole with no graven image on it at all - a rod which was in fact a shepherd's crook - to be a sign of the God Who was His people's shepherd, so they should say of Him, "Thy rod and Thy staff are my comfort me."
With that rod, Moses called forth plagues on their enemies, and lifted them away; with that rod he reached out his hand over the Red Sea, and its waters parted; with that rod he struck the rock at Rephidim, and the waters gushed forth. Now with that rod, he climbed the hill and raised it over his beleaguered people.
It was the 'Banner of Yahweh' their God, that Moses lifted over them - the very sign of His presence in power among them.
And the people fighting in the valley below saw it, and took courage.
But then the tide of battle turned, so they fell back, and began to be in terror of their lives. Turning wild eyes to the hill above them, they saw that Moses' arm had fallen. Then they saw him raise his wearied arm and hold the rod firm again, silhouetted against the sky, and they took fresh heart, and rallied, and carried the fight to the enemy again. "Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed: and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed." (v. 11)
As the day wore on, it was borne in upon the fighting men of Israel that their hope of victory was in the Lord's hand, and not in the might of their own arm. There kindled in every warrior's breast a will to will strength into Moses arm, for unless the banner of Yahweh was over them, they were lost. So the fighting men in the valley, and Moses on the hill, became as one in their mind to trust God for victory.
Was the Lord among them or not? That was the question being asked and answered at Rephidim. Now the people knew that everything depended on His presence among them, and their faith in Him.
But still Moses' arm grew weary. So Aaron and Hur took a boulder for Moses to sit on, and standing either side of him they held up his hands, so that "Moses' hands were steady until the going down of the sun." So Israel prevailed.
Moses, Aaron and Hur, Joshua and his fighting men, and the whole company of Israel, even to its watching women and children, were that day welded into one company whose whole trust was in the Lord. His power, through faith in his power, gave them the victory. (As Peter said of the cripple by the Gate Beautiful: "His Name, through faith in His Name, has made this man whole.")
"Is the Lord among us, or not?" they had asked at the day's beginning. At its end, humbled but victorious, they knew. So God accomplished His purpose with Israel, after all. The response He had been after all along was fashioned in their hearts at last.
In the strength of the faith forged in their hearts this day they will come to Sinai, and there enter wholeheartedly into covenant with their God.
There was a flowing forth of trust and love between God and His people at this time. Hosea would recall these days in later years as the time when "God brought Israel into the wilderness to allure her and speak tenderly to her, and she answered with open-hearted response." (Hosea 2:14) In Jeremiah, we hear God say of this time, "I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown." (Jeremiah 2:2) Soon we shall hear God say to Moses, "Oh that they had such a mind as this always, to fear me and keep my Word, that it may go well with them and with their children for ever." (Deuteronomy 5:29)
This is the blessedness to which God would have us come - the blessedness, the wholesomeness, the deep, rich strength of open, trusting fellowship with Himself. If we but once know the love of God shed abroad in our heart, and answer to it with awakened faith, all else in life we are pleased to call its pleasures which are not shared with Him will appear beside it grey and drear.
Into that blessed fellowship, God is pledged to bring us, and He will not be turned aside from His purpose. "He Who has begun a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." (Philippians 1:6) It is toward that goal that all His dealings with us tend. If His provision of water out of the rock fails to awaken our trust in Him, then He will perhaps let Amalek loose upon us, so that by His protection in the evil day we may learn at last to fix our eyes upon Him.
For His banner over us is love. Like Moses on the hilltop, our Lord is now ascended into Heaven, where He lifts His banner over us. His hands do not grow weary. He does not, like Moses, need another's hands to lean upon. And the rod in His uplifted hand is in the shape of a Cross. Holding that above us, He calls to us: "In this sign conquer." For is it not the sign of His triumph over all the powers that can oppress or destroy us?
The motto of Spurgeon's College where I trained is 'Et teneo et teneor' - 'I both hold and am held.' The symbol above the words is a Cross grasped in a hand. Whose hand is it that holds it? Christ's or mine? It is both.
In the light of all that that Cross tells me of Him, I hold Him. In the light of all that that Cross tells me of Him, I know that He holds me. I both hold and am held.
So He would bring us to the ending of our day, raising with Moses the exultant cry, "A hand upon the banner of the Lord."
He will beget faith in us, even if it kills Him ... as it did.
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