Disobedience and Unbelief

We're actually at the second last phase of this story. We're actually, interestingly enough, not going to read in Exodus, but we're going to read a story of the Exodus from the book of Numbers that tells of an event during this journey through the desert this morning. And we're going to look at a familiar scene with the Israelites, one that if you've read your Bible before, you will be familiar with. During the forty years of their wilderness experience, the people of Israel whinged and screeched with the sound of a bunch of lorikeets at a local shopping mall car park. Has anyone ever heard that before?

Those lorikeets just going at it at dusk time. They're just yelling incessantly. And so we get this idea of the Israelites and their chatter on and on and on. And we see Moses with just this amazing patience, just bearing it and interceding for them to God and mediating between them and God, asking for God to save them and to ease their worries and to soothe their complaints. And yet, this morning, we're going to look at a moment where Moses lost his cool, where he became impatient, and we see a man that had feet of clay.

And he made a mistake which cost him a very precious thing. And so this morning, I'd like to invite you to read with me in the book of Numbers 20, verses 1-12, about this event. Numbers 20, verses 1-12. In the first month, the whole Israelite community arrived at the Desert of Zin, and they stayed at Kadesh. There, Miriam died and was buried.

That's Moses' sister. Now there was no water for the community, and the people gathered in opposition to Moses and Aaron. They quarrelled with Moses and said, if only we had died when our brothers fell dead before the Lord. Why did you bring the Lord's community into the desert that we and our livestock should die here? Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place?

It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink. Moses and Aaron went from the assembly to the entrance to the tent of meeting and fell face down, and the glory of the Lord appeared to them. The Lord said to Moses, take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to the rock before their eyes, and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink.

So Moses took the staff from the Lord's presence just as He commanded him. He and Aaron gathered the assembly together in front of the rock, and Moses said to them, listen, you rebels. Must we bring you water out of this rock? Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.

But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, because you did not trust in Me enough to honour Me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them. So far, our reading this morning. So we see Moses and Aaron go and meet with God to relay this message from the Israelites. There's no water. Our throats are getting parched.

We're very thirsty. This was one of the latest terrible disasters to happen to the Israelites. They had croaky throats. Their tongues were sticky. And God listened to Moses and He said, okay, Moses, take your staff, go to the assembly, speak to the rock, and water will come from it.

Now make sure you listen to that. It couldn't be any clearer, could it? Take your staff, go to the rock, speak to the rock, and water will come from that rock. But what we might miss from reading this story is actually the undercurrent of red hot rage in Moses as God was telling him this. Up until now, there's nothing in this story, there's nothing to indicate that Moses was getting a bit hot under the collar.

He takes the staff after God commands him, takes the staff, goes to the rock, but then deviates from God's plan. Verses 9-10 says that he gathered everyone together and said to them, listen, you rebels. Must we bring you water out of this rock? And Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice. Okay.

Now wait a minute. Did we miss something here? Where did Moses get the okay to divert from this plan of God, which was very simply relayed to him, and give a sermon to the Israelites, firstly? God didn't say anything about rebuking. But Moses took it upon himself, brimming with hostility, and says this, listen, you rebels, you ungrateful toads.

Must we bring water out of this rock for you? Now, wait up again. When did Moses ever bring out water from the rock? Did you just speak to God, Moses? Wasn't it Him who told you what to do?

Is it you, Moses, or God who brings water from this rock? He tells the Israelites, Aaron and I bring you water from this rock. And then the text continues and says, and so Moses raised his arm, struck the rock twice with his staff. Again, we see that God said to Moses, speak to the rock. But Moses struck the rock, not once, but twice, and you can bet he hit that rock with some feeling.

He nearly broke his staff on it. It was with white hot anger boiling in his veins that he decided to take out and vent some of this violent anger. Frankly, I wonder if he even cared if water came out from that rock or not. You know, for all he cared, he would've thought, well, you know, the Israelites' throats can probably stay dry. Let them struggle a little bit.

But the amazing thing again is despite Moses' disobedience, water comes gushing out of this rock, it says. So much so that all the Israelites and all their livestock drank and had enough. But God did not overlook Moses' disobedience. He couldn't. And we see in verse 12 just the result of this.

You can sense the disappointment in God's voice as He says to Moses in verse 12, because you did not trust in Me enough to honour Me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I am giving them. Now imagine hearing that for the first time. Imagine you were Moses. That would have hit you like a ton of bricks. Your whole life had been spent in preparation of leading God's people out of Egypt and into the promised land that He was wanting to give them.

And God says, because of this moment, you won't be seeing the promised land. Now, I don't know about you, but when I read this, it seems harsh, doesn't it? It seems almost unfair. All Moses did was hit a rock. You know, he was provoked by this stubborn, stiff-necked people.

Wasn't Moses entitled to a bit of frustration? But although we can sympathise with Moses and the frustration he would have felt, there are three things that we see from this text and that we actually, as Christians, should remember. Three things. Firstly, we have to understand that disobedience comes from unbelief. Disobedience to God's will comes from unbelief.

God says to Moses in verse 12, because you did not trust in Me enough. Another translation says, because you did not believe Me, you did this. Moses never said explicitly, Lord, I don't want to do it your way. I'm gonna do it my way. It wasn't that simple or that obvious, but his disobedience to God's command actually had come from unbelief.

How? Well, this is something many of us might be familiar with. When you know God's will and you know how He wants you to act in a certain situation, what to do in a certain circumstance, how to speak, how to think, and yet, we wilfully decide to move in a different direction. That's not simply disobedience. That's unbelief.

When Moses walked out of God's presence with the staff in hand, still, you know, glowing probably from the glory that he had experienced in God's presence, the words of God still fresh in his ears, he had no intention of speaking to that rock. Every step that he took through that mob of ungrateful Israelites, every step that he took got him more and more annoyed. He'd had it. And as he walked through them, moment pushed out God's words out of his mind more and more, till the point where he stood in front of that rock, and he demonstrated what he really believed in that moment, and that was that God didn't know how to handle these Israelites right. These Israelites deserved some rebuking.

These Israelites needed to hear that God was unhappy with them, but God didn't say that. God was going to be compassionate on them, but Moses thought, I'm going to preach a sermon to them on how to be grateful. The book of Hebrews picks up on this plague, this epidemic that was going through the Israelite camp in that time of unbelief. Hebrews 3, verse 19 says that it was because of Israel's unbelief that they were in the wilderness for forty years. It was because they had rejected God, that they believed that God could not lead them into the promised land and conquer all those impressive armies in Canaan.

And so God, it says, decided to wait forty years for an entire generation to die out so that the next generation, more faithful than them, would take hold of His promises, would trust in God and let them enter into the land. Why was it so important for the Israelites and for Moses to believe every single word of God? Why was it so important? Remember last week when we spoke about the ten commandments and the preamble that God gave about these ten commandments, that Israel was going to be for the nation, a nation of priests that would mediate and would show and exemplify what it looks like for a person to be walking obediently with God. That those ten commandments would be precious to them, but that their lives would flourish because of it.

They were to be living examples of God's grace and love. But we see that they failed to do that. For forty years, had to die out in the wilderness because of that. And now here was Moses disobeying God, not believing God's word. F.

B. Meyer, in his commentary on Hebrews 3, writes that disobedience and unbelief are two sides of the same coin. Disobedience and unbelief, two sides of the same coin. They exist hand in hand. They who disobey, he says, do not believe.

And they who do not believe disobey. Now, it has become very real to me in a situation of a friend that I have who's grown up in a nominal Christian household. And some of us may even be able to relate to this. They hold to a Christianity which is in name only. And although my friend will passionately claim that they are a Christian through and through, when it comes to decisions in their life, you can see the vast chasm between what they say they believe and what their actions show they believe. Their choices in life.

Their choices in life. Who they want to be in a relationship with. What they choose to pursue to build their success and their fulfilment on has led this person to, in essence, deny the place of lordship of Jesus over their life. In other words, you can accept Jesus as saviour of your life, yet deny Him as the Lord and the King of it, and in essence, fall under the judgment of God, not be considered as a believer at all. Because their choices of disobedience to God's will are not simply mistakes.

We have to understand that. Our decisions to not obey God is not simply a mistake. It is a decision made against better judgment. We know. We know what God wants.

If these individuals know enough to believe that Jesus Christ needs to be their saviour, that they know enough of what it needs to be what they need to be saved from. And yet, if they indulge wholeheartedly in rebellion to God, the question must be asked, is Jesus their Lord as well? Not simply a saviour. Is He the King of their lives? Will they bow the knee to His wisdom or will they stand with straight backs, stiff necks against His holiness?

Disobedience to God often means unbelief. Not believing God at His word. Not believing that He knows best in this situation or in your life. Disobedience means you do not believe what God has told you is true. Secondly, we have to be aware of disobedience because it diminishes God's glory.

God said to Moses, and because of his unbelief, that he smeared or he dragged God's glory through the mud. Verse 12, you failed to honour Me as holy in the sight of the Israelites. You failed to honour Me as holy in the sight of the Israelites. In other words, Moses had caused the Israelites to forget that God is holy, that He's completely other. Instead of fearing God's word and sticking to it, Moses' decision to stray from God's commands meant, in essence, God, that my way is higher than yours, that I know better what should happen in this situation.

The holiness and the otherness of God was reduced to merely another option. A little bit of wisdom, pop culture psychology to choose from. Now, this is again so true for us today as we live in a world of shopping cart Christianity. We can choose what we like. We can choose to take out what we don't like.

We accept things as true for our lives, and then we reject other things that we don't like from God's word. Homosexuality, we say, is forbidden, but sex outside of marriage with my girlfriend is fine. Both, in fact, are sexual sins. Both, in fact, are wrong in God's eyes, yet one command is added to the shopping cart, and the other one is kept on the shelf. Disobedience, however, for God diminishes His glory because it says, God, I know better than You.

I know better than You, or modern society has evolved to a place where they know better than what You've said. Thanks for the advice, but I will choose to approach it in this other way. And again, many people will never consciously say this to God, but our actions prove otherwise. There's also another aspect in this passage that some of us need to consider, and that is specifically aimed at leaders. All God's servant leaders live in a divine goldfish bowl.

Our lives are constantly on display. As leaders, as elders, as evangelists, as deacons, as preachers, even just as the spiritual dude in the office, we exist in a fishbowl that transparently shows how we treat God's word in our lives. Your act of wilful disobedience publicly casts a shadow on the glory of God. One man wrote, the plain and sobering lesson is that God deals more stringently with the sins of leaders, especially when their public actions involve His glory. And that is what happened with Moses.

As an example of faithfulness to God, He failed. And God said, this cannot continue. Is it any wonder then that the Apostle James writes in James 3:1, not many of you should presume to be teachers because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. It is a fearful thing to be in leadership of God's people. Be aware of disobedience because it diminishes God's glory.

And thirdly, guard against disobedience since it can bear painful consequences. After Moses gave into a moment, a single solitary moment of rage, and he committed this sin, God said to him, You will not bring this community into the land. Imagine hearing that, all that work. Thirty odd years would go by and he would still be listening to the same complaints and he'd still be interceding for the people and he'd still be leading them, but he would never see the promised land. If you read Deuteronomy, in fact, you see that the reaction, just the immense pain that this was, Moses asked three times for God to remove this judgment.

Three times Moses asked that this may not be true, and after the third time, God answered and said, don't pray for that again, Moses. The answer is no. The judgment was final. Like I said, God wanted His people faithful. God wanted His people faithful.

He wanted His people to mediate like priests to the nations around them about the love of God and to exemplify faithfulness to Him. But Moses failed in this moment of weakness, and it was a public failure. It was in front of the entire assembly. And it meant that Joshua, the son of Nun, would take the Israelites over the border. And again, you see why this was Joshua, the young whippersnapper, the fierce, loyal man that he was, showed incredible faith and obedience when, at the start of that forty years, he was willing to enter into the promised land.

He was willing to believe God at His word, to conquer these impressive armies, because he knew God was on their side. He never once doubted. God said, that man is the man I need to lead the nation in this new land. What we see in this story is that God is not okay with having His glory dragged through the mud. He may be long suffering, but He doesn't remain patient forever.

But it begs the question, and this is the other question we might have, did God forgive Moses? Was Moses' relationship broken from that moment onwards with God? And the assurance is that it wasn't. It seems that for Moses, there was a genuine repentance, there was godly sorrow, which instantly restored his relationship with God. Moses still had thirty years of faithful relationship with God.

He still enjoyed God's presence in his life. He continued meeting with God. He experienced God's majesty in the tent of meeting. That was not taken from him. He was still used in God's service.

But that one moment, that one very public weakness had far reaching consequences. And we see that in many examples in the Bible. Remember the story of David, King David, and the fact that he fell into adultery with Bathsheba, that he, in fact, caused the death of her husband, that he was a murderer, but God also forgave him. But if you study the life of David, you know that as a result of this sin, he lost a child, and in fact, his life sort of looked like the peak of a roof. Everything up until this moment was just going up.

His kingdom was growing. It was expanding at a tremendous rate, but at this point, at his highest point, he fell into adultery and from there it was a slow descent as his kingdom started fading, as there was infighting in his family up until the point where he was overthrown almost by his son, his own son, Absalom. There were very real consequences to his moment of unfaithfulness. In closing, we may have made decisions, apart from God's will, that may have earthly consequences. We should not live in the perception or the misconception that what we do now will be completely restored or renewed or will be just ignored.

There are earthly consequences for our decisions, and we have to accept that we cannot go back to that moment of rage, that moment of weakness, and undo sinful deeds or unsay sinful words, but this God we serve is also a redeemer. Perfectly just, but perfectly loving. King David, after he had committed these terrible things, was broken. He was stripped back by the prophet Nathan who accused him and knew what had happened. And he wrote Psalm 51 in response to this, and this was his prayer.

Listen to these words. Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your unfailing love. According to Your great compassion. Blot out my transgression. David had become very aware of his guilt.

He was well aware of God's holiness and perfection and glory. But David knew the father heart of God as well. David knew it. He knew that God is compassionate, that He has an unfailing covenantal love for His people, and he threw himself on the mercy of God, and he pleaded with God for not just forgiveness, but for redemption. Not just forgiveness, but redemption.

Verse 10, listen to this, create in me a pure heart, O God. Create in me a pure heart and renew a faithful spirit within me. Do not cast me from Your presence or take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. That's not simply forgiveness.

That's not simply blotting out transgression. That is redemption. That is formation of a new heart. While David realised with painful certainty the consequences of his sin, he also knew that God was able to restore and renew. That while aspects of his life may be marred by a dumb decision, what was of surpassing importance was that he would not be thrown from the presence of this God.

And friends, as Christians, we believe that Jesus Christ, on our behalf, has sealed this great assurance for us. That not only have we received forgiveness, but we have received redemption. And we have an eternal promise of God's forgiveness that was won for us at Calvary. And that we cannot, for the life of us, even if we were to try, we cannot be removed from God's love. That there is nothing on heaven or earth that can rob us of the joy of this salvation.

Beware of the danger of disobedience because it is real. Beware of the consequences of it. Guard against it in your lives. Honour the glory of God through your lives, but also rest in the knowledge that God does not remain angry forever. The God who does not treat us as our sin deserves but is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love.

Steadfast, faithful love. Let's pray. Father, it is so amazing to, again, just experience in this entire service that understanding of this eternal transaction that took place on our behalf, that we are forgiven because Jesus was forsaken, that we are accepted because He was condemned. And Father, we have seen and we have experienced even what disobedience and unbelief can result in in our lives, that we may struggle for the rest of our life with insecurity because of it. We may struggle for a long time with frayed relationships, but at the same time, Father, that we are so forgiven, that we are so set free, that there is so much forgiveness available to us, that these consequences, Lord, pale in comparison.

And, Father, that You are even in the process of renewing and redeeming them for Your purposes. Father, You are the ultimate healer. And Father, in our lives, we recognise that perhaps we may never experience the horrifying reality of what Moses experienced. That man who You called for a very holy and specific purpose, that our lives may thankfully never be in that sort of predicament. Father, we realise that sin in our lives is real.

Father, protect us as Your son Jesus taught us to pray. Protect us from temptation. And Psalm 19 says, Lord, show us and guard us against wilful sin in our lives. Lord, I pray that areas in our life will be opened more and more to the light of Your love, that the dark recesses of our hearts and souls will be cleansed and washed clean by You. Father, for relationships that are afraid, that there may be redemption for that even.

Lord, that there may be restoration, there may be healing of insecurities even. Father, let us realise Your amazing, abounding grace as well. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.