Learning to Trust - or Distrust God

At the end of forty years, God told Moses that the years of Israel’s deprivation in the desert had had a purpose. 'My design', God said, was ‘to humble you and test you in order to know what was in your heart” Deuteronomy 8:2. 'As a father disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you’ (v.5) ‘to do you good in the end’ (v.16).

Hunger and thirst are powerful tests – and God wanted Israel to internalize deep in their consciousness a conviction that they could trust their covenant Partner. Experiencing God’s provision of water and food in God's time would lay a foundation of trust in other areas of life. But Israel never seemed to pass the trust-test. They were habitual whiners, constantly grumbling against God, testing God’s patience.

Moses named the memorable landmarks where God provided water from the rock Massah (i.e. Testing.) and Meribah (i.e. Quarreling) in order to indelibly mark these low-points in their spiritual odyssey.  This naming signals later travelers – like us - of some of the prevalent dangers of the road.

Psalm 78, quoted above, is a long study of Israel’s resistance against God, their suspicion that God would not meet their needs. 'How often they rebelled against him in the desert, and grieved him in the wasteland', the writer laments in v.40, but God still 'brought his people out like a flock; he led them like sheep through the desert' v.52.

In this context of Israel blaming God, we read about God's lavish, generous response - “when Moses struck the rock, water gushed out and streams flowed abundantly,” v.20. The psalmist seems to

be amazed that God’s grace towards a grumbling, dissatisfied and distrustful people is as lavish and abundant as the water streaming from the rock.

Other psalms also cite this event at ‘the waters of Meribah’ as a historic reminder of Israel’s instinct to question and blame God rather than to trust God.

Do not harden your hearts
as you did at Meribah,

as you did that day at Massah
in the desert,

where your fathers tested and tried me,

though they had seen what I did.

Psalm 95:8-9

The writer of Hebrews picks up this challenge and applies it to believers in every age, lest we also allow our hearts to harden into distrust, lose our courage and confidence and fall short of the challenge to live by the high calling of faith.

This is a powerful reminder that testing - and the human inclination to distrust God are virtually universal. We want our needs to be met on demand. We are impatient and restless when we have to wait. But there is no opportunity for faith and trust to grow without testing. And there is no oasis for our restless hearts unless we learn to rest in the Ultimate Provider.

I am writing this during my weekly day of fasting. As I type these words, my stomach is growling. I’m hungry. Thankfully, I have food and drink in abundance, but I choose to discipline my appetites and curb my instinctive desire for good things so that my spirit and body can learn that I do not live by bread and drink alone, but by the word and grace of God. It also links me sympathetically with millions of people in other places for whom hunger and thirst are not optional.

For me it’s a simulated desert experience to practice and deepen the disciplines of trust and compassion – and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Art Credit: James Jacques Joseph Tissot - Moses Strikes the Rock c. 1896-1902,