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THE QUARRELSOME GENERATION

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Moses Drawing Water from the Rock, Tintoretto (c. 1518-1594 CE), Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, c. AD 1577.

This article is Part 10 of the FAI Publishing series Seeds and Generations, a Biblical survey of the theology of “Seed” and “Generation” throughout redemptive history to the end of the age.

 

FROM SEED TO GENERATION

At Pharoah’s invitation and the Lord’s prompting, Yakov and “all his seed” migrated to Egypt in the second year of the famine to live with Yosef and his sons.[1] Four centuries passed, and a staggering birthrate turned the “seeds” (i.e. descendants) of Yakov into generations as vast as the stars in the sky.[2] The man Israel had become a nation.

After Yosef’s death, a new Pharaoh took the throne who viewed the burgeoning Hebrew population in the land of Goshen as a threat to his rule. Embodying the “cunning” seed of the serpent, he acted “shrewdly” with the covenant people, subjecting them to slavery.[3] As Nimrod before him, the unnamed Pharoah used his new labor force to build cities to his own glory and fame. Life became “bitter” for the Israelites as they toiled year after year under “ruthless” masters and “heavy burdens.” Yet they continued to multiply all the more.[4]

In an act of wicked desperation, Pharaoh summoned the Hebrew midwives and commanded them to put the newborn Hebrew boys to death.[5] Once again, the ancient enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman reached its murderous apex. Only this time, it was not simply the oppression and murder of a single man, but an entire nation.

FROM YOSEF TO MOSHE

Thankfully, the Hebrew midwives did not comply with the genocidal order of Pharoah. Acting “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,”[6] they reported to Pharoah that the Israelite women gave birth before they arrived. However, Pharaoh was undeterred. A general order went out to all of Egypt that newborn Hebrew boys should be cast into the Nile River.[7] A panic undoubtedly arose in Goshen, as Hebrew mothers and fathers desperately sought to protect their infant sons. One such couple was Amram and his wife Jochebed,[8] who chose to watch their son float down the Nile rather than drown in it. The boy was later rescued by an unlikely character, the daughter of Pharoah. Lifting him from the river current, she named him Moshe, Hebrew for “drawn out.” At the suggestion of the boy’s nearby older sister, the princess unwittingly gave the child back to his birth mother to wean him.[9]

Eventually, the boy Moshe took his place in Pharoah’s house as an adopted son. Raised as an Egyptian, his life became an echo of his ancient cousin, Yosef, and the promised seeds who came before him. Moshe was the youngest among his siblings, sent to live among the gentiles until his appearance and speech could not be distinguished from them. Interestingly, Moshe was the offspring of a marital union which he himself would later record as “asur” (i.e. forbidden) in the Torah, as his father had married his great aunt.[10] Despite this, the trajectory of Moshe’s life followed the pattern of the woman’s seed. Although ensconced among the Egyptians, he had not forgotten his connection to the Hebrews. Witnessing their abuse, he flew into a rage, murdering the abuser of his people before fleeing into the wilderness.[11] There he spent forty years, and like his ancestor Yakov before him, he married in exile, tending the flocks of his father-in-law.[12]

It was in the desert that Moshe encountered the God of his fathers Abraham, Issac and Jacob in the bush.[13] The One named I AM told Moshe that He had “seen the affliction” and “heard the cry” of his people in bondage, commissioning the man to return to Egypt and lead his people out into freedom.[14] And so Moshe prefigured the coming Seed of the Woman who would step into the place of bondage to deliver His covenant people.

In reluctance, Moshe obeyed the Lord’s Word, returning to Egypt and employing his elder brother Aaron to speak on his behalf. Through wonderful and terrible signs, the humble deliverer brought judgement upon Egypt and led his people into the desert. In a spectacular display of Divine power, Moshe split the sea and led his people to safety, leaving the Egyptian horde to drown in the returning depths, and foreshadowing the One of whom it would be said, “Even the wind and waves obey Him.”[15] After a triumphant song and bread from heaven, it appeared as though the seed of the serpent had been defeated. However, the serpent was not just the oppressor of the sons of Israel from the outside. He was also the saboteur of Israel from the inside.

From CRYING to Testing

As the nation of Israel moved through the desert towards the Land of Yakov’s sojourn, they ran short of water. Instead of crying out to God as they had done in Egypt under the whip, many of the Israelites “quarreled with Moses” and “grumbled against Moses,” slandering their deliverer with malicious accusations. “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”[16] Rather than reciprocating in kind, Moshe cried out to the Lord,

“‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.’ And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.” And Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel.  And he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the Lord by saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’”

The grumbling and quarreling exposed a deeper issue of faithlessness among the ranks of Israel. Instead of trusting the Lord, they tested Him. Instead of contentment in His provision, they poured contempt on His anointed leader. In doing so, they demonstrated a prophetic reality which endures to this day. The Apostle Paul summarized it best in his epistle to the Romans: “Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.”[17] That is, it’s not enough to be the physical seed of the man Israel. In some greater sense, you had to be like the man to belong to him. In other words, the seed of the woman is not necessarily genealogical. Delivering his farewell address to the next generation of Israelites four decades later, Moshe traced the wandering demise of their parents to that fateful day. “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.”[19] His words would later be cited by the Promised Seed of the Woman while enduring Satanic temptation:

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you,” and “On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”’ Jesus said to him, ‘Again it is written, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”[20]

Therefore, the act of “putting the Lord your God to the test” is not simply a benign error. It is the nature and character of the serpent himself, and the evidence of his seed. In the insolence of asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” we are echoing the serpent from the garden who questioned the credentials of the Son of God to His face.[21]

A later Hebrew king, descended from the patriarch Yehuda, would reveal the Lord’s reaction towards that infamous generation of Israelites at Meribah as he penned the Ninety-Fifth Psalm. He begins his prose with exhortations to do the opposite of complaining and quarreling: “Let us sing to the Lord… let us make a joyful noise…let us come into his presence with thanksgiving…let us worship and bow down.”[22] Then he ends with a dire warning:

Today, if you hear his voice,
     do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
    as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
 when your fathers put me to the test
    and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
 For forty years I loathed that generation
    and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
    and they have not known my ways.”
Therefore I swore in my wrath,
    “They shall not enter my rest.”

The quarrelsome generation was also the loathsome generation. The ones who put God to the test were kept from His rest. Their “bodies fell in the wilderness”[23] and they did not inherit their place in the Land. In doing so, they became the prototype for every wicked generation that would follow in their footsteps of complaining and quarreling and failing to inherit the promise, including the generation of the Promised Seed Himself.

“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’”[24]

“A wicked and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”[25]

”From the murder of Abel to the murder of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, it will certainly be charged against this generation.” [26]

”The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it.”[27]

Therefore, the “generation” that Moshe endured and that David recalled was the same “generation” that the Promised Seed would later confront during His ministry. It was not so much a generation of time, but a generation of type. The majority of the Israelites in the desert were generated “according to the flesh”[28] and therefore lived “according to the flesh.”[29] They needed something greater. They needed re-generation. As the Promised Seed would one day tell Israel’s teacher, “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”[30] The author of Hebrews would later expand upon David’s words in Psalm 95, broadening the scope of the king’s warning beyond a particular group of Israelites to incude us all:

“Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’ Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”[31]

From Rock in the Desert to Rejected Stone

And yet, despite their grumbling and quarreling, the Lord “remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob”[32] and showed Israel mercy in providing water from the rock. In doing so, He foreshadowed the path of the Promised Seed, who would be “poured out” for the sake of Israel and the nations. Moshe was to approach the rock “with some of the elders of Israel.” As the Lord stood before them on the rock, Moshe (a Levitical representative of the priesthood) was to “strike the rock” with his staff. It was a seemingly odd display, at least as a means of getting water. But the purpose of God was in every step.

In acting out the direction of the Lord, Moshe and the elders prefigured a future generation of the “chief priests and elders” of Israel who would sit before the “Stone that the builders rejected” and condemn Him.[33] When Moshe struck the rock with his staff, he portended the ones who would “strike the Shepherd and scatter the sheep.”[34] But this predestined confrontation would not result in Israel’s condemnation. Rather, it would become the very means of their salvation. It was not wrathful fire that came out of the rock at Horeb after Moshe struck it, but instead, life-giving water. Likewise, “blood and water” would one day flow from the side of the One who had boldly announced to Israel, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”[35]

There is hope for grumblers and quarrelers. There is a Way for God-testers to become God-resters. There is shockingly good news: The seeds of the serpent amongst both Israel and the nations can find redemption in the Seed of the Woman. The wicked generation can find regeneration. Once again, the Apostle Paul summarizes for us nicely,

“For they [the Israelites] drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Messiah.”[36]

Maranatha.

Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.

 
 

Gabriel Caligiuri