7: Water, Wafers, Water, War

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 2, episode 7. We are continuing our Lessons from the Wilderness series with a look at boot camp. Boot camp? More on that in a moment.

But first, hello, Father.

[00:14] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Here we are back in the Book of Exodus.

[00:18] Stephanie: I love the Book of Exodus. This has been so much fun. And, you know, for our icebreaker today, we’ve had several listeners over our time together who have asked us Lord of the Rings questions, and so I’m going to bring one up here. Do you have a favorite character from Lord of the Rings?

[00:39] Marcus: Well, yeah, Gandalf has been my favorite character. I first read Lord of the Rings in the 1970s when I was in high school, and I didn’t know anybody else who had read the book back then. It wasn’t this social phenomenon. I actually built a four foot by eight foot model of Middle Earth in my…

Stephanie: Do you have pictures of that?

Marcus: You would think somewhere. Probably in the archives. The Fort Wayne Public Library actually put it on display for a period of time. So that was fun working on that. I used to get a Lord of the Rings calendar for my room every year in high school. So I go back before it was huge.

[01:25] Stephanie: You’re a hipster?

[01:28] Marcus: I was hip. I tried telling people that. No one believed me.

[01:31] Stephanie: So why Gandalf?

[01:33] Marcus: Well, Gandalf, I think was, to me, to Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth what Aslan was to Narnia. He felt like a Jesus figure of sorts, so I looked at him as kind of the hero.

[01:51] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:51] Marcus: Now, I know there’s a big debate on who the hero is. Is it Frodo? Is it Sam? Is it whatever? But my first time reading through, Gandalf was the hero.

[02:00] Stephanie: I think that they’re all heroes to a certain extent, but who’s the protagonist or who is doing the hero’s journey may be is in debate. You know, my whole life I have cycled through so many different favorite characters to now they’re all my favorite. When I first read the books in junior high, I loved Legolas and Pippin and Gandalf and Aragorn and Sam Wise Gamgee. I can’t really choose, but I do have to shout out Pippin. He has a special place in my heart. He is so unqualified, and yet he’s supposed to be there. And he’s just so earnest and loyal.

Anyway, enough on Lord of the Rings, but I love it. Speaking of quests, we’ve made it to the wilderness. So this was the stated goal from the beginning. We’re going to go back to Moses and Aaron approaching Pharaoh. And let’s see. I think I have it right here, Exodus 5:1, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.” So this is the original quest. Get to the wilderness. We’re here. We’re here. So why the wilderness?

[03:28] Marcus: There’s multiple things going on here that probably need a little bit of a word. First of all, a lot of people have been like, “Was God lying when he had Moses tell Pharaoh, just let my people go for three days in the wilderness?” Was that actually a lie? I would think we need to put this in the category of God sending out angels to write down what people are doing, sending angels to Sodom and Gomorrah to see what’s really going on there, saying things like, “The cry has reached me, so I’m investigating.”

What’s going on with things like this is that God is showing himself to be just. He’s showing himself to be fair. He’s not simply saying, “I know everything, therefore I’m right, therefore we’ll do this.” He’s saying, “I know this to be true, but I am, just so that everything is above board and nobody can complain, I am going to send out people to investigate this.”

In a similar way, he was showing that Pharaoh was not going to be willing to do any of this. He wasn’t going to be willing even to do the three day thing. So he starts off and he’s kind of making his case and looking like, “Yeah, no, they have no interest in helping us out here at all.” And so he’s going to grow his demand eventually, over time.

[04:47] Stephanie: And frankly, God knew what was going to happen there. But if Pharaoh had said, “Sure,” I think the story would have unfolded in a different way. Pharaoh could have said, “Yeah, sure, okay, go do that.” I don’t know why he would have because of the state of being that he was in.

[05:05] Marcus: But it also brings us into this issue of the hardening of the heart that we talked about before. I don’t think God was going to let that happen because he had made up his mind that it was time for judgment on the gods of Egypt and that it was time for judgment on Pharaoh for everything he’d been doing to his people. And as we said before, the first act of judgment is the hardening of the heart.

So here we are in the wilderness. Maybe the second thing is, I come back to this emotional healing issue. I remember I was a PhD student at the same time that my parents and I were working deeply with several people who had multiple personalities from incredible childhood torture. And so while I’m a PhD student studying Exodus, studying these things, and we’re also doing this emotional healing work, it’s just hard to miss the parallels. One of the things that just jumped out at me was how I felt for these people who’d had such a hard life. They’d been through so much already, and I was like, “God, why don’t you just make this easy? Isn’t it time for them to have a comfortable life?”

[06:20] Stephanie: Why the wilderness? Why not an oasis? Why not?

[06:23] Marcus: Yes. And then I came to the people of Israel and I realized I had a similar question. It’s like, “God, they’re coming out of 430 years here in Egypt, they’ve been enslaved, they’ve been abused, they’ve been mistreated. Why don’t you just get them to the promised land? Why don’t you just get them at least to an oasis where they can kind of take it easy for a while?

“Why do you take them someplace where their life is going to be threatened at the Red Sea, where they are going to go into a desert where they look around and go, ‘We are going to die. There’s no water, there’s no food. There are roving bands of people everywhere.’” I think that what was happening was the same in both cases: God knew that they needed to learn to trust him for their survival.

They needed to learn some, not only trust, but they needed to learn some new life habits that they had not learned before if they were going to really succeed. That it wasn’t enough just to make all the pain stop and make this easy. There was more to it than just healing. Part of this journey was, “You need to learn to trust me, and I’m going to teach you some new skills, and between the trust and the new skills, you’re going to be able to take on giants. You’re going to be able to win every battle that I ask you to fight, and you’re going to have a peace in the midst of it that defies explanation.”

[07:53] Stephanie: Okay, that’s a good overview. So we are entering what we’ve called the boot camp phase of the wilderness. And we’ve been calling this episode Water, Wafer, Water, War. What does that mean to you? Let’s set that up.

[08:06] Marcus: All right, so first of all, the reason for Water, Wafer, Water, War is that there are four tests that the people go through when they first walk into the desert. The first one is that they have bitter water. The second is that there’s no food, and so God gives them manna, which is called wafers. And then they find themselves again with no water. Not just bitter water, but no water. And God provides miraculously. And then they’re attacked. And so they find themselves facing war.

And so to help me remember it, well, this is boot camp and when people are in boot camp, they sing. So we put it together.

Water, Wafer, Water, War.

Boot camp helps you win the war. So that’s kind of what we did with that. It was just a memory device for myself and then to remember this is the sequence of the stories that happen during this boot camp phase in the desert.

[09:07] Stephanie: Beautiful. So we’re entering four trials before we arrive then to the place where they will be for a year is the mountain, of this two year period. So it takes about three months to get to the mountain.

[09:24] Marcus: It is a three month period from the parting of the Red Sea to getting to Mount Sinai. And I will point out, too, that there are a lot of debates about where Mount Sinai is. There’s the traditional site where St. Catherine’s monastery is in the central part of the Sinai peninsula. There’s been an increasing number of people who believe that it’s in Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole lot of stuff around that. And then there are a group of people who believe it is near Edom and Mount Peran on the border of Israel, the Sinai peninsula and Edom up north.

I don’t have time to unpack all of the things about all of that. Let me just say that it is interesting that the text again and again simply says, the mountain, the mountain, the mountain. Everybody knows what we’re talking about here. Either way, the identity of this, for our purposes, is the mountain of God. And so it’s his mountain that he’s taking them to.

It’s interesting to me that boot camp was a two year experience. That was the intent. Three months to get to the mountain, a year at the mountain, and then they begin their journey to go and get in position to invade the promised land. And if all goes according to plan, God’s original plan was two years. I found that encouraging, which is that even on the emotional healing side of things, I find that God had a two year plan to get people from where they are to a place where he wanted them to be.

I find that God often has a plan of how he’s going to get us from a to b. But what I realized was, that plan can get delayed if we don’t trust. I often found that the journey of emotional healing with people felt like trying to lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. It was like trying to get people to trust God, but realizing you can’t actually make them do it.

And so you can set it all up, you can get it all like, “Hey, next step, just trust God with this.” It was amazing to me how hard it was for people who’d gone through significant abuse to trust. I realized that it’s almost like their truster got broken. And so God was going to have to do something significant and some healing work for this to get to where they needed to be.

[11:48] Stephanie: And I think, as ever, when dealing with extremely wounded people, you also get a window into your own wounds and your own pain. We can have trust issues in those pockets of pain. And so I think this is applicable to anyone at any level of healing journey.

[12:10] Marcus: I’m really referring to where I learned the lesson.

[12:13] Stephanie: Sure.

[12:13] Marcus: So I learned the lesson in that context, and you’re absolutely right. One of the things I noticed as I was working with these really deeply wounded people was that I have all the same issues they do. It just isn’t quite as obvious and just isn’t quite as dramatic, but I struggle with that, I have a problem with this, I have a problem with that.

I began to realize it was like holding a mirror up and that was an interesting thing to me because I didn’t think I was wounded. I didn’t think I had any issues. And so it was kind of eye opening for me on that front. But I do think that all of us have a common journey and that’s one of the reasons why the Exodus journey is so universally appealing and so universally applicable to all of us. I do believe that all of us have some kind of a freedom journey that we’re going on.

[13:01] Stephanie: So let’s revisit the four trials leading up to the mountain. Bitter water, no food, no water, and then warfare. Why did God let that happen on the way to the mountain? What’s that about?

[13:15] Marcus: I sometimes think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the idea that the first core need everybody has is the need to know they’re going to survive. And then it goes on up from survival to security to personal satisfaction issues, or higher up the scale. So thinking kind of like that, as you’re going into the desert, your first concern is survival. Can we survive this experience?

And you start looking around, and you’re going, “Where’s the water going to come from?” And you look around, “Where’s the food going to come from?” And what are you going to do about all of these? “We’re kind of exposed out here to all these raiders. What’s going to happen?” So God actually allows them to face first, not no water, but bitter water, and he shows them how easily he takes care of this problem.

“Let’s throw a tree in there!” All of a sudden, no more water problem. This is all good. We also get a glimpse into how quickly people flip from trusting God to being angry at God. It often reminds me, one of my favorite books I read back in the day was The Hidden Rift with God, by William Bacchus, in which he makes the argument that he thinks most Christians are secretly angry at God and are just afraid to admit it.

And I think that one of the things that comes out in the Exodus story is, here are people who, on one level, have every reason to trust God. He just humiliated the gods of Egypt. He just rescued them out of a bondage there was no reason to think they would ever be free from. He just drowned the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, and now he’s just turned bitter water into whole water. Yet again and again and again, we see how quickly they flip from trusting God to complaining and grumbling and not believing. Really the heart of the complaining and the grumbling is the unbelief, and you begin to see how deeply rooted that is.

So one of the purposes of boot camp is to try to cure people of their unbelief and teach them to trust. It’s also to break down their old identity as a slave and teach them a new identity as a child of God. And that’s what you do in any boot camp. You break down that civilian identity and create a military identity. God, in the same way, is breaking down an old identity, building up a new one, and in the process, his core thing is, you’ve got to learn to trust me. And the only way to learn to trust me is to go through trials.

[15:49] Stephanie: Watch how I take care of you.

[15:50] Marcus: Watch how I take care of you. Doesn’t mean you aren’t going to face the trial, but watch how I take care of you.

[15:56] Stephanie: I also find it interesting. In Exodus 15 we were talking about Moses’s song and Miriam, and how you found seven descriptions of fear in Moses’s song and that there’s this idea that, in this sense, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. The first lesson is for people who don’t know God to realize, “Wow, this is what he can do if you are not on the right side, and then I will unleash you momentarily.”

But then, as we were continuing to look through, we were looking at the fact that we have the Jethro story between the four trials and the mountain. And we were contemplating, why is that there? And there could be many reasons there. But it jumped out at me that Jethro makes a statement of, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all the gods,” And I feel like there is also now this bracket of the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge and look how he takes care of those who trust him.

[17:05] Marcus: Now, we see a couple of things going on with that. One of them is, throughout the Old Testament, one of the things we see is how stubborn God’s people are and unable and unwilling to trust him. That is often juxtaposed or set beside Gentiles who do trust God. Jesus makes a big deal about this. He almost gets stoned for it in Nazareth, and that is that he’s like, “God could have saved a lot of people, but he saved this Gentile woman, and he saved these Gentiles.”

And here’s one of the first examples of it. At the same time that the people are grumbling and complaining and they’re failing test after test after test, here comes Jethro, who is not an Israelite. He is a Gentile. And he believes. He says, “I now know that there is no God in all the earth like Yahweh. He’s the greatest of all of them.” And he trusts completely.

It’s very similar to what we see with Naaman the leper, where Elisha’s own personal servant doesn’t trust God the way that this Gentile, Naaman, trusts God. And so one of the things that I think the Jethro story is doing is it’s setting up his faith in contrast to the unbelief of God’s chosen people and going, “Do we kind of see where we need to be versus where we actually are?” So I think that’s part of the big picture here. Now, you’d mentioned something else and it skipped my mind.

[18:34] Stephanie: It was the fear of the Lord.

[18:40] Marcus: I heard Dr. Wilder tell me – he was the first one to point this out and ever since then, it’s just jumped off the page at me – and that is this idea that God makes it very clear throughout the Old Testament that fear is to be in the enemy camp and not in the camp of God’s people, that he is constantly telling his own people, “Don’t be afraid. I am with you.”

But fear is the proper response of his enemies. And so when it says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” in a sense, he’s talking to the Gentile nations. He’s talking to the people who are not saying, “Hey, you don’t know me, you don’t like me.”

“Well, look at what I can do. At least be afraid of what I can do and start learning some wisdom, which is to recognize where I am at in the pecking order of the gods.” And so that’s kind of this idea of the fear of the Lord is recognizing the true place of God in this pecking order of all the world’s gods so that people say that’s the beginning. It’s just recognizing he’s number one, he’s the most powerful. Factor that in if you want to learn some wisdom.

So that was part of what’s going on here in this too, specifically, we’re talking about the idea that fear belongs properly in the enemy camp. Moses makes it abundantly clear here in chapter 15:14-16. I’ll just read it. He goes,

When the peoples hear about what happened to the Red Sea, they will shudder. Anguish will seize the inhabitants of Philistia. The chiefs of Edom will be terrified, trembling will seize the leaders of Moab. All the inhabitants of Canaan will panic. Terror and dread. (It actually is horror could be the translation.) Horror and dread will fall on them, and they will be still as a stone.

That idea, still as a stone, that was a description of Nabal, Abigail’s husband Nabal, when he dropped over, still as a stone, before he finally died. It’s this idea that he’s been overcome by fear and terror. And it says, “All of this is because of the powerful arm of the Lord who allowed his people to pass on through parted waters.” It’s piling it up here in this song.

[21:01] Stephanie: Repetition is a highlighter. Well, I am very much enjoying this. We’ll have to continue next episode. We’re running out of time. So I’m going to make a brief announcement, which is that you are invited to a Name Your Own Price conference, online conference, The Body, the Brain, and Breakthrough, with our own Dr. Warner and Dr. Jim Wilder and Dr. Todd Hall. Would you like to give a brief welcome or invitation?

[21:32] Marcus: So, The Body, the Brain, and Breakthrough, that’s the name of the book, Breakthrough. The idea here is that every emotion that we experience is physically manifested through the body and the brain. If it wasn’t for those two things, we wouldn’t have the emotions the way that we experience them.

Dr. Todd Hall teaches psychology at Rosemead, which is the same school that trained Henry Cloud, John Townsend way back in the day. Our own Dan Rumberger attended Rosemead. It’s connected to Biola University. He is on the cutting edge of attachment theory and connectivity and the brain and all of this stuff. So we’ve got two of the leading experts in the evangelical world in Dr. Todd Hall and Dr. Jim Wilder. I’m kind of here just to pick their brains and learn from them and then try to tie everything together. But it should be a great conference.

[22:31] Stephanie: It’s going to be awesome. So we’ll have the links in the description, and you can find more out at our website. April 13. You’re invited.

All right, Father, final thoughts on this episode.

[22:43] Marcus: Well, Water, Wafers, Water, War. I love the boot camp concept here. I think it was revolutionary for me in understanding how important trust is to the whole message of the Pentateuch, and thus how core trust is to God’s overall message to us. He’s like, “If I can get one thing across to you, that one thing is you are going to have trials, your survival is going to be in question, but you can trust me.”

And if you want to look for where is my growth edge? Where do I need to be growing? You look at the areas in your life that you have the most trouble trusting God and think, all right, well, that’s my growth edge. And so you dive in, you go, why am I struggling to trust God? And there is almost always because there is something unresolved under the surface.

That is, I am stuck between my slave identity and my free identity and I am not living like a free child of God at this point. I’m living out of a slave/orphan mentality here. And so that means there’s healing work that needs to get done. So if I find that I’m struggling to trust God, that is a sign that there is some more work to do, that’s something I need to push into and ask God, “Would you show me why I’m struggling to trust you?” And let’s go through what we need to go through to bring healing to this area.

[24:08] Stephanie: Awesome. Thank you so much.

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