Exodus 17:1-7
Growing up in the Pittsburgh area in the 1970s, there were several absolutes that a young person took for granted: The Pirates would be a good baseball team, the Steelers would win the Super Bowl, you had to chew up the air before you could breathe it, and Heinz Ketchup would be on every kitchen table.
As Western Pennsylvanians, we took a strange pride in the fact that Heinz Ketchup was our most famous export, along with steel (remember when steel was manufactured in America?). Indeed, Heinz had the best commercials—like this one:
Anticipation.
Remember, these were the days before the instant condiment gratification of plastic squeeze bottles and recycling. Heinz touted its ketchup as being so thick and rich that it was virtually impossible to get out of the glass bottle. Many baby boomers remember having to smack the bottle repeatedly to get the ketchup to come out … and that was supposed to be a good thing. Back then, we were willing to wait a minute before getting to the good stuff.
Things change, however. As the decade of the 70s rolled into the 80s and 90s, however, “anticipation” got replaced with speed and efficiency. Think about your first personal computer, for example. I remember that my 286 with a 42 meg hard drive took about ten minutes to boot up. The salesman had said that I’d “never use” all that memory and the that the speed was “blazing.” Nowadays if any computer operation takes more than ten seconds I’m tapping my fingers in frustration.
Anticipation. As the adage goes, good things come to those who wait. The real question, though, is how long you should have to wait for something good to happen. Think about how hard it is to wait for, say, a child to be born, or your upcoming wedding. We can wait a little while for these good things but, by and large, we humans aren’t very good at waiting. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’re constantly aware of the relative shortness of our life span and don’t want to waste our little block of time. Some studies have shown that if you live to be 70, you will have spent a full three years of that life simply waiting for something to happen — waiting in traffic, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting on hold, waiting at the airport. We spend a lot of time anticipating, and we get more than a little frustrated if we have to wait too long for what we want or need.
Part of the problem is that we’re governed by the ticking clock, but we often forget that the rest of creation tends to work on a different timetable. We’re watching minutes and seconds, while the earth is marking time in epochs. While we’re frantic to get things done, creation is a lot more patient.
Take, for example, an experiment begun in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Australia. Parnell wanted to demonstrate to his students that some substances that appear to be solid are actually liquid, so he heated some pitch — a petroleum-based substance known for its stickiness and high viscosity (this is the stuff Noah used to waterproof the ark, if you recall) — and sealed it in a funnel-shaped glass tube. After three years, the pitch had coagulated, and Parnell unsealed the tube to see how long it would take for the now solidified mass of pitch to drain out. The “Pitch Drop Experiment” was born.
The result? Well, let’s put it this way: By the time the first drop began to form two years later, most of Parnell’s students had graduated. By the time the first drop actually fell, those same students had likely forgotten Parnell and the experiment altogether. It took eight years for that first drip to finally drop. It took another eight years for the second drop to fall. Professor Parnell died in 1948, which means he saw only two drips (now there’s an exciting life!), but the experiment keeps going. As of 2009, only eight drops have fallen, while a ninth has formed and could drop at any time. A Web cam is set up at the University of Brisbane so the world can watch it, assuming you have nothing better to do while you’re waiting for, say, paint to dry. The experiment is so slow that the Guinness Book of World Records lists it as the longest-running experiment in history — a record that shouldn’t be broken any time soon. Scientists estimate there’s enough pitch in the funnel that it will take more than 100 years to drain out, outliving all of us, too!
After the eighth drip, scientists calculated that the viscosity (“stickiness” to us liberal-arts majors) of pitch is roughly 230 billion times more than that of water. Comparison to the viscosity of Heinz Ketchup is unknown, but my guess is that the eight years it would take to pour a drop of pitch on a burger wouldn’t be worth the wait anyway.
Waiting for a drop every eight or nine years isn’t exactly the kind of patience most of us have. The Israelites certainly didn’t have it. They were looking for a lot less viscosity and a lot more water. Even a drop or two would have been exciting to an increasingly thirsty and thoroughly impatient people.
As Exodus 17 opens, God has once again commanded the Israelites to move “by stages” through the desert on their sojourn of escape from slavery and oppression in Egypt. Just three chapters earlier, we read that God had miraculously brought them through the Red Sea by increasing the viscosity of water and making it stand up in order to clear a path for the people (Exodus 14). By chapter 15, however, these same people are sounding more like impatient restaurant patrons than liberated slaves. God (whom the people see as being represented by Moses) isn’t delivering water and food fast enough for their liking (15:22-24). They want a squeeze bottle, not a slow, eternal drip. In chapter 16, they pine for the good old days in Egypt when, sure, they were slaves but at least their bellies were full (16:3). God responds by providing manna and quail as a daily provision of food in the middle of nowhere. But even that eventually gets boring, and the impatient complaints get louder (Numbers 21:5). In Exodus 17, the issue again is lack of water, and the demand is incessant: “Give us water to drink” (17:2).
In the midst of a crisis, it’s hard for humans to take the long view and understand God’s long, steady purpose. Instead, we focus on the potential shortness of life. The people are angry that Moses brought them out there to “kill” them and their livestock with thirst (v. 3), while Moses is concerned about his own hide because the people “are almost ready to stone” him (v. 4). When we’re in trouble, we can hear the clock ticking down our lives with increasing urgency. Anxiety is often the result of a compressed view of time.
God, however, isn’t bound by such a compressed view of time. Throughout the Scriptures, God’s timing, rather than clock time, is what really matters. If chronos is time governed by the clock, kairos is time governed by God — the right time, the appropriate time, the divinely appointed time. If God created the universe billions of years ago, as science tells us, and if Earth has been shaped over millions of years by the steady drip of water and the slow shifting of tectonic plates, the one thing we come to realize theologically is that God isn’t in a hurry. God has a longer worldview than our temporal bodies and limited knowledge can understand. God has patiently formed creation, and he’ll patiently continue to form his people, doing things always at the right time, the kairos time, the time that suits his eternal purpose.
God doesn’t respond to the people’s complaints or Moses’ fear with chastisement or comfort. God simply says to Moses, “Go” (notice how that word frames verse 5 in the NRSV). When we’re stuck waiting, even a little progress is good! Moses is instructed to go to a rock at Horeb (another term for Mount Sinai) and meet God, who will already be standing there (v. 6). Wherever we’re going, whatever we’re waiting for at the end of the line, God is already there.
The patient God then does something for his impatient people. God instructs Moses to strike the rock like he’s thumping a bottle of ketchup. He’s to do it with the staff he had used to strike the Nile when demonstrating God’s power to Pharaoh (7:20-24). At that point, God confirms Professor Parnell’s thesis — that often what appears to be a solid can actually be a liquid! The writer of Exodus doesn’t tell us how the water came out, only that it did so (17:6). We might guess that it wasn’t just a few slow drops but a gusher.
God had to repeat this kind of lesson with the Israelites multiple times, just as Jesus had to constantly remind his disciples to stop worrying about today and, instead, seek first God and his kingdom. Do that and everything else will begin to make sense. We might call that living with an “eternal perspective,” recognizing that wherever we’re headed with our lives, God is with us and, indeed, already ahead of us.
Interestingly, the word “wait” appears 183 times in the Bible, with many of those references in the Psalms. “Waiting on the Lord” is a recurring theme, but that waiting isn’t exactly a passive form of sitting around or standing in line. Waiting, in fact, is an active process. Take a look at Psalm 27, for example, where the psalmist is implored to “seek God’s face” and “Wait for the Lord” by being strong and letting his heart take courage (27:14). Waiting on God means that we are always actively trusting in him by seeking him in prayer, meditating on his Word, and continuing to do what he has called us to do. Faith always involves persistence, and faith anticipates that God will do what God will do within God’s own timing. Waiting involves moving from worry to faithfulness, and from anxiety to anticipation.
As I get older, I am beginning to find that times of waiting are actually a gift. I bring a book with me to the doctor’s office, I listen to a podcast while stuck in traffic, I chat with the barista while my coffee is being made. Waiting provides us with space that enables us to listen more deeply and observe where God is at work around us. Patience is a learned process.
One of the practices that’s helped me over the last few years is taking time out to go and pray at a local monastery. In Utah, I would travel up in the mountains twice a year to sit with the monks at Holy Trinity Abbey. The monks pray and chant the psalms 7 times a day, the first service being 3:30 in the morning and the last at 7:30 in the evening. The Benedictine order has been doing this for a thousand years, 24/7, 365 days a year. It is deliberate, steady, and slow. You will never see a monk in a hurry! Being there reminds me that my own life is often so frantic and impatient that I miss much of what God wants to do in my life. Slowing down, listening, doing things more slowly and deliberately is a blessing. It’s a way of “waiting on the Lord.”
You don’t have to go to a monastery to experience this yourself. All you need do is set aside time in your day or your week to simply wait—to refuse to be in a hurry and to recognize God at work in you and around you. My guess is that the more patience you begin to exercise, the more patient people will be with you, too!
Scripture tells us that God is immanently patient with his people, thus we should be patient with each other and wait upon the Lord for the things he will do in his time.
What is making you impatient in your life right now? Where are you frantically looking for the quick fix or the instant solution? What’s making you anxious?
The prophet Isaiah addressed his people’s own impatience in a similar way. The people began to believe that God had forgotten them as they anticipated the pain of exile and loss. But Isaiah offers a glimpse of the reward for waiting upon the Lord:
ISAIAH 40
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
Now that’s something to anticipate!
I want to invite you to put aside the fast-moving thoughts that worry you, and take a moment of silence to simply pray and wait upon the Lord. Seek his face, trust in his promises, know that when we are faithful, God is faithful.
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