We are continuing our series
in the names of God. The one we are looking at today
is in Exodus Chapter 15. It is the first reference in
the scriptures to God healing someone. So the story is familiar no doubt
to you. In chapter 14, Pharaoh and his
army are destroyed. The Israelites march through
the waters of the Red Sea on dry land and they are told in
verse 14 of chapter 14, the Lord shall fight for you. You shall
hold your peace. And the Lord worked in hardening
the hearts of the Egyptians. And they come out of the Red
Sea with the Egyptians drowned and then they sing in verse,
in chapter 15, you'll have to read this at your leisure at
home, but they sing this remarkable song of Moses and then Miriam
sings to the Lord and they sing They sing about Him and they
sing of His glorious character. In chapter 1, He has triumphed
gloriously. Verse 2, the Lord is my strength
and song and He is become my salvation. He is my God. The
Lord, verse 3, is a man of war. The Lord is His name. 6. Thy right hand, O Lord, has become
glorious in power. Thy right hand, O Lord, has dashed
to pieces the enemy. Verse 7, and in the greatness
of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that rose up
against thee. Thou sentest forth thy wrath
which consumed them as stubble, and with the blast of thy nostrils
the waters were gathered together, the flood stood upright as a
heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea. And
here we have the expression of free will Ma'am, isn't it? The
enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil,
my lust shall be satisfied upon them, I will draw my sword, my
hand shall destroy them. In God's response, thou didst
blow. with thy wind and the sea covered
them. Verse 12, Thou stretchest out
thy right hand. Verse 13, Thou in thy mercy hast
led forth the people which Thou hast redeemed. Thou hast guided
them in thy strength under thy holy habitation. 17. Thou shalt bring them in, and
plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place,
O Lord, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the
sanctuary of the Lord which thy hands have established. 18. The
Lord shall reign for ever and ever. And Miriam sang in verse
21, Sing ye unto, sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphed
gloriously, the horse and his rider he has thrown into the
sea. Verse 22, and this is the passage
we'll just look at briefly this evening. So Moses brought Israel
from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur.
And they went three days into the wilderness and found no water.
And when they came to Marah, they could not drink the waters
of Marah, for they were bitter. Therefore the name of it was
called Marah, which in Hebrew just means bitter. And the people
murmured against Moses, saying, What shall we drink? And he cried
unto the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree, which when he had
cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet. There he made
for them a statue and an ordinance, and there he proved them, and
said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord
thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt
give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I
will put none of these diseases upon you which I have brought
upon the Egyptians. For I am the Lord that healeth
thee. And we'll finish by looking at
the next verse, because they spent one day at the waters of
Mara. So here we have, as we say so
often, a journey, a picture of the people of Israel, and it's
a real historical picture, but it's a picture with spiritual
significance. Egypt represents this world,
Moses represents the law, And the deliverance from Egypt is
a picture, isn't it, of the deliverance of us from the entanglement to
this world and Satan and our deliverance, our deliverance
to the Lord in the strength of the Lord and to a place where
we sing His praises. But in this world, We find ourselves,
like the people of Israel, one moment praising God with those
words that you've just heard, and in just a matter of days
we are murmuring against Him. They went out into the wilderness
of Shur. They were led by God Himself,
God who had made a difference between them and the Egyptians.
And they go three days, two million of them plus all their herds,
all their animals. Everything that they had they
carried with them. They were three days away from the Red
Sea. They had been led by God. As they were at the Red Sea,
led to a place where there was no way forward and there was
no way back. They saw the waters, what it
must have felt like. as they saw and felt the pain
of that extraordinary thirst in that wilderness land, what
it must have felt like for them to see that water. And here you
have this enormous multitude, half the population of Sydney
they say, a huge crowd. What must it have been like as
the first of that huge flock gathered near those waters and
they saw them for the first time after it was past evening and
the waves of excitement and anticipation would have rolled back through
that great crowd. But there they were, they saw
the waters and there was great joy and then they came to the
waters and they tasted the waters and they were bitter, and they
murmured. They murmured against the Lord. All I could see, all I could
see was the bitter waters and their thirst. It's an extraordinary thing,
isn't it? That the mother of all sins, the root of all sins
is the root of unbelief, isn't it? is taking our eyes off God
and off His character. The unbelief is forgetting the
Lord, isn't it? It's forgetting His providence,
His promises. He brought them to this place.
They weren't there by accident and He was present with them. He delivered them just a matter
of days ago. He delivered them from Egypt.
He delivered them from a situation of impossibility. And they saw
nothing in His providence. They forgot. They forgot His
goodness. They forgot His promises. They
forgot His word. And they should have prayed and
they complained. They should have believed and
they grumbled. And the Lord brings all these
things to pass purposefully. He brought them to this place,
he brought them to this experience to expose themselves to themselves
and to expose himself to them. Such is the nature of our experiences
in this wilderness world. Only, only in that place and
only in those circumstances could He prove them and prove Himself
to them. As Spurgeon said, our lives are
a canvas upon which God paints His own character. This world is a wilderness to
the people of God in our Adam flesh. It's just a wilderness,
isn't it? We are like Ruth. She went out
from the house, from Bethlehem, the house of bread, and she went
out full, and she came back empty. There's plenty of water, but
none to drink. And we have to remember, don't
we, that our Sovereign God leads, leads His own into that wilderness
and He leads His own into the experiences of that wilderness. He leads His own to a place like
the waters of Mara to show us that He is the Lord that healeth
thee, Jehovah-Rapha. He leads them to a place where
they realise what they are as men, that they are poor. The poor man cried and the Lord
saved him out of his troubles. The full soul loathes the honeycomb. But to the hungry soul, every
bitter thing is sweet. So the first thing that's revealed
here, isn't it, in terms of man, is what we are. We are, as the
children of Adam, in a wilderness world, in a wilderness flesh. Man that is born a woman is a
few days and full of trouble. The promise in Genesis 3.17 is,
In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Jacob
said to Pharaoh when he met him, 130 years, few and evil have
the days of my life been. Surely I have seen, says God,
in the midst of all this affliction, we saw last week, I trust and
heard that we have the God who is present with us. He is there. He is there. He says before this
is me, surely I have seen the affliction of my people which
are in Egypt. I have heard their cry and I
know their sorrows. God knows. Man is born into trouble
as the sparks fly upward. Verily, man at his best is but
vanity. It is a wilderness, isn't it?
It's the wilderness that we live in. But God, our great God, is
the healer of all of our troubles. He's present with us in them. He leads us into them. And He
leads us into all the troubles that He might reveal something
more of Himself. God never causes His child a
needless tear. He says He keeps our tears in
a bottle. He actually knows. He knows what
it is for us to be in this place. He's put us there. He's brought
the circumstances that surround us. the circumstances where we
are so often in a place where we just would wish that it would
be anything other than it has been. Who would write, who would
write the script of their life if they had the opportunity?
No one would ever write it, would we? But our God has written it
from eternity. He does it to reveal his person
and his character. Just like at the Red Sea at Mara,
there was no way forward. You've been three days in the
wilderness without water, three days getting back does not get
you back to those waters. And what looked so promising
to their eyes was now bitter to them. It's as if the waters
there mocked them and made it even worse. And such as it is,
such is the way, I pray that it is for us, children of God
in this world, that God continually makes this place seen to us as
a wilderness. Because that was the purpose
here, wasn't it? God didn't do this by accident. This is a wilderness. because this is no place for
God's children to build their nests. How often have you been
in a situation where you think that like the waters of Mara,
if you finally get to those waters, you get to this certain sort
of level and stage in life and all of a sudden there will be
ease and things. and you will be at peace and
at rest. And God makes us to see again
and again by taking away those things and turning them into
bitterness, that He is our peace and He is our rest. The Lord has remarkable ways,
doesn't He, of making, changing the circumstances of our life.
And He is the God who heals us. He can and He does sometimes
just change the circumstances. We look around and we see these
hills of difficulty all around us and then when we get closer
to them we find that the Lord has remarkably taken them away
and they have become a plain before us. And He's opened a
way when we could see no way, He's opened a way. And sometimes
He brings something into our path when we are troubled that
just comes completely unexpected, completely out of the blue. Moses
prayed. Here's one of those remarkable
circumstances in the Scripture. Moses cried, didn't they? See,
the people cried. They cried against Moses, verse
24. In verse 25, Moses' response
was not to join with them in their murmuring against God,
really, but he cried unto the Lord, and the Lord showed him
a tree. The Lord showed him a tree. We
should have no doubt from our reading in Song of Solomon and
from Revelation 22 about that tree of life and in Psalm 1.3
we read of the Lord Jesus is that tree. He shall be like a tree. His
delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law does he meditate
day and night. Who does that refer to except
our Lord Jesus? He shall be like a tree, planted
by the rivers of waters, that bringeth forth his fruit in his
season. His leaf also shall not wither,
and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." It's that tree that
is on each bank of that river of the water of life in Revelation
22. It's that tree that we read about in Song of Solomon, the
one that's above all the others. And of course the interesting
thing about the tree was that the tree was always there. The
waters were always bitter, but the tree had always been there. But the tree had to be shunned.
The Lord had to show Moses the tree. See, we saw last week,
didn't we, the Jehovah Shammah. The Lord is there. You see, He's
always there in our troubles. but we only see him when he reveals
himself to us. So often we seem as if the circumstances
are dark and the clouds are dark and threatening, but we must
remember that whenever the sun shines, it shines above those
clouds as bright as it ever did. We see him when he reveals himself
to us. And we'll see him, when he reveals
himself to us, we'll see that he is righteous in what he does.
I know, says the psalmist, that the law, that I know, Lord, that
thy judgments are right. All of what comes to pass from
your hand is right. And that thou, that you in faithfulness
have afflicted me. And God doesn't waver from being
perfect in all of his providence. And one of the most wonderful
ways that the Lord makes the bitter around us an inner sweet
is by bringing us to a place where we are at peace with his
will. We are at peace with the fact
that he is sovereign. We are at peace with the fact
that his character is unchanging, that he leads his sheep. He's
too good to err. He's too powerful to fail. He's
too loving to hurt without a balm. So often, like Jacob, when he'd
lost his son, he said, all things are against me. And then he was
made to realise in the latter part of his life that all that
time his son Joseph was actually sitting on the throne of Egypt
and ruling all things that he might save many, including Jacob
in his old age. He is Jehovah-wrapper. He is
the healer of all of our diseases. He is the healer of our sickness. He is the healer in the sense
also that he reminds us that all sin and all sickness is a
result of sin. Sin, sickness and disease will
be part of our journey through this wilderness. The resurrection,
says Don Faulkner, will do for our bodies what regeneration
has done for our souls. we will be healed by Him. He's promised. That's what His
resurrection promises us. Sickness has a purpose in this
world, doesn't it? It reminds us of sin and it reminds
us that all healing must come from our Lord Jesus. It should
remind us that He is familiar with our sufferings. He took
our infirmities I've yet to plumb the depths of it and take eternity
to know what that means. I'm not sure what it meant on
the cross, but the scriptures say that he took our infirmities
and he bore our sicknesses. We have never suffered, child
of God. You have never suffered without
Him being with you and without Him in such a large measure bearing. And as the psalmist said, He
makes our bed in times of sickness. How many times have you in the
depths of sickness and affliction found that He is the God that
heals? He heals all of our diseases. And it's good to think, isn't
it? I remember watching a video once about when I had a microscope
and it sort of went down and down and down and ended up sort
of showing familiar things around our lives including a thing like
a pin or a toothbrush or our teeth and it just showed the
bacteria that were living on them. It's remarkable to think. They were just all over the place.
It was just billions of them, just all over the place. We breathed
them in. We touched things and they were
all over and under, just our hands. And the Lord God restrains
all of that. We are the constant beneficiaries
of the providential care and rule and reign of our God over
all things. This story also shows us that
our God in healing uses means, doesn't He? And the means that
He uses don't hinder faith. They just cause us to see that
He is a God who will prove our faith. See Moses was shown a
tree and Moses took the tree and cast it into the water. He
just took God at His word. This is the first mention of
healing in the scriptures. The first healing is the healing
of sin and the healing of unbelief. But it's a healing in a way which
just beautifully pictures our Lord Jesus' healing. Every healing
is a picture of resurrection. That's when our bodies will be
healed completely and perfectly. Elisha healed the waters of Jericho
by putting salt into them. Isaiah healed boils on Hezekiah
with figs. Paul said to Timothy, take a
little wine for his stomach. tells us in James chapter 5 about
that anointing oil and the prayer of people. Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals,
He heals from death. He restores life to our bodies. and He will gloriously one day,
you can read about it in 1 Corinthians 15, it's good to go back and
read the promises of God in terms of the new creation. This will
be sown, this body of mine, like all of the bodies, except for
those last year which will go through that remarkable transformation
when the Lord comes. But He will bring a new creation
and new bodies. But this healing, of course,
in all of its references to our Lord Jesus, in all of His ways
of caring for us, in all of His ways of leading us to these things,
Pictures, of course. Pictures of Jesus Christ and
Him crucified. If we look for Jesus Christ and
Him crucified in these pictures in the scriptures, we'll find
them there. They were written for our encouragement that we
might, through patience and belief in the scriptures, we might just
have hope. The bitter waters of Mara are led there by Moses. So they represent in many ways
the bitter curses of the law, because sin brings about so much
bitterness into this world, but also The feeling of sin brings
about that work, that bitter work of repentance. The law demands
bitter plagues upon every sinner. The law demands the death in
hell and the law cannot bring peace. The law cannot bring sweetness
to that bitterness. Christ, the tree of life, was
immersed under the curse of the law. He was made a curse for
us. He endured the bitter wrath of
God. He suffered the curses of the law. He took all the bitterness,
all of the bitterness upon himself. Now the law which was so bitter
to our souls, That justice and judgement of God expressed in
it is sweet. It's a sweet thing to us in the
hands of our substitute. God's justice, God's honouring
of his Lord demands our freedom and our peace. It's sweet and
it's pleasant. It refreshes our souls and it's
life-giving. So the people were brought I
pray that this is what the Lord has done in your life and continues
to do in His grace and mercy. The people were brought to see
the wilderness of this world as wilderness. They were brought
to see that this is no place for God's children to build their
nest. They were brought to a place
where they saw that they had in themselves no ability. They were helpless, they had
no ability, they had no means. They had been brought to a place
where they saw how bitter it is and how helpless they were. And once they know how bitter
it is, then the Lord sweetened it for them. So it's comparable
to the Lord's healing of us in conversion, isn't it? The Lord
makes sin bitter for us. He makes this world a wilderness
for us. We see how corrupt we are, and
we see how corrupt mankind is, and how much vanity is tied up
in all the best things that man does. And we are caused by the
Lord to call out, O wretched man that I am. and the Lord. To those he wounds
he heals, doesn't he? He strips and he clothes. He humbles before he exalts. He kills to make alive. He heals. He heals by grace. He heals his own by grace. Also, he brings his people to
a place where they have nowhere else to go but to cry out to
the Lord. If Israel is going to get water,
they had to seek it from the hand of God. I love that story
of the publican. He stood afar off, didn't he?
He stood afar off and he would not lift so much as his eyes
unto heaven, but smote upon his breast. saying, God, be merciful
to me, a sinner. God, in his grace, takes his
people into a wilderness where he must be their refuge. He must
be their only hope. And in that place, when he comes
by grace into the hearts of his people, they find that the trees
cast in. It's a picture of the Lord Jesus,
isn't it? It's a picture of the Lord Jesus
who in his own self bore our sins in his own body on the tree. The work of the Lord Jesus must
be imputed to us. It must become something that's
personal and real to us, and it does by His work of grace
in our lives. See, salvation is Christ dwelling
in your hearts by faith. That was Paul's prayer in Ephesians
3, that having dwelling in their hearts by faith. And once the tree is cast into
the waters, once the tree is cast into that bitterness, into
that wilderness, there is perfect and complete healing. The waters
were the sweetest waters on all of the earth. What was so vile
and what was so repulsive to them has now become sweet and
life-giving and refreshing. what God does, He does perfectly
and completely. And I love the next verse in
our text, in chapter 15 of Exodus, after they had had these waters
bitter and they had seen that I am the Lord that healeth thee. And they came to Elam. They came to a place where there
were 12 wells of water. In this wilderness there were
12 wells of water. Mara had one tree, Elam had 70
palm trees and they encamped there by the waters. People of
God have been brought to a place of the wilderness where God alone
must care for them and God alone must provide them and God alone
uses those circumstances to reveal himself again and again and again. Brothers and sisters, has that
not been your case? for you have been to places where
it's bitter and it's tough, been to places where this world is
a wilderness and your own flesh is a wilderness as well. And
the Lord brings healing, brings us to turn those waters into
sweetness because we see His hand. We see that He's present
with us. We see that all of what's come
to pass has been in the hands of someone who loves His children
infinitely and unchangeably. He uses this canvas, doesn't
He, this canvas of this world to display His glory. He uses this to show us more
and more of His character. What an extraordinary Saviour
we have, what a great God we have. He heals and when He heals
He does it forever and He does it perfectly. I love what Ecclesiastes
3.14 says, Whatsoever the Lord doeth, it shall be forever. Nothing can be put to it. I love
that. What he does, no one's going
to add to it. And nor can anything be taken
from it. No one's going to take anything
from it. That, for the souls of God's
people. is sweetness, the greatest sweetness
is Him in the midst of it all. I've left up there some things
from Robert Hawker. I'll just read the last paragraph
and you can take it home and study it at your leisure. I just
love the way he writes. He talks about his heart finding
and our hearts being found in correspondence to His, where
we are prone so often to come to a place having seen the amazing
mercies of God, to find ourselves murmuring and saying, why did
He do it this way? If He knew as much as I knew,
He'd change it and He'd do it better. And how often He actually
in mercy turns this world into a wilderness for us. And He's
done it, He says purposely, that to manifest His watchfulness
over me and to make sure my dependence upon Him. He says, Let us do
then as Israel did, when at any time our waters are like the
waters of Mara, cry unto the Lord. Let us put the cross of
Jesus into the stream. Be it what it may, for that is
the truth which the Lord showed his people. And never doubt that
Jesus' cross though to him more bitter than gall, yet to us will
prove the sweetener of all our crosses. Yes, thou dear Lord,
thou didst drink the cup of trembling even to the dregs, that in the
view of it thy redeemed might take the cup of salvation and
call upon the name of the Lord. Thy cross, if cast into a sea
of trouble, will alter the very properties of affliction to all
thy tried ones. In every place and in every state,
while my soul is enabled to keep thee in remembrance, and thy
wormwood and thy gall, the wilderness of all of my dispensations will
smile and blossom as the rose. And I shall then learn to bless
a taking God, as well as a giving God, for both are alike from
the overflowings of Thy mercy. And like the Apostle I shall
then have learnt the blessedness of that state, to glory in tribulation,
that the power of Christ may rest upon me."