For most of his adult life, regardless how he had planned his future, Moses, chosen by God, had to perform some rather mind blowing tasks as if he had had the courage to make all the upcoming sacrifices and was prepared enough. He had to take on the Pharoah, prove to the Hebrews he was God-directed and not crazy, and then had to deal for forty years with any complaint uttered by anyone on the trek to the Promised land.
There had been pursuing armies, a sea in the way, having to deal with the substitution of a golden calf for God and having to deal with the crowd that would do that, and a God who didn’t like it. He had to convince his people to paint their doors with blood because God couldn’t tell a Jew from an Egyptian and might accidentally kill a wrong kid.
It was one thing after another and Moses bore up pretty well.
But, in spite of this, he was barred from entry into the Promised Land for one minor act.
From the source, Numbers 20:
“Now there was no water for the community, and the people gathered in opposition to Moses and Aaron. They quarreled with Moses and said, “If only we had died when our brothers fell dead before the LORD!
Why did you bring the LORD’s community into this desert, that we and our livestock should die here?
Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place? It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates. And there is no water to drink!”
So much gvetching that Moses needed some help and turned to God.
The LORD said to Moses,
“Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink.”
So Moses took the staff from the LORD’s presence, the staff he had used every time God needed something done like turning it into a snake to scare the Pharoah and friends, when he parted the Red Sea, times like that.
When he got to the rock, Moses first said something, admonishing the Hebrews for all the whining, and then, perhaps by force of habit, as he had done for over forty years at God’s bidding, he raised his arms and struck the rock twice with his staff.
Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.
The problem was that while he struck the rock twice, like one does with the elevator button to make sure you pressed it right, or as if a second push will speed up the elevator’s arrival, especially as no water started coming out immediately as one would expect from a miracle, perhaps his first tap being too light, he tapped it again and the water flowed.
However, in childish petulance, God said this, in spite of everything else, showed Moses doubted God, and so he was barred from entry into the Holy Land.
After all those years using his staff every time God had him do something, this one time, God had a problem with it.
A whole life of dedication to the Lord, wiped out because God was a little slow on letting the water flow. There might have been a football game on the tube in his celestial background and God got momentarily distracted.
After all his nerve wracking trials and adventures, Moses could have turned out to be either by nature or the Exodus nurture one of those people who always hits the light switch a second time or randomly straightens pictures on other people’s walls. There had to be some effects from the whole Hebrews going to the Promised Land events.
Can you imagine how many souls would be burning in hell if God had a thing for elevator buttons?
Hell would be overcrowded with people with OCD.
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