Mon, 5 September, 2005: Today’s Bible readings.
1 I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. 5 Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.
Paul ended chapter 9 warning that we need to be concerned about our conduct in our Christian lives, as our commitment to obeying Christ is indicative of true saving faith in Him. Paul says:
But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.
Paul’s warning isn’t to say that you can lose your salvation, since there are other clear passages where Paul tells us that can’t happen (Romans 8:28-39; Philippians 1:6), but this is to warn us against indifference to our conduct.
In his warning to us, Paul makes the curious comparison of baptism and the Lord’s supper to what Israel did in coming out of the bondage of Egypt. His intent is for us to consider how greatly they were blessed by God. And we have been likewise blessed. They all experienced a common salvation from the bondage of Egypt and they saw God’s miracles. They had all the advantages possible given to them as a people. But although they had participated in the blessings of the church, they were not all saved, and many died in the wilderness.
What do we learn from this?
Once again we find that our conduct is important. It is not that we are saved by our conduct. But our conduct validates the reality of our faith in God.
The Old Testament church experienced God in a very real and personal way. They passed through the parting of the Red Sea. They ate the food and drank the water that God miraculously provided for them. And afterwards they rebelled against God and died without reaching the promised land. We also have been blessed with a common experience of God. We have been baptized, and regularly share the Lord’s supper. But if we, like Israel before us, are counting on those religious experiences to save us, we are lost.
Our salvation is not in our baptism or in partaking of the Lord supper. As important as those things are, they do not save us. God saves us. Our salvation is by God’s grace administered to us through the instrument of faith. We are commanded to trust in Him, and not in our shared experience with God’s people.
Where is Christ in this passage?
Paul says that when the Israelites drank the water from the rock, the Rock was Christ. This symbolism explains the significance of Moses striking the rock at God’s command and of the seriousness his error when Moses later strikes the rock when he was only supposed to speak to it.
Once again we see the scriptural claim that the events of the Old Testament are about Christ. The temporal salvation the Old Testament church experienced in the miraculous flow of water from the rock was from Christ. The water they needed to live was provided by God when Moses struck the rock. And the eternal salvation we need was provided by God when the Romans crucified Jesus Christ.
