REFLECTION 3:  THE WATERS WERE MADE SWEET

"Now when they came to Mara, they could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter....So Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree.  When he cast it into the waters, the waters were made sweet."  Exodus 15:23-25

When I was a child I used to eat a candy called Zotz.  At first it tasted mild and fruity.   Within a minute though, the fizzling core of the candy was reached and a BITTER EXPLOSION occurred inside my mouth.  My face would contort and shrivel inward in sourness. This candy is often given out as a joke just in order to see the look on the face of the poor victim.  Unbelievably, many like the pain and eat the candy on purpose looking to get buzzed on bitterness.

For many who come to God today, it starts off sweet and fruity.  Initially, most Christians share Jesus with others as a God of unconditional love and forgiveness. The person is then drawn to accept and trust in such a God of goodness.  They receive Jesus as their Lord.  They then start attending teachings and preachings to learn more about their God. 

But guess what?  For every sermon or teaching they hear about God's love, they hear another sermon or teaching about God's dark side.  His awful wrath.  His hatred of His enemies.  His bone crushing revenge.  Sometimes it's one step forward, one step back. Sometimes it's one step forward, two steps back because many preach much more on God's dark side than they do his light side.

The end result is a conflicting and double-minded view of God which, like a Zotz, starts off sweet but when the core is reached, starts fizzling with a vicious brutality that takes the breath away.  When I hear Christians claim that God kills, maims, hates and afflicts, I feel grief in the pit of my stomach.  They may not explicitly say He does these things, but what they teach and preach paints no other alternative. 

The Old Testament stories highlight again and again that God kills (or orders to be killed) women, children, men, and nations.  He sends sickness, natural disasters, enemy armies, famines and assassin angels to kill and kill and kill and kill. The God they were first told forgives all our sins actually tortures those who reject Him forever and ever and ever and ever.

The truth is that most can't drink of God deeply because they are scared of Him deeply.  There is a bitter taste imbedded in our thoughts which robs us of complete trust and devotion to Him.  Worst of all, this bitterness often hides so that we are not even aware of it.

I want to make a very bold assertion. I believe every man has bitterness somewhere in His core toward God.  You, me, everybody.  Two years ago I would have so disagreed with what I just wrote.  I would have boldly claimed I have no bitterness toward God about anything.  I don't blame Him for anything.  I have nothing but love in my heart toward Him.

But I have had a rude awakening. My Zotz core was reached last year.  I started fizzling with frustration, then bitterness, then wrong desire for what I perceived my life was missing.  I wasn't blaming God in an explicit way by railing at Him directly that I deserve better.  No, my bitterness was much more subtle.  I was railing at my circumstances, pitying myself and mourning that I felt as if I was dying on the vine.  I did have serious issues in my life which were painful, but I was not dealing with them from a faith perspective which believes in overcoming problems rather than running away from them.

The bottom line was that I was bitter at the life God had given me.  Bit by bit I painted myself into a corner of lack and ingratitude.  I literally talked myself into believing a sinful desire I had was justified. It has taken me a long time to understand that my bitterness was not primarily at the people I blamed for my pain.  My bitterness was at God for not giving me what my flesh demanded and what I thought I deserved.

What happened to me was no different than what happened to Adam and Eve. Satan accused God of wanting to keep something good from them.  God, so Satan accused, was trying to keep them from something DESIRABLE and PLEASURABLE.

Oswald Chambers said, "All sin starts with mistrusting God's character."  I never really understood this until now.  I became bitter because I did not trust that God's will for my life was good.  Rather than believing that He could and would heal my problem areas, I was willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater and basically start a whole new life for myself according to my own wants.  What He gave me for good I gave up on and condemned as evil.  I then followed what my own flesh saw as DESIRABLE and PLEASURABLE.  At the core of this bitterness was a hidden belief that God was keeping something from me that I thought I needed and wanted.

Satan was hissing all these accusations in my ear the whole time, although his voice was disguised as my own.  The Devil sows discontent against God. Discontent sows anger.  Anger sows bitterness.  Bitterness sows lust.  Lust conceives and sin is birthed.  This is why David could say in Psalm 51, "Against you alone Lord have I sinned."  The issue is NOT about bitterness towards others.  It is about bitterness toward God--always. 

I grant you this is not always occurring on a conscious level.  This goes on at a deep core level in our hearts and souls. This is why the human heart is deceitful beyond knowing--- because of its capacity for bitterness and self-deception blended with what Augustine called "the lust to self-vindicate."  This fizzling concoction allows us to rewrite history at the drop of a dime so that we can justify anything we want to do, say or feel.  Once this happens, there is nothing we can't deceive ourselves into.

Poor atheists talk themselves into consciously claiming there is no God, yet sub-consciously they are bitter at the God they claim doesn't exist because they so resent being told they need to trust in someone greater.  Their voices ooze sour and angry tones.  Similarly, mean-spirited Christians talk themselves into consciously believing the wrath of God routinely smites their enemies into dust, yet sub-consciously they are bitter at God because He loves their enemies rather than pulverizing them.

 

Another reason I believe we all have some core bitterness toward God comes from the faces Christians display most of the time.  To be frank, most Christians look like they are sourly sucking on a corporate Zotz, especially during teachings and preachings.  Even when Christians look happy, it is only fleeting, brief and lacks the sparkling quality of Shekinah glory that testifies of God's light and love. 

Moses' face shone after he had experienced God on the mountaintop.  The rest of the Israelites stayed at the bottom of the mountain because they were scared God was going to kill them if they saw Him face to face.  Because of this wrong thinking, their faces never got to shine with the Lord's presence like Moses.  SOMETHING IS WRONG TODAY!  Where is our shine?  Have we stayed at the bottom of the mountain grounded in wrong thinking about His nature or will we ascend the mountain of His absolute goodness?

 

In 2 Kings 4:38-41, the prophets had made a stew for their meal.  They eventually realized there was death in the pot and that it could not be digested. Elisha then came on the scene and commanded that blessed "meal" be added to the stew which immediately healed and sweetened it for consumption.

Beloved, today the pot of God's image has death in it.  It can't be digested.  It is bitter and causes bitterness.  It is poisoned with the lie that God is the death-bringer.  Hebrews 2:14 says Satan has the power of death, not God.  Jesus is the life-bringer---ALWAYS THE LIFE-BRINGER.  Satan slips death in the pot by sowing the idea that God is depriving us of something desirable and pleasurable.  But Jesus is the miracle meal that we can cast into our pots and know beyond all doubt that He is only and always good.  No death is in or near Him.  Death was in the pot until the meal cured it. Death is in our image of God until Messiah cures it.

This exact same dynamic occurs at the bitter waters of Marah cited above.  The waters could not be consumed until a healing tree of life was cast in.  Jesus is that tree of life which sweetens every stew, purifies every fountain and sanctifies every heart.  Only He can remove death from our pots, bitterness from our waters and delusion from our hearts.

Do not eat poison stew which claims death is to be found in God's nature.  Do not drink bitter waters which cause us to doubt God's goodness.  Do not partake of any lie that tells us we lack any thing in God.  Let's open ourselves totally up to God by inviting Him to sweeten the cores of our being.  Let all wrath, bitterness, anger and malice be removed from our heart pots by the sweetening power of the Messiah, the righteous branch of life.  Instead of our hearts and tongues fizzling with bitterness, let our words and thoughts fizzle with joy unspeakable and full of glory.