Then Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet. There the Lord made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them. He said, “If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.”
Exodus 15:25-26 NIV

Now, I am not all that smart. And I had to dig a little into the commentaries to gain some insight as to why this passage was speaking to my heart. And here is what I found. The evidence and speculative conclusions may point to a tree with some chemical properties that enabled the wood or its sap to render the bitter water sweet.

Maybe it did, or maybe it didn’t. Maybe, as one lady in my Bible Study says, “It was God’s will.” Maybe it was just another plain old garden variety miracle like the one at the Red Sea a few chapters earlier. The point is that the water became sweet to drink.

Now, here is the part that I failed to fully grasp earlier. The newly sweetened water had a medicinal effect as well as a refreshing effect. In fact, it had a “cleansing” effect. One of the commentaries noted that there is research to indicate that the water acted as a laxative and purged the Children of Israel of some internal gastrointestinal parasites that caused weakness and was marked by dysentery.

So, here is the point.

Are you ready for this?

Not only did God want to get His children out of Egypt. He wanted to get Egypt (or at least its ill effects) out of his children!

OK, that’s may be a little gross and out of place on a blog about holiness. But maybe not once you let the thought sink in. At Marah, God provided just the right medicine to prepare His children both physically and spiritually for the long hot march to Sinai.

So what does that mean to me?

I think it means that when I have tasted the bitter waters of sin, shame and suffering I can have them sweetened by the wood of Calvary’s cross. And that wood can bring refreshing, cleansing and healing to a sin sick soul. It can cleanse the outside. And it can cleanse the inside from the stain of sin. So that, just like the Children of Israel were cleansed of the internal parasites, God can cleanse me from the sinful nature that causes me fall into sin.

And that dear friend, is holiness.

Last Sunday found us in the 15th chapter of Exodus. The week before the Children of Israel were miraculously delivered from the advancing army of Pharaoh. God parted the waters and Moses and the people walked across on dry land. Not wet, sticky, messy, get stuck between your toes mud. But dry land. What an amazing deliverance.

It is in this passage that God places a test before the people. This is not the post to debate whether or not God tested His people back then, or tests us today. All I know is that the Bible says that God said to them “if you will listen… do… and obey…”, then God would do something.

Whenever God tells us what to do we always have a choice. And that choice really demonstrates a lot about us and about our character. If we obey then we see God’s hand upon us and our faith in Him grows. The next command will be easier to obey because of our obedience to the last command.

But many times we do not obey. At least not right away or not cheerfully. This is certainly true of the children of Israel. God had delivered them from bondage, slavery, Egypt, Pharaoh and his armies. And the bulk of the 15th chapter of Exodus is all about the spontaneous worship that erupted from the mouths of the people. They celebrated the horse and the rider being thrown into the sea. They sang praises to God as Miriam leads the ladies choir in echoing the praises of the people.

They leave the worship service and go three short days into the wilderness of Shur. And there they found no water. Their physical natures were being tested a little due to their thirst. They began to murmur and grumble about the lack of water. And that brought about a question about their spiritual nature.

Were they going to be a worshipping people who occasionally murmured? Or were they going to be a murmuring people who occasionally worshipped?

That question is relevant to me today. And it is relevant to you.

What is my spiritual nature?

Am I a person who truly “listens, does, and obeys” but someone who occasionally doubts and murmurs when God does not respond immediately and as I think He should? Or am I a person who consistently doubts, grumbles and murmurs about my lot in life and who only occasionally stops and worships the God of all creation?