This week’s Parashat skips from year two in the Wilderness all the way to year forty. Miriam dies, and immediately there is a water issue — something that hasn’t happened since the first couple of weeks in the Wilderness. Miriam’s whole story is tied to water. She watched over Moses in the basket as he floated down the Nile. She sang a song of victory after the Red Sea. And when Moses struck the rock the first time, that rock became known as Miriam’s Well. Now Miriam is gone, and her well stops producing.
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Miriam’s faith carried the people for nearly forty years. When she was no longer there, the people could no longer live off of her faith — it was time for them to live off their own. This same week, a mighty man of God, Jimmy Swaggart, passed away. He fell publicly at one point in his life, but he got back up and finished his race. Remember, Miriam herself made a mistake and was struck with a skin disease, yet God restored her within a week. We cannot live forever on the faith of the people who raised us or came before us. People fall. If your faith is only ever borrowed from someone else’s, you are setting yourself up for failure. Learn to live on your own faith.
Moses loses his sister and never even gets the chance to mourn her. The people complain immediately about the lack of water. God tells Moses to take Aaron and his staff, go to the rock, and speak to it. But Moses, in his frustration, gathers the people, raises his hands, and asks, “Must we bring water out of this rock?” — and strikes it twice instead of speaking to it. That disobedience cost him the Promised Land. The final lesson he was supposed to teach Israel never got taught, and because of it, that generation never received everything they had been promised.
We can actually see the lesson Moses was meant to teach show up later, in the words of Jesus. When Jesus goes over the Law, He doesn’t loosen it — He doubles down on it. Take lust, for example: Jesus said that entertaining the thought is the same as acting on it.
If we go looking for a story that involves a rock, water, and speaking rather than striking, we land in Mark 11.
“Then Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Have faith in God. I tell you the truth, you can say to this mountain, “May you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,” and it will happen. But you must really believe it will happen and have no doubt in your heart…’” — Mark 11:22–25
This comes right after Jesus curses the fig tree, and the disciples later find it withered from the roots up. Jesus tells them that if we forgive others — refusing to let bitterness have power over us — we can operate in faith at a whole different level. Instead of asking a rock to give up water, you can tell a mountain to be cast into the sea. Whatever mountain you’re facing, your faith is greater than it is.
Where would we be today if Moses had been able to teach that final lesson at the rock? Jesus taught it for him. The only question left is: what are you going to do with what you’ve now learned?