Three days. That is how long it took Israel to go from singing on the shore of the Red Sea to grumbling in the desert. They had walked between walls of water on dry ground. They had watched the Lord wash away the whole Egyptian army. They had sung a victory song about the nations trembling and about being planted in the land God had promised them (Exodus 15:14-17). Everything looked rosy. And then, three days into the wilderness of Shur, the water ran out.
From the Red Sea to Marah
Picture two million people, roughly the population of Dublin, camped in a desert with all their livestock. The scattered watering holes along the routes of that wilderness could never supply so many. Three days of travelling, twelve miles a day under a hot sun, and no water found. You can imagine them spotting Marah in the distance and finishing off the last of their reserves, telling their children, it's alright, drink up, we can refill in a couple of hours.
And you can imagine the horror when they scooped that water into their mouths and spat it straight out again. Marah means bitter. The water was foul and undrinkable. This is not a diner sending back a steak because it is a little tough. These people were exhausted and dehydrated, and suddenly life was hanging by a thread. So they grumbled against Moses: "What are we to drink?" (Exodus 15:24).
Why would God lead his people to bitter water?
Be clear about one thing: God brought them there on purpose. Israel was being guided by the pillar of cloud and fire. It is easy to take a wrong turn at a motorway interchange with sixteen lanes and a GPS that will not settle; it is hard to go wrong when God himself is showing the way. They had not got lost. God led them deliberately to undrinkable water.
Why? Not because he is cruel, and not because he is good at parting seas but bad at geography. Verse 25 gives the answer plainly: "there he tested them." The whole wilderness is a testing ground. Moses later called it "the vast and dreadful wilderness, a thirsty and waterless land with venomous snakes and scorpions" (Deuteronomy 8:15). It is a hard place, and God used it to train his people to trust him.
All training hurts. Anyone who has turned up to Covenant Run Club knows there is no shortcut that cuts the pain out of getting fit, and the same goes for preparing for exams or growing in holiness. Anybody can trust God when things are easy. The real test is whether we will trust him when things are hard.
God's own summary of these months is striking. "You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself" (Exodus 19:4). That phrase sounds gentle, like effortless gliding above the chaos. It is anything but. It describes how a mother eagle teaches her young to fly: she carries the eaglet out of the nest, high on the cliffs, and drops it. The little bird plummets. If it does not manage to flap, she swoops underneath, catches it, bears it up, and then does the whole thing again, as many times as it takes. It looks brutal. It is actually love, because the eaglet must learn to fly, and it will never learn in the nest. That is what God was doing with Israel in the wilderness, and the mother eagle was always there to catch them.
Israel's failure
Israel's concern at Marah was perfectly reasonable. Their failure was not that they were worried about water; it was their attitude. They grumbled. The word sounds almost comical in English, like something out of a Mr. Men book, but the Hebrew word describes hostile complaining, angry rejection, people on the brink of rebellion. This becomes Israel's besetting sin in the wilderness, and it comes back again and again.
Two things lie underneath the grumbling. The first is faithlessness. They did not trust God's power to take care of them, and they did not trust his goodness, that he actually wanted to. The second is forgetfulness, and this is the Bible's own diagnosis: "How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness... They did not remember his power, or the day when he redeemed them from the foe" (Psalm 78:40-42). It had been three days since they walked through the Red Sea. A few weeks since the plagues and the Passover. The pillar of cloud was still right there in front of them. But thirst and fear had pushed everything God had ever done for them clean out of their minds, until the problem filled the whole horizon.
It is tempting to think we would never be so ungrateful. Paul will not let us off that easily. Writing about these very events, he says "these things took place as examples for us", and of all Israel's wilderness sins he singles out grumbling (1 Corinthians 10:6-10). Then he adds: "let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall."
Because we are in the wilderness too. This life is the wilderness. We have been rescued from slavery to sin, and we are on our way to the promised land, but we are not there yet, and the road passes through hard country. There will be times when it feels like the Lord has thrown us out of the nest and we are freefalling, when some need takes up our whole horizon the way thirst filled Israel's. For some it is the news, war in Ukraine and unrest in the Middle East. For others it is closer to home: the cost of living, finding a job or surviving one, housing, a relationship that is struggling or one that simply does not exist, a health problem that will not go away. What is God doing? This makes no sense. At exactly those moments, the choice in front of us is the choice Israel faced at Marah: grumble, or trust and keep bringing the need to the Lord.
God's grace
Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. Moses did what the people should have done: he 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 (Exodus 15:25).
This was a miracle, not chemistry. There are trees in that region, Moringa trees, whose seeds can purify small amounts of brackish water, but no handful of seeds turns a water source for two million people sweet. The wood was a symbol that God was working through Moses, like the staff lifted over the Red Sea. The Lord himself made the bitter water sweet.
If you hold on to one phrase from this passage, hold on to that one. The Lord makes bitter water sweet. It is a picture of what he continually does for his people, and he puts a name on it himself:
"If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes... I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you." (Exodus 15:26)
The whole Exodus could be summed up that way: bitter slavery in Pharaoh's service turned into sweet freedom in the service of the living God. So can the whole of salvation. The Lord our healer meets us in the bitterness of sin and misery and gives us the sweetness of forgiveness, a clean conscience, his love and his presence. And when we have made life bitter for ourselves by our own sin, no matter how badly, if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us.
He goes further still. "We know that for those who love God all things work together for good" (Romans 8:28). All things, even the tragic and painful ones. Perhaps you have lived this: something bitter happened to you, an illness, a broken relationship, a failure, and you wept over it and asked God why, unable to see any good in it at all. And now, years later, you can look back and trace at least some of the ways he turned that bitter thing to good. Joseph could. After the betrayal, the slavery, the false accusation and the forgotten years in prison, he told his brothers, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
The greatest example in the universe is the cross. The most bitter thing imaginable, the Son of God nailed to a tree by the hands of wicked men. And just as at Marah, through that tree the Lord has brought sweetness beyond measure to the whole world.
If you are in bitter circumstances right now, remember what he has done, refuse the grumbling, and look to him. In due course, the Lord who heals you will make even this bitter water sweet.
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