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Key Text – Exodus 15:22-27 (NIV)
V22- Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water.
V23- When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.)
V24- So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?”
V25- 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.
V26- 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 keeps 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.”
V27- Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.
Life is not a long-continued song of triumph.
The children of Israel had just gone through the Red Sea and seen their enemies thoroughly defeated. They had just sung a glorious hymn of praise and thanksgiving. They began traveling onward into the Desert of Shur. But new needs arose. They became thirsty but for three days, they couldn’t find any water. A single day in the desert without water would be tolerable; two days would be difficult but three days would be impossible. It was not until they arrived at Marah that they found water at last.
But the water at Marah was bitter and undrinkable. Can you imagine the disappointment of the children of Israel when their most basic need was not met? It is here that we find that the past triumph at the Red Sea which causes their lives to sing has now turned into a present tragedy that causes their lives to suck. You can say that their experience of life has changed from triumph to tragedy; from joy to sorrow; from dances to disappointment. At this point of their Marah experience, life really sucks for them.
This morning, I would like to share with all of you the last in the series that is in line with our “Life” Evangelistic Service, a message entitled, ‘LIFE SUCKS’.
(I) Our Life Sucks Because of Marah
What is “Marah”?
Marah means “bitter” and it is related to the word “myrrh.”
Metaphorically, “Marah” points to any bitter experiences we encounter in this life and mind you, Marah is on the path where God leads us just as it was in the path where God led the children of Israel.
You may not realize it, but the oasis of Marah is a normal Christian experience. When a bitter experience comes to a Christian, it is puzzling and perplexing thing. Some people ask, “Why does God let this happen to me?” I cannot tell you why certain things befall Christians but I do know that God uses Marah to test our hearts, not because God doesn’t know our hearts but because we don’t know our own hearts. People often argue, “Well, I know my heart!” But they forget that the “heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jer 17:9).
The Lord is using Marah in our lives to educate us and preparing us for something. Like what Pas Jessie quoted to me from Charles Swindoll, “I doubt God can use any man of God until He has hurt him deeply.” The Lord also said, “In the world ye shall have tribulation.” The Lord tests us through our Marahs to encourage spiritual growth and bring out the best in us but the devil tempts us to bring out the worst in us and to encourage spiritual immaturity. The attitude we take toward our difficulties, determines which direction life will go, for what life does to us depends on what life finds in us.
So, right on your pathway there is Marah. In the pathway of every one (whether you are born-again or not), there is Marah. God has arranged it all. Someone has said, “Disappointments are God’s appointment.”
(II) What are your Marah?
The Marah of your lives designates any place, any circumstance, any experience, any painful or estranged relationship through which you may be passing. It may come to you in the form of:
1. Disappointment
Where you fail to fulfill your dreams; where a desire in your heart is not fulfilled and it causes you frustration.
E.g.
A young man said to his pastor, “I wanted to go to school. I wanted to prepare for the mission field, but my father died and I had to help support my mother; so I could not go to school.”
Does this story sound familiar to many of you? You wanted to continue your college but you have to stop schooling because your family is too poor to finance you and so you relegate yourself to be a trisicad driver. That is your Marah- your bitter experience and frustration of an unfulfilled dream.
You will also discover that disappointments in our lives do not often arise from big things like our ambition or dreams but from trivial things. The children of Israel were disappointed because their basic need like water was not met. So it is with us. More often than not, we are disappointed by trivial things. Many times men have to frequently pursue life for a time in the absence of needful things. This shows their dependence upon God. If man never lacks any good thing, he will imagine that life is self-supporting and that he could do anything without the aid of God. The absence of needful good teaches men to value its return.
E.g.
We are all guilty of taking for granted the supply of the most basic commodities in this city – water and electricity. Last summer, there was a shortage of water and the prices of water escalated. We all began to cry to God for rain. The rain came and the water problem was solved. Are we thankful to the Lord? Then recently the city was in shortage of electricity where every household experienced at least once or twice brown out daily. Our church went through four major services without electricity.
We never prayed or saw the need to implore heaven for electricity until the Marah of brown-out hit us and we each started calling upon God. Thankfully, the coal plant began to operate and since Monday, electricity supply to the city has been going on smoothly. So you can see, disappointments can come to us in the form of deprivation of the basic needs of our lives.
2. Sorrows
Which is actually pain of mind, grief, sadness or distress.
We experience that normally through the death of our loved ones.
E.g.
There is this sweet superintendent of a Sunday School department in a church. She is a beautiful, sweet and uncomplaining young woman but she is prematurely gray. One day the pastor asked her why. He was told that at one time she was engaged to one of the finest young man in the church. They were to be married, but he was called away to war and was killed. It caused her hair to turn gray. That was the “Marah” in her life.
For some parents, the sorrow of your life is a foolish son who refuses to serve and love God but who squanders away his life in debauchery (sin/corruption). Proverbs 17:25- “A foolish son is a grief to his father and bitterness to her who bore him.”
If you are a parent today, you are bound to meet your Marah through your children. It is that difficult situation to which you have come with your children. Someone has said that a parent is as happy as his unhappiest child. The fact that we parents love our children makes us vulnerable to our children’s hurts. The fact that we want the best for them causes us to be deeply sorrowful when things are not working out for them. Certainly, there are those times when our children bring us far more pain than pleasure.
3. Terminal Illness
This is a common Marah to many of us as we have many friends and loved ones who have contracted terminal illness and have died thereof.
E.g.
Last Tuesday Bible Study, I shared a very heart-wrenching story of Rev Allen who has experienced this kind of Marah in his life. In the 19080s, Rev Allen met his Marah that would change his life and ministry. It was that time that his son informed him that his daughter-in-law, Lydia, while pregnant with her first child, had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. Following the birth of Rev Allen’s second grandchild, the family discovered not only Lydia’s positive HIV status, but that both children also tested positive. Bryan, the infant, died in 1986. Lydia died in 1992. Matthew, his oldest grandson, lived until the age of 13. The disease devastated the family but it was the Church that broke their hearts. After Rev Allen’s son Scott learned about his wife’s condition, he immediately shared the news with the senior pastor of the congregation in Colorado where he served as an associate pastor. The church fired Scott the next day. Over the next months, after relocating to Dallas, the family struggled to find childcare, schools or even a church home, because fears about the disease caused people to keep the Allens at arm’s length. Scott, while reeling from the loss of his family, one member at a time, grew disillusioned over the next months and years, not only with the Church but with the Christian faith in general.
He was convinced, as he told his father, that the Church was “just like any other business.” Today, Scott practices Taoism, having left Christianity altogether. During the final days of his grandson, Matthew, Rev Allen visited Matthew every week, especially during the final months of his life. Rev Allen often asked what Matthew wanted to do, and the two of them would take off on some adventure. In Matthew’s final days, the adventures grew difficult as his health failed. During one of their final visits, Matthew covered with tubes and confined to a wheelchair, asked his grandfather to take him to McDonalds. Matthew always like McDonald, but to Rev Allen, it seemed an odd place for a dying child’s final adventure. But as good grandfathers do, he packed Matthew up and off they went to the golden arches. When they arrived, Matthew asked his grandfather to take him out to the playground. He was not eating much those days anyway and, as Rev Allen soon discovered, food was not the reason for his visit.
When he wheeled his grandson through the playground doors, several kids made their way over to say hello. Matthew laughed and talked like any little boy. As Rev Allen watched Matthew with the other children, he realized the reason for his grandson’s last request: Matthew had chosen McDonalds because he wanted to belong, and the children at McDonalds –unlike at church or school- didn’t care about his disease, feeding tube or wheelchair. At the McDonalds, all little boys are equal. Finally Rev Allen whispered, “I guess I couldn’t imagine a sadder experience in my entire life. Of all the places my grandson could have chosen to go during one of his final outings, he did not….he COULD NOT…..choose the Church. He couldn’t, because when they had a chance, the Church didn’t choose him.” That is quadruple Marahs for Rev Allen- death of 3 loved ones with AIDS and rejection by the Church due to the ominous terminal disease, AIDS.
4. Estrangement
Which is the separation or the drifting apart of a relationship with your spouse or loved ones. Here we see it so rampantly through abandonment of family, divorce and separation. It is an embittering experience to be abandoned by your husband; divorced from your husband or to be separated from your spouse.
E.g.
A woman, married thirty years, was asked, “In your many years of marriage did you ever consider divorce?” She said, “No, I never consider divorce…..murder maybe.”
For young people, the estrangement takes the form of break up in the boy-girl romance. It doesn’t mean every romance you enter into will last till eternity. Courting couples do break up. So, if you are not emotionally and mentally strong or spiritually matured, please do not enter into a romantic relationship with any one yet because there is a 50% chance of it breaking up. Some of us, after a break up in our relationship with our boyfriend or girlfriend, can become so traumatized emotionally that you cannot study, eat or sleep and worse, you feel like leaving the Church. That is Marah for the couples.
5. Despondency
This designates whatever place it is in your experience to which you have come but DON’T WANT TO BE.
Illustration
In Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan referred to “the slough (mire) of despondency (depression, unhappiness, misery)”. This may be what Marah is all about. We become despondent because of the circumstances of our lives.
E.g.
For 14 years, my despondency was Iloilo City. I felt trapped in the slough/mire of this City. I didn’t want to be here and I was very miserable and unhappy for the first 14 years of my stay here. That was my Marah.
So friends, there are many disappointments, sorrows, illnesses, estrangement and despondency in life. Your plans can be torn up like a jigsaw puzzle. May I say that we all have our Marahs. You will not bypass them. You cannot detour around them, skip over them or tunnel under them.
God uses branding iron. And our Marah is God’s branding iron.
Illustration
In the spring of every year, calves are branded in West Texas. The cowboy would catch the calf and the branding iron would be burnt down on the flesh of the calf on the hind hip. Oh, how the calf would bellow. It is quite a sad thing to hear him cry. But from then on every one knows to whom he belongs. After a calf is branded, it will not get lost. God does that for us today. Our Marah is to brand us so that we will not get lost; so that we can belong to God.
(III) Our Response
The Marahs of our lives can lead us to respond in one of the two ways:
1. Murmuring
V24- So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?”
The children of Israel gave way to murmuring; only one man among them prayed. In the Marahs of our lives, only one man in the crowd will seek communion with God. The rest of us will grumble and complain. Grumbling is more natural than prayer. The former is folly. The latter is healing. Man loves to have his own way. He ought to submit to the will of God. When we murmur, we are deaf to the voice of God and blind to the remedy that God would disclose to us.
We murmur at the Marahs of our lives, always forgetting the memories of past divine help. We murmur the moment we are displeased.
Illustration
Entering a department store, a little old lady was startled when a band began to play and a dignified executive pinned an orchid on her dress and handed her a crisp hundred dollar bill. She was the store’s millionth customer. Television cameras were focused on her and reporters began interviewing. “Tell me,” one asked, “just what did you come here for today?” The lady hesitated for a minute, and then answered, “I’m on my way to the Complaint Department.”
Would it not have been wiser if those children of Israel had called to mind the deliverance which God had wrought out for them in the past? Had God not brought them out of Egypt and through the water of the Red Sea as on dry land and saved them from life-long enemies? Had God done this that He might destroy them with thirst for a few days afterwards? Certainly not! But unbelief views things on the dark side. It only looks at the bitter waters it cannot sweeten.
2. Prayer
V25- 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.
Moses took the right approach, the way of faith: he cried out to the Lord and then followed God’s orders. God can solve our problems by changing things (like making the waters sweet), by giving us something else (like the wells of waters at Elim) or by giving us the grace we need to bear with our difficulties and not complain. The third approach is what produces lasting spiritual growth.
Application
Do you think that perhaps the Lord might give you and me some bitter water to drink once in a while, just to see what we will do? Will we praise Him and thank Him for that bitter water? Or will we murmur and complain against Him?
(IV) God’s Remedy
V25- 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.
The remedy of God for the Marahs of the children of Israel is to throw a tree into the bitter water. That tree is a picture of the Branch, Jesus Christ. Deuteronomy 21:23 says, “he that is hanged is accursed of God….” And in Galatian 3:13 it says, “….Cursed is everyone that hanged on a tree.” Jesus Christ died on a tree and it is that cross that makes the experiences of life sweet. He tasted death for every man, and took the sting out of death. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” says 1 Corinthians 15:55. Just as the tree was cast into the bitter water, making it sweet, so Jesus heals and redeems all that touches him. When we invite His presence by praising and thanking Him for what is bitter to us, He sweetens it for us. It is the cross of Christ that makes sweet the Marah experiences of life.
V26- 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 keeps 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.”
From this Marah experience, the children of Israel not only learned something about themselves and about life, but they also learned something about their God, that He is “Jehovah Ropha, the Lord who heals” (Exodus 15:26). God promised Israel abundant physical blessings if they would obey Him but physical afflictions if they disobeyed.
We can claim this promise of healing in every area of our lives. All we have to do is to be obedient unto the Lord.
(V) God’s Compensation
V27- Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.
If life were nothing but tests, we would be discouraged. If life were all pleasure, we would never learn discipline and develop character. The Lord knows how to balance the experiences of life, for He brought His people to Elim.
Elim was a place of abundant blessing and fruitfulness. There were seventy palm trees and twelve wells. After the bitterness of Marah, God brought His people to Elim. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Simon Peter may be locked in the inner prison, but the angel is going to open the door. Paul and Silas may be beaten at midnight, but an earthquake will free them. There is a Marah along the pilgrim’s pathway today; but friend, there is also an Elim. God’s plan for usefulness always leads to Marah and to Elim. Joseph, you remember, had the experience, Moses did, Elijah did, David did and I am sure you and I will have that also. Beyond every Marah there is an Elim. Beyond every shadow, there is an Elim. Beyond every cloud, there is the sun. Beyond every shadow, there is the light. Beyond every trial, there is triumph and beyond every storm, there is a rainbow. God knows how to compensate after every pain and trial we have been through. This is our God!
Let us be grateful that the Lord gives us enough blessings to encourage us and enough burdens to humble us and that He knows how much we can take.
Conclusion
Life sucks because of Marah. As long as you are human, you’ll know the bitter experiences of life coming to you in the form of disappointments, sorrows, illnesses, estrangements and despondency. You can stay bitter, complain and murmur and nothing will ever change. You will still be stuck in the mire of despondency or you can be like Moses, cry out to the Lord. In your prayer, God will also point you to the Cross where His beloved Son died for you. When you invite Him into your bitter Marah, He will sweeten your life and teach you obedience, so that He can continue to be the Jehovah Ropha of your lives, healing you. Then Elim will come to you, where God will compensate you and make you glad as many days as He has afflicted you and as many years as you have seen evil. That’s the way God always works. Life doesn’t have to suck always when you have Jesus. Life can sing even in the midst of our Marahs.
My Testimony
I can testify to all of you that I am what I am today is because of the many Marahs God has allowed me to encounter. When I was just born again, my immediate Marahs was two years of bitterness against my father who destroyed my dreams of an overseas education; 6 years of bitterness against my boyfriend for dumping me. Then after my marriage to Pas Toh Nee, another 4 years of Marahs with him- fighting and arguing. I also had some Marahs with my mother-in-law when Jan was born. Then there was the Marah here in this church where a couple almost split our congregation in 1987; then another Marah in the late 1999 with a rich family that undermined our leadership in the cell group. I also had a short Marah experience with Joy for two years when she was 13-14 years old and a longer Marah experience with the more rebellious one – Jan. But I dare say that through each of this Marah experience, I got to know myself more –areas of my life, I thought I was strong, I wasn’t and vice versa.
But the best outcome of each Marah is that it drives me to pray. Initially, I didn’t pray. I didn’t want to pray because it was easier to complain and murmur and stay bitter but it led me no where. Gradually, the Lord taught me to take all my Marahs to Him in prayer. 24 years have passed and it is each of these Marah that has enriched my personal experience with the Lord and I was able to translate that experience into stories to tell all of you today, stories which I hope will touch your lives. God chooses his choice servants through the furnace of fire, especially the Levites – “For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, till they present right offerings to the Lord. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years” (Mal 3:2-4). Indeed, “it is doubtful God can use any man of God until He has hurt him deeply.” Brothers and sister, your hurt and wounds are not fatal and useless if you turn them to the cross as Jesus will sweeten them up and use them to bless others.
End of Sermon
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