Comments on Numbers 11:10-17

"Honest to God"

Numbers 11:10-17

7/18/93

Some people are never satisfied. No matter what you do, you can never meet their expectations. Sometimes working with the youth group can be like that. And it seems as though all youth group leaders struggle with this. You can come up with a great program or recreation idea, and they hate it. But they don't have any ideas of their own to suggest. The leader has to come up with all the ideas, and none of them are good enough.

Moses could relate to that feeling, as he led all those Israelites out in the desert. They just couldn't be satisfied. God had delivered them out of slavery in Egypt, and he was leading them to the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey. In the middle of a barren wilderness, he fed them with manna, a strange food that came every day, exactly enough for what they needed. But the people kept complaining. Manna wasn't good enough for them. They wanted meat. Something to sink their teeth into. There was plenty of meat in Egypt, and they wanted to go back. No wonder Moses was in a foul humor. He had worked so hard to help these people, and in return all they did was complain that they wanted to back to where they came from. Not too long ago--at the beginning of this chapter--God killed some of the people who were complaining. But they still moaned that they wanted to go back. Moses was fed up with it all. And so, in frustration, he went up to talk to God.

That was quite the conversation. Now we might expect a prayer like this to come from Pharoah, or Cain, or Jezebel, or one of the other bad guys in the Old Testament. But Moses? This is God's right-hand man. The one who stood against Pharoah, who parted the Red Sea, who received the Ten Commandments. Surely he would never talk to God like this. But he blamed God for all his troubles. He complained about all the stuff he had to put up with. He accused God of giving him a burden that's too heavy to carry. It makes us uncomfortable to hear Moses talking to God in such a defiant way. That's not the attitude we're supposed to have in prayer, is it? What's this prayer doing in our Bible?

The Bible tells us a lot about prayer, and that's not surprising. If Scripture is an account of how God and humanity relate to each other, it's only natural for it to talk about prayer, the way we communicate with God. And so we find lots of examples of prayer, and lots of instruction about how to do it. And to our ears, it sounds like Moses goes directly against what the Bible teaches. Listen to some of examples.

First, a passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians. "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." Well, Moses didn't do so well. He seemed anxious about everything, and it doesn't sound like he presented his request to God with thanksgiving. All he could see was the complaining of the people, and he took out his frustration by blaming God for the whole mess. Strike One.

Let's try again. Listen to what Jesus has to say about prayer in the Gospel of Mark. "If anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you will receive it, and it will be yours." Moses doesn't exactly give the impression that he believed that God would come through for him. He was sick and tired of having to do all the dirty work. Jesus tells us not to have doubts when we pray, and Moses was full them. Strike Two.

Let's look at one more passage, from Ecclesiates in the Old Testament. "Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong. Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few." Moses certainly didn't come to God to listen. Whether God is in heaven or not, he was mad at him, and he wasn't about to sit around quietly to wait for what God had to say. Strike Three for Moses. No wonder we don't like this prayer. Moses breaks all the rules of prayer.

In fact, he breaks all the rules of common decency. Ever since we were children, we were taught to treat our superiors with respect. You don't talk back to your parents. You don't sass your teachers. You don't argue with your boss. And for crying out loud, you don't tell God how to run the world. Remember, this is God we're talking about. The One who created the universe by speaking a word. Moses had seen his power, maybe more than any other person. God brought the seven plagues upon Egypt. He parted the Red Sea. He billowed fire and smoke from the mountain. And listen to the way Moses talks to him! "If this is how you are going to treat me, put me to death right now!" From the way Moses was carrying on, we almost expect God to do just that. We look for the lightning bolt to come out of the blue and fry Moses for talking to God like that.

Moses is not the only one who prayed to God like this. Many people in the Bible complained to God. For example, look at Samson, the famous strongman who killed a thousand enemy soldiers with the jawbone of a donkey. By the time he was done, he had worked up quite a thirst. So he complained to God, "You have given your servant this great victory. Must I now die of thirst?" So much for gratitude. Or look at Job, who struggled with his friends to understand why disaster had come upon him. In bitterness he prayed to God, "Your hands shaped me and made me. Will you now turn and destroy me? Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again?" Even Jesus Christ complained against God. As he hung in agony upon the cross he cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The Bible is laced with people like Moses who argued with, complained to, and even accused God.

People still accuse God today. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, one of the concentration camps that the Nazis used during World War II to kill millions of people, most of them Jews. In his book, The Trial of God, Wiesel imagines God facing charges in a trial for the evil of the world. He writes, "He is almighty, isn't he? He could use his might to save the victims, but He doesn't! So--on whose side is He?" Eventually, Wiesel declares that God is guilty.

We don't even have to look to Holocaust vicitims to hear people accusing and complaining to God. Among ourselves--in our community, in this sanctuary--we can see people aching with despair. Look at the people who must cope with a tragic death. Look at the family torn apart by divorce. Look at the woman who has nothing to look forward to but empty loneliness. Look at the man struck down in his prime by a crippling disease. It's not so uncommon for people like these to lash out in anger or despair against God, just as Moses did.

An author who has the same name that I do has written a novel about such a person. In "The Blood of the Lamb", Peter DeVries tells the story about Don Wanderhope, a man who had all the rough breaks in life. His brother died as a child. His father died in a mental hospital, after the years of treatment used up all the family's savings. His wife committed suicide, and he himself had a bout with tuberculosis. But what finally drove this man to despair was the death of his daughter after a long struggle with leukemia. He went to visit her in the hospital on her birthday, cake in hand, only to discover that because of an infection, she would die in a few hours. In despair and rage, he lashed out against God. He accused him of being like Herod, slaughtering innocent children. After he watched his girl die, he walked out of the hospital with the birthday cake still in his hand, and went to the church next door that had a statue of Jesus on the cross. Listen to his words as Peter DeVries--the other Peter deVries--records them.

"It was miracle enough that the pastry should reach its target at all, at that height from the sidewalk. The more so that it should land squarely, just beneath the crown of thorns. Then through scalded eyes I seemed to see the hands free themselves of the nails and move slowly toward the soiled face. Very slowly, very deliberately, with infinite patience, the icing was wiped from the eyes and flung away. Then the scene dissolved itself in a mist in which my legs could no longer support their weight, and I sank down to the steps."

These are uncomfortable scenes for us. It bothers us to see Don Wanderhope throw a cake in Christ's face because his child died. We don't want to hear Elie Wiesel condemn God for the Holocaust. And we don't like the thought of Moses complaining in the desert because of the ungrateful people. That's just not what's supposed to be. But why?

There's a common attitude among us that a person who gets angry at God for misfortune shows a lack of faith. But, as one of my seminary professors explained, it is impossible to complain "O God, why did you let this happen?" if you do not have faith in him. If people doubt that God exists, they cannot argue with him. It is impossible to protest to God if you don't believe in him. The people who lack faith are not the ones who complain to God about misfortune, but the ones who think he has nothing to do with it at all.

But because we believe that we shouldn't complain to God in our grief, we mask our pain with praise. After all, isn't that what we're supposed to do? Isn't that what God wants? If your heart is breaking over some tragedy, aren't you supposed to overcome that sorrow and look for something that you can praise God for? That's what many of us have been led to believe. To be sure, there are people who can legitimately praise God in their struggles. But far too many of us force our pain, our despair, and our anger underground. We bottle up our grief, rather than express it, because "that's not what God wants to hear." We don't think we're allowed to express it.

Imagine that there's a couple--say a husband and wife--who decide to go out for a movie on a Friday night. The theater in Kittanning has two movies: an action picture and a romance. The husband likes shoot-'em-ups, but because he knows that his wife prefers romances, he says, "Let's go see 'The Roses of Spring.'" But the wife, who knows that her husband would enjoy the action picture, says, "No, let's go to 'High-Impact Death Machine.'" The husband, who hates sappy love stories, replies, "I don't know; 'The Roses of Spring' has gotten good reviews." And the wife, who can't stand to watch people getting blown up on a movie screen, responds, "No, I think 'High-Impact Death Machine' sounds like a good movie." They keep going round and round because they're both saying what they think the other one wants them to say. And so neither one is being honest with the other. By the time they finally make up their minds, it's too late to go to either movie, and they're stuck at home watching a show about the latest hair-replacement technology.

And that's the good news from our passage this morning. We don't have to tell God what we think he wants us to say. We can be honest to him. When Moses complained to God about how hard it was to lead those ornery Israelites, God could have thundered back in reply. "Is this the thanks I get for all I've done for you? How dare you tell me what to do!" But look at what God did do. He listened to Moses, and selected seventy people to help him in his work. Moses complained that the burden was too heavy, and God responded by giving him people to help carry the weight. He listens to and honors those honest, impious, and even blasphemous prayers. We don't have to launder our prayers to make sure they are acceptable to God. It's more important to be honest with God than to make sure that we pray "properly," or "according to the rules." God will hear us.

This doesn't mean that we can give free rein to childish or selfish prayers. The good news is not that God wants us to be petty or greedy. The good news is that we do not have to hide our pain and frustration from God. We are not to wallow in our misery, but we can lift it up to our Lord. We can be honest to God.