Daily Worship

Water from the rock

Rhona Cathcart March 08, 2026 1 0
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Exodus 17: 6 (NIV-UK)

6 I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.’ So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel.

Today’s passage is a very dry place with which to begin a week following the water of life. I was struck by the ‘hardness’ of the setting and Moses’ location within it. He may not have been ‘stuck between a rock and a hard place’ as the expression goes but the passage puts him specifically between the Rock of Horeb, and an angry crowd almost ready to stone him. There in that hard, dry, stony place God has told him to take his staff (another hard object) and strike the rock. 

Now we don’t know whether the biblical Rock of Horeb was the same as the massive split boulder which stands on a hill in the Saudi Arabian desert near Mount Sinai and which tradition has associated with it. If it was, I wouldn’t blame Moses for doubting whether water could ever possibly come out of it. It doesn’t look like a place which has ever seen much moisture. 

Did he strike the rock with trust and confidence in God? Could he somehow ‘see’ the very source of living water standing there as he promised? Or did he act because he was stuck on stony ground between a rock and a hard people and there was nothing else to do? 

We don’t know. What we do know is that the water flowed. 

Curiously, I’ve read that the split in the modern Rock of Horeb or Split Rock of Rephidimin is considered evidence of ancient water erosion. When it comes to the refreshment of the water of life maybe it doesn’t need to be instantaneous. Maybe it’s just as miraculous if it happens slowly and powerfully over millennia. 

 

Prayer:

 

Stony hands and stony hearts

Gasps of longing, anger and hope from dry throats

Strike us, Lord, 

And release the water trapped within.

Amen