Today’s passage says this:”For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. (1 Corinthians 10:1-5)
Is it not amazing to realise that, the Israelites “drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ”? My brother, my sister, is Christ really your spiritual rock? Where and what well do you drink from when you are tired or exhausted, when you feel unguided or seem lost? Let’s look at this passage to understand that just as we have been placed into Christ and identified with Him, so did the Israelites who were identified with Moses. Now, Moses was the great mediator of the Old Testament. He stood between God and man; he was the representative of the people to God, and the spokesman of God to the people. He had intimate access to God, and in Moses all the Israelites had that same access to God. This, of course, is true of us, isn’t it? The Bible says: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we[a] have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand” (Romans 5:1-2).
Now, notice that it is written that the rock that followed them wherever they went was Christ (verse 4). God is good: in the past, the people of God were related to Christ as we are related to Him today, which means that, just as He fed them and refreshed them, so we are fed and refreshed by the Spirit of God flowing out of Christ. So, my friend, you understand the question: is Jesus truly your rock? You see, when the Bible says the Rock “followed them,” do not imagine a great big rock rolling along behind the camp of the Israelites. It only means that wherever the symbol of a Rock appears in the Old Testament (the Rock from which the water flowed, the Rock of refuge into which the Israelites ran when the summer storms broke, the rock/stone Samuel erected, ‘Ebenezer’, etc), it referred to the presence of Christ in the midst of God’s people to quench their thirst, protect or help them. Is it not the same Christ who promises this to us: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20)? So how can one explain or understand that so many believers of Christ continue to complain about their faith, their beliefs, circumstances? My friend, is Christ really your rock? Always bear in mind that we are in the same boat as the Israelites in the past and Christ is in the boat with us. Therefore, let’s ensure we do not make the same mistakes the Israelites made, because despite all the amazing things God was doing for them, most of them remained ungrateful, unsatisfied and unfaithful, so much that “God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered in the wilderness” (verse 5). Stay blessed in Jesus’ name.