The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. (Ps 18:2)
This is a warrior, speaking of God as a rock, and by that he means success in battle. Incontrovertibly, David’s warrior terminology extends far beyond literal war, even in his own day, although it does include literal war; however, in the New Covenant, the warrior analogies are applied literally to the truer and only still-standing enemies: spiritual strongholds. New Covenant believers can sing the imprecatory Psalms, but they must sing them against lust and greed . . . not Assyrians nor Persians. David, being a true believer in the Old Covenant, employs a mix of the literal and the spiritual.
The epitome of a successful battle would not only be the efficient conquering of one’s enemies, but also the successful protection of one’s own peoples. The latter is being sung about in the above-cited Psalm. On all sides, David says that God has been a Fortress, a Deliverer, a Refuge, a Shield, a Savior, and a Stronghold. He references God as being all these things in one word which he repeats: Rock.
Now, we see Moses, the leader of the people of God, stationed upon the rock, and a direct relationship emerging between this and the victory over their enemies. But this is not the only thing taking place. They are not only being kept safe and delivered from their own deaths, but they are winning the battle as well:
For who is God, but the Lord? And who is a rock, except our God?—the God who equipped me with strength and made my way blameless. He made my feet like the feet of a deer and set me secure on the heights. He trains my hands for war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You have given me the shield of your salvation, and your right hand supported me, and your gentleness made me great. You gave a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip. I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed. (Ps 18:31–37)
The only Rock that exists, is God, says David. He then goes on to describe, in the very same chapter, how God is not only a Rock who saves his people from their enemies, but he is a Rock who crushes the enemies of his people. Those who love to sneak and set traps, David says further on in Solomonic fashion, will be devoured by them. Such is the case with Amalek. Moses is seated on the Rock, and the battle is being won for the people of God. Moses is stayed on the Rock, and the Rock is undoubtedly the Rock of Salvation.
But the Rock upon which Moses sits is only part of the gospel message. There are other pieces built into it. Moses is seated on the Rock, but his arms are held up by other men from the camp. His arms are held up; his staff is in his hand; and Moses is growing weary.
The man of God, in this Exodus passage, is a mighty leader. He is a Bible hero unparalleled. But what is the message in this passage? The victory is not only related to the man of God being established on the Rock, but it is required of him that he remain in a posture of surrender and dependency. To fail to do so is to lose the battle. Aaron and Hur are not commissioned to cheer him on. They are commissioned to hold his arms up. What curious irony. The leader of the people exists in a perpetual state of surrender, that by doing so they might be victorious in battle. The only way this makes sense is to place it all under the rubric of gospel logic. Every person who surrenders to Christ is truly victorious:
Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 18:3b)
After the event at Horeb, Moses renamed the place, and he gave it two names. One name meant quarreling and one name meant testing. The quarreling commemoration was made because the people fought with one another and with Moses. Even down to this day, it is remembered of them that they complained and argued. The other name was given because the people tested God. Moses even says in what manner they did such a thing:
And he called the name of the place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarreling of the people of Israel, and because they tested the Lord by saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (Exod 17:7)
What they had done to test the Lord was to question whether or not he was still among them. And so, Moses stands with his hands raised in surrender to the Lord, and Israel wins. Imagine the shock and fear that must have raced through him when he made the connection between their success of the troops and the position of his hands. Moses is showing us what it looks like not only to be a godly leader, but to be a godly believer. It is to live in dependency on the Rock, both beneath us and above us.
It would have been the simplest thing in the world to deny that it is possible that his own arms being raised was the key to the success against Amalek. The simplest thing would be to confess a wave of self-centeredness and a brief encounter with the world of Messiah complexes. Moses could have slapped himself in the face a few times and asked Aaron to pinch him. What was he thinking? There is no way that a guy raising his arms in the air—or not—could determine the outcome of war. But it was not about a man raising his arms in the air or not. It was always about whether or not God was preaching the gospel through Israel for the rest of human history after him to receive. To put his arms down would have been to surrender to the unbelieving error that God must not actually be among them.
I remember a time when a woman who was not very old came down with a sudden sickness and was immediately on the brink of death. It was quite sudden and certainly a shock to the congregation. Everyone was praying for healing, despite the fact that hospice had been called in and the family had gathered to say their farewells. Remarkably, and in an unforeseen manner, this woman began to come out of the sickness and nearly as rapidly returned to a healthy form of functioning.
A friend was leading the call to worship the Sunday after this woman’s recovery and she chastised the congregation. “How dare we?” she said. “How dare any of us suggest that this woman’s tenacity is the cause for her recovery. How dare we use quippy sayings about us knowing she had it in her. We have prayed to God as our only hope, as the One who holds the power of life and death in his hands. If this woman has recovered, God alone should get the glory.”
It was a prophetic rebuke. How easy it is for us to be unbelieving in reference to God’s sovereignty over and involvement in the world. One could enter any number of jokes here about praying petitioners saying, “Forget it God, a helicopter is here now.”
This concept of believers being people who live in dependency on God weaves through the entire Bible. We find it in the letter that Paul wrote to the church in Galatia. The primary issue with these folks is that they had started flirting with a return to the customs and traditions of Judaism. That, on its own, isn’t the worst thing about their condition. The recovery of things like circumcision and food laws was most problematic because they stripped Christ from his rightful position as the fulfillment of these things, and they were rejecting the sufficiency of Christ in relation to both justification and sanctification. This Galatian error is best summed up in the following manner:
Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (Gal 3:3)
The fact that Paul has to address the error in how these folks lived—after being justified—shows that the poison of a works-based righteousness has crept beyond the borders of justification and has made its way into the fabric of sanctification as well. They had forgotten the simple truth that a mature Christian was not someone who could spar with theologians in the original languages. Not at all. A mature Christian is someone who has walked with the Lord for a long time and never put their arms down. To suggest that a continuance in the faith looks different than dependency on the Spirit is foolishness, according the Spirit of God:
By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. (Heb 11:24–26)
Moses is preaching a sermon to all the believers that would