Bitter? Sweet!!

Exodus 15:25
So Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree. When Moses threw the tree into the water, the water became good to drink. There the Lord gave the people a rule and a law to live by, and there he tested their loyalty to him.

I honestly don’t know why God did the things He did for the Israelites. A reasonable person would think that God would get annoyed and walk away from this band of whining, complaining, ungrateful people, but He didn’t. I guess we have only one thing to consider in God’s dealings with the nation of Israel: grace!

It was grace that brought them to Egypt in the first place. It was the grace of God, through Joseph, that provided for Israel in a time of famine. It was the grace of God that kept the Hebrew men, women, and children from the ten plagues sent upon Pharaoh and his people. It was the grace of God that provided a cloud of leadership by day and fire to light the way at night. It was the grace of God that parted the Red Sea and swallowed up the army of Pharaoh as they pursued the Israelites. And it was the grace of God that continually tolerated the groaning and complaining as He led them through the wilderness.

So I suppose, then, that it was the grace of God that heard them in Marah, where the waters were bitter and undrinkable. It was God who placed a tree before Moses. It was God who laid it on Moses’ heart to toss the tree into the waters. It was God who caused the tree to make the waters not only potable, but sweet! It was God who, through His grace, continued to provide for the people.

It’s understood by most scholars that, in areas of prophesy, the term “waters” typically means people. (Revelation 13 is an example of this.) It’s also thought that the “Tree of Life” found in Genesis and again in Revelation is a representation of Jesus. (Genesis 3:22/Revelation 22:1) Jesus even refers to Himself as the “true vine” in John 15:1, implying that He is the Tree of Life. So in reading this verse, I began to ponder what it means on an eternal plane.

We, the waters, are bitter and undrinkable; our sin has made us this way. God cannot have fellowship with us knowing that we have sinned. He sees past our works and our deeds and is so holy that He can not tolerate our bitterness. So God, thirsty and desperate for a true relationship with us, cast into the waters a Tree. This Tree, Jesus, became a person. He walked among us, lived with us, and died for us. Because He was tossed into the bitter waters, they became sweet. Because of the innocent sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God, the Tree of Life, we have been made not only drinkable, but sweet to the taste of God the Father. As we read in Hebrews 10, we are given to Him, holy and acceptable, by the blood of Christ!