“Our Sin and God’s Grace Part 2: The Sin of Testing” by the Rev. Dr. Don Wahlig, March 8, 2026, Year A / Lent 3 – Psalm 95 ¨ Exodus 17:1-7
THEME: Trust that God is always with us, in even our deepest suffering and despite our darkest sin.
You have to feel for Moses, don’t you? This is not the first time on their Exodus journey that the Israelites have overwhelmed Moses with their griping and grumbling. No sooner does God lead them out of slavery in Egypt, than they find themselves wandering in the desert without enough food and water. Three times they complain against Moses. Three times Moses cries out to God. Three times, God provides. First, he shows Moses how to make bitter water sweet. Then he provides manna, bread and meat to eat. In today’s passage, God shows Moses how to bring water from a rock so the people can drink.
God is testing his people. The purpose is to find out whether they can be trusted to be his faithful covenant partners. The answer is ‘no – not yet.’ Instead of responding to their suffering in prayer, trusting God and leaning on his provision, they complain. They even try to turn the tables and test God. Despite all his miraculous provision, they doubt him. They ask, “Is God with us, or not?” They are not ready to be his covenant partners. As a result, none of this generation will live in the Promised Land of Canaan.
It begs a question. What is this troublesome, quarrelsome people looking for? How many times does God have to rescue them before they learn to trust him? That question is also for you and me. Just as God is testing them, so he tests us - in the same way, and for the same reason. He tests us through hardship and suffering. The issue is not God’s faithfulness, but ours. Will we trust him, even in hard times?
The answer that the text demands from us is yes. When we see that the Hebrews fail, we criticize their lack of faith. But the Hebrews wandering in the desert without food and water are not our loved ones. Their animals are not our animals. Their experience of uncertain sustenance is not our experience. When it is we and our loved ones who are suffering, the question takes on greater urgency. When we and our loved ones suffer, we are likely to ask the same question they did. “Where is God? Is he among us, or not?” We, too, are inclined to test God. These past few months, I have spent a significant amount of time at hospital bedsides and on living room couches where tears are spilled and hard questions are raised about God and suffering.
Why did God permit me to get cancer? Why is he allowing my loved one to suffer the throes of addiction? Why did he let my nearest and dearest get sick, or die? The specific circumstances differ, but the underlying question is always the same: Where is God in all this pain? These questions are not always spoken aloud, but they are always there. So, maybe we ought to take another, more compassionate look at those Hebrews wandering through the desert, complaining and kvetching, and generally making Moses’ life miserable. What we find as we keep reading, is that, even though they doubted, and tested God, God never abandoned them. He walked with them to Mt. Sinai, where he gave them his covenant. When they broke it, he still refused to abandon them. God was always with them. After the first generation passed away in the desert, God stayed with the next generation, and the next, all the way to the promised land.
Friends, you and I are on a journey much like theirs. The earthly duration and destination of our journey are often uncertain. This season of Lent is a microcosm of that journey. Just as God stayed with the Israelites in the desert, so he promises to remain with us - in the midst of our deepest suffering, and despite our darkest sin. Some day, when St. Peter ushers us through the pearly gates of Heaven, we will have the opportunity to ask God face-to-face why he permits us to suffer and why he does not always intervene to deliver us from it. But by then, it won’t matter, and we won’t care.
In the meantime, as we navigate this life knowing that we are guaranteed to suffer along the way, God assures us that he is with us. He never leaves us. That is how God responds to our sin. When we doubt him and try to turn things around and put him to the test, God does not condemn us. Nor does he desert us. He remains faithful, even when we are not. His grace overcomes our sin. His presence is the proof of his grace. There is a difference, however, between the intellectual understanding of God’s promise of perpetual presence, and actually experiencing it. Even lifelong Christians are surprised when they discover this crucial difference between the thought of God’s gracious presence and the reality.
Few have ever described this better than Tim Keller, the late Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. In a famous book he published in 2013 on the topic of faith and suffering, he wrote, “You don’t really know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.” But he wrote that before he had his own first-hand experience with God’s grace in the midst of suffering. 6 years ago this month, as the world was coming to grips with the reality of COVID, Tim Keller published another book called “On Death.” It was a summary of his counsel to Christians who are facing their own mortality and the death of loved ones. Less than a month after this book was published, at the age of 70, Tim himself was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. It shocked him to the core.
On an emotional level, it forced Tim to realize that he, like all of us, had been living in denial of his own mortality. His diagnosis was hard proof that our time here on earth is limited, sometimes far more limited than we know. The day after his diagnosis, Tim began to ask himself the question we should all ask at any age, and every age: “What does God want me to do with the limited time I have left?” As he considered this, Tim came to a profound revelation. His faith had become what he called “a mental abstraction.” He believed in God’s grace and goodness with his head, but not enough with his heart. The experiential side of his faith needed to get stronger or he would not be able to handle what was coming. In other words, his faith had to move from his head to his heart, from his mind to his fingertips. Tim said, “It’s one thing to believe God loves you, another thing to actually feel his love. It’s one thing to believe he is present with you. It’s another to actually experience his presence.”
So, he began to pray with new urgency, with deeper longing. He prayed for healing, of course. He also began using the contemplative prayer techniques that Lisa and I are teaching on Wednesday evenings this Lent. In an interview not long before his death in 2023, Tim described what happened. He said, “When you know you’ve got to have more of God — because there’s really no alternative — to our surprise, there is more of God to be gotten. And you say, why didn’t I find this before? And the answer is, you didn’t feel the same sense of need.” Friends, that is the opportunity that suffering presents to us: the realization of our desperate need for God’s presence, and the comforting reality of feeling it. That is God’s grace.
When we suffer in the wilderness of life, we have a choice of how to respond. We can get angry with God. We can blame him for our pain. We can even try to test him. But that changes nothing, and achieves nothing. It only robs us of the opportunity to experience his grace. The better response – the more faithful response – is to trust that no matter what kind of suffering we are going through, God is right there with us. This is true in our personal life, and in our public life.
The latest war, this time with Iran, is yet another reminder of the violence and uncertainty of this world. We pray for it to stop, and we pray for the suffering to stop. We suffer along with those who are suffering around the world. The question all of us are asking is where is God in all this? God has not left us. He is with us and he wants us to experience his presence. He wants us to draw closer to him. That is the way to peace.
There is no more appropriate time to do this than right now in the season of Lent. Now is the time to confess our sin. Now is the time to repent. Now is the time to trust God’s grace.
May it be so.
