“At Rephidim, Amalek came and fought against Israel. Moses said to Joshua, ‘Select some men for us and go fight against Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on the hilltop with God’s staff in my hand.’ Joshua did as Moses had told him, and fought against Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. While Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, but whenever he put his hand down, Amalek prevailed.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How does God’s power work? If you are someone who believes His power exists and can accomplish things in our lives, that would seem to be a pretty important question to answer. Sometimes God answers big questions like this at unexpected times. As we take the next step forward in our journey with Israel in this new year, we find ourselves faced with an opportunity to reflect on this very question. Let’s take it and see what we can learn.

Happy new year and welcome back! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year with your family and friends. As much as I enjoy writing each day, I certainly enjoyed a bit of a break myself. It’s been a minute since we were in Exodus, so let’s make sure we’re on the same page. We are working our way through the story of Exodus right now. We have gotten Israel out of Egypt and are making our way with them through the wilderness to Mount Sinai. We’ll arrive there with them in a few weeks.

In between Egypt and Sinai, Israel faced a whole variety of trials. While we only get the snapshots of the journey of three months, those snapshots reveal that most of Israel’s adventures were connected with opportunities for them to learn to trust God more fully. This particular episode is no different. Yet while the other episodes they have faced so far have been primarily internal challenges, this one was decidedly external. And, instead of there being a specific lesson of trust to learn, God offers them more of a general principle.

As Israel was making their way through the wilderness, they were not going through totally uninhabited lands. They were passing through regions controlled by various tribes and nations. In this particular case, the people of Amalek perceived them as a sufficiently significant threat that they launched an unprovoked attack on Israel. This was Israel’s first encounter with warfare of any kind. Remember, they managed to leave Egypt without having to fire a single shot, so to speak.

Well, as with nearly all of Israel’s battle plans in this season of their history, they took a bit of an unconventional approach to things. Joshua (which is our first introduction to Moses’ future successor) is tasked with putting together a fighting force sufficient to meet the challenge that Amalek represented, and to lead them into battle. For Moses’ part, he was going to go up on a hilltop overlooking the battlefield with “God’s staff.” From there, we are told that as long as Moses held up his hands with the staff raised over the battle, the Israelites were winning. Whenever his arms began to droop some, the tide turned in Amalek’s favor.

Through a modern lens, the whole thing feels very gimmicky. From the standpoint of Christianity from this side of the cross, the whole staff thing feels very much like a talisman; the kind of talisman that we are not supposed to use. Now, we are not told that any of these actions were specifically directed by God, but I think we can safely assume His tacit approval of what happened here. So then, why would He allow an approach like this that could potentially lead the people to put their trust in something like a stick rather than directly in Him?

Here’s one thought: God knew that we were going to have a hard time understanding His character and His power. He is just so different from all the other gods we created. We could only think in a single and very much limited set of terms when it came to our understanding of gods and how they operated. He wasn’t (and isn’t) limited like that. We tend to operate on the basis of what we can see and hear and touch and taste and smell. Our senses are a gift from Him, and we rely on that gift pretty heavily. God’s power and activity go beyond merely what our senses can perceive. Trusting in something beyond our senses, though, is hard. So, God had to go slow. He consistently met us where we were, and moved us in the direction He wanted for us to go in a stepwise fashion.

We can see several examples of this across the various stories in the Scriptures. It started back with circumcision. There was nothing magical about that surgical procedure. What it represented, though, was a very much tangible sign that the people who had undergone it belonged to Yahweh. Because it was such a private thing, though, it was intensely personal. No one could look at you and see that you were one of God’s people, but you knew. You knew in about as personal and private a way as anybody could have imagined. You literally bore the mark of it on your body.

From there, God used Moses’ staff like we see here. It was a symbol of God’s power for the people. Yes, there was a chance they were going to trust in it instead of in Him, but they needed a tangible representation of His power in order to get their hearts and minds around its working. So, He used it often. Moses used it throughout the plagues. He used it when they crossed the Red Sea. He struck a rock with it to make water flow. It was the key to their military victory here. It featured in several other episodes as well, each time as a stand-in for God’s power so that the people could see what was happening and have trust in Him.

After the staff was the Ark of the Covenant, the temple, Jesus Himself, and finally the Holy Spirit. Each step in this process took us more and more away from a specific physical object and in the direction of taking God on faith and as the unlimited Spirit that He is. The Holy Spirit was the final gift in this regard. Through the Spirit, we have God with us all the time, dwelling in our very hearts, and giving us the direction, strength, wisdom, and power we need to follow Him faithfully and well.

The point of each of these different objects is the same. We need to trust in God’s power to overcome what lies before us, not in our own. Moses made sure that Israel understood that their military victory here was rooted in Moses’ staff’s being raised into the air. In other words, they weren’t the ones who were the source of their victory. Not even Moses himself was the source. God was. As long as they trusted in Him, they would continue to enjoy that victory because His power was more powerful than any other powers that might be arrayed against them. Interestingly, and rather directly to the point here, one of Israel’s greatest military defeats as a nation was when they took the Ark of the Covenant and used it as a talisman rather than trusting in the power of the God it represented. As the editor of 1 Samuel makes very clear, God left them on their own when they did that, and their defeat was pretty thorough.

This same principle is in play in our lives today. When we trust in our own power and what we can accomplish using our own resources, we are going to be limited to that. Now, it’s true that there are some people with a lot of power and resources who can accomplish an awful lot, but even they have limits eventually. And for the rest of us, we run into our limitations pretty quickly. But God’s power doesn’t have such limits. We won’t do things in the same way, and our victories with Him may not look like they will when we do things our way, but they will be victories all the same. When our trust is in Him, we cannot lose. Even if we seem to lose in this life, we’re operating on a much larger scale than just this life. So, as long as we are following Him and doing things His way, our ultimate victory is assured. As we get started on this new year together, let’s make sure we are trusting fully and only in Him for the adventures that lie ahead of us.