Strike The Rock, And Water Will Come Gushing Out

Exodus 17:6
"Strike the rock, and water will come gushing out"

I guess I never noticed these words before, but they were in my readings for today. How amazing is the tapestry which God wove in our holy scriptures, through dozens of writers over thousands of years.

And yet it all holds together.... miraculously so.

From the ancient scriptures of the Old Testament, we read so many prophecies pointing us to Christ. A few of them are as follows...

Here, one of a gazillion foreshadowings of the Christ to come...
Psalm 118:22
The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;

Here, a mystical foretelling of days to come, and the kingdoms yet to be seen....
Daniel 2:34-35
While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.

Here, a prediction that his disciples would flee at his darkest hour...
Zechariah 13:7
"Awake, O sword, against my shepherd,
against the man who is close to me!" declares the LORD Almighty.
"Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered,
and I will turn my hand against the little ones....


So much for the Old Testament. And of course this is just a small sampling...

On to the New Testament. The Christ finally does appear, and Jesus lives up to these and so many other scriptural prophecies. Among so many things he did and said which confirmed them, he had also these words to share:

John 4:10
Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."

And, of course, the Apostle Paul must have his say too!

(an explicit reference to Exodus...)
1 Corinthians 10:4
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.


And yet. And yet. And yet.

After all these things, most of which I was familiar with... I still never noticed until today the simple hidden message here:

Exodus 17:6
"Strike the rock, and water will come gushing out"

And indeed, that is exactly what happened. The rock (that was Christ) was indeed struck... and living water has been gushing out ever since, just as God promised all along.