Snack Schedule

6/14 Sue (Notes)
6/21 Allie (Notes)
6/28 Amy Acobacey
7/5 Sung
7/12 Jess Hong
7/19
7/26 Jen Ko (Notes)

Jehovah Rapha week 2

Context of Marah, the bitter water:
Exodus 15  (reference:http://www.crivoice.org/biblestudy/exodus/bbex21.html)
God had just delivered Israel and destroyed the Egyptians by means of His control of the water in the Red Sea.  Then Moses leads the Israelites into the desert and they go for three days without finding water.  Finally they came to some water and their hopes skyrocketed - only to be dashed by the bitterness of the water. It was undrinkable. The Israelites named the place "Marah", which means "bitterness."  When the Israelites came to this bitter water grumbled against their leader Moses. Moses in turn cried out to Yahweh. Yahweh showed Moses a piece of wood which Moses promptly threw into the water. Immediately the water was made sweet and the Israelites were able to drink it. Moses then led them to a place called Elim which had twelve springs and seventy palm trees.

Journaling Activity:  Has there been any bitter water (context: Exodus 15) in your lif this week?  It can be drops here and there or an entire river.  If there has, I believe this is an answer to prayer, that God is granting to you a real life practice session to know Him as your Jehovah Rapha.  When you came upon your bitter water, what was your response?

--------THINGS TO REMEMBER------------
Who brought Israelites to the bitter water?  GOD
What did the Israelites do when they came upon bitter water?  They grumbled and blamed Moses
What was Moses' response:  He led His people to God


Bitter circumstance drove Israel to grumbling and Moses to prayer.  Where do they drive you?

2 Corinthians 4:18

Warren Wiersbe wrote

The people went from rejoicing to complaining!  It is easy to sing when the circumstances are comfortable, but it takes faith to sing when you are suffering.  God tests us in the everyday experiences of life to see whether we will obey Him.  He is able to change our circumstances, but He would rather change us (Philippians 4:10-13)

This is the mistake Israel made at Marah.  Because their eyes were not on Jehovah (and they literally should have been since He was there in a pillar of fire by night & smoke by day), they grumbled and blamed God's appointed leader Moses for the bitter water.  When God surely and wisely leads us to a "Marah experience" our response is a telltale indication of where our eyes are.  When they are not on the Lord, we grumble loudly and blame our wife, our employer, our friend, or our government.  Who have you blamed this week?

Our perception of Marah, our response, makes the water taste different. The water became "Marah" AFTER Israelites grumbled and complained.




Why do God bring us to bitter water?

To test the genuiness of our faith


Where do we go in times like this, when we are at this bitter water?  Remember- God is one who brought the Israelites to the bitter water, and HE is the one that made the bitter water sweet- by the log


Where are our eyes set on?
ON HEALING:

When our eyes are focused on ourselves, rather than having an understanding of what God desires, we may be interpreting "Healing" as something that WE desire to see; that is not a proper understanding of "HEALING"








When you come to Marah, the bitter water, cry out to Jehovah Rapha and then cling to the Tree He made available at Calvary

Intro to "The Lord Who Heals" - Jehovah Rapha

What is the Progressive Revelation of God's Names?

Genesis 1

El Lohim - Creator- He created you for His glory & you are His workmanship created for good works in Christ Jesus

Genesis 2

Jehovah - I Am that I Am - see Exodus 3:1-14  (Covenantal God)

Genesis 14

El Elyon - God Most High - Sovereign & In Control of every event in your life, all filtered through His fingers of love & designed to conform you to the image of His Son

Genesis 15

Adonai - Lord, Master, Owner for you are not your own but bought with a price

Genesis 16

El Roi - God Who Sees All your trials & afflictions. Angel of Jehovah appears

Genesis 17

El Shadai - God Almighty - All Sufficient & able to complete His good work in you

Genesis 22

Jehovah Jirah - God Will See & Provide the sacrificial offering

Exodus 3:14

Jehovah - the great I Am Who is anything & everything I will ever need

Exodus 12

Passover Lamb - Redeemed by the blood of the lamb

Exodus 15

Jehovah Rapha - God your healer of all your diseases

What is the context for the revelation of Jehovah Rapha?

What just happened?
Exodus 12:7, 11, 23, 27

God sees Israel, God provided the passover lamb and saved His people through the lamb

How do John, Paul and Peter explain the Passover Lamb?
John 1:30, 1 Corinthians 5:7b, 1Peter 1:18-19

John - Takes away the sin of the world
Paul - He's been sacrificed
Peter - Without blemish or fault

What was Jehovah Jireh's next provision in Exodus 14?
Exodus 14:10, 13-14, 31

Crossing of the Red Sea - God fighting for His people.

How did Israel respond to Jehovah giving them victory over Pharoah?
Exodus 15:1-3, 11, 17, 21

Gave praised and worshipped God
With their mouth, praised God

How does faith relate to worship? By Bob Deffinbaugh


(1) The Israelites failed to see the relationship between the affirmation of their faith in their worship (Ex 15:1-21) and the application of their faith in their daily walk (Ex 15:22-26). Israel had just proclaimed her faith in God as her warrior (Ex15:3), but she was unable to trust in God as her "Waterer" (Ex 15:22, 23, 24, 25, 26). That God could handle a problem with the water at Marah should not come as any surprise. After all, God had delivered Israel and destroyed the Egyptians by means of His control of the water in the Red Sea. The winds (which the song describes as coming from the breath of God, v8,10) caused the waters to part. God was able to make the waters congeal, so that there were walls of water on both sides of the Israelites (cf. Ex 15:8). God caused the waters to close in upon the Egyptian army, drowning them all. If God could deal with the waters of the Red Sea, surely He could be trusted to deal with the waters of Marah. Israel should have been able to apply the faith she affirmed in the “Song of the Sea” to her dilemma at the waters of Marah, but she did not.

Lest we become unnecessarily perturbed at the Israelites for their lack of faith, and become a little proud of ourselves, let me suggest that the problem which Israel illustrates is also one of the greatest problems of Christians in every age, including our own. We often fail to apply our faith in God, resulting from one event, to another event which is virtually identical. For example, the feeding of the 5,000 (Mk 6:30-44) should have taught the disciples to trust in the Lord Jesus to feed the multitudes, and yet shortly after this great miracle, the disciples failed to apply their faith to the matter of feeding the 4,000 (Mk 8:1-10).

When we gather to worship God, we do not sing the “Song of the Sea” but we do sing many hymns and choruses which express our faith in God. We sing, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and then go our ways fretting and worrying about the petty details of our lives, as though God was not faithful at all. We sing, “It Is Well With My Soul,” but when some little irritation comes along, our faith flounders. We sing, “O, for a Thousand Tongues,” and then, when someone makes fun of our faith, we are tongue-tied and cannot find any words to say concerning our faith.

The point is simply this. It is a great deal easier to affirm our faith in public worship than it is to apply our faith in our daily walk.* Here is the real crunch. Here is where the rubber meets the road. It is not that we need to worship less, it is that we must apply in our daily walk those truths which we affirm in our worship. Just as God led the Israelites to the waters of Marah, so He leads us in such a way as to give us ample opportunity to apply our faith, or at least to reveal our lack of faith.

One of the contributing factors to our failure to apply our faith in our daily walk is that we tend to create false distinctions between those areas which are sacred (church, public worship) and those which are secular (work, daily living). The result is that we think of our faith as relevant to our “devotional” activities, but not to our daily activities. It is my contention that God distinguishes between those matters which are holy and those which are profane, but not between those matters which are sacred and those which are secular. A more careful look at the Law of Moses will reveal that Israel’s faith was to govern and guide them in the minute details of their (secular) lives.

(2) Not only did Israel fail to apply their faith to their situation at Marah, they failed to even see the problem as being spiritual. In the text we read that the Israelites protested against Moses, not against God (v24). They demanded that Moses produce water for them, they did not cry to God for water. It is my contention that they did not see their circumstances as demanding a “spiritual” solution, but only as demanding a “secular” solution. At least when the Israelites were trapped between the Egyptian army and the Red Sea they cried out to God for help (before they began to grumble against Moses, cf. Ex 14:10, 11, 12). Here, at Marah, they immediately confronted Moses, and ignored God altogether.

Ironically, the Israelites forgot that the pillar of cloud was still guiding them (cf. Ex 13:21, 22), and that God Himself was present with them in the cloud. If they were wrongly led, God led them wrongly by the cloud.* Imagine the protests of the Israelites, while the cloud hovered over the waters of Marah. The Israelites failed to understand that if God promised to bring them safely out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan, any obstacle which would hinder or prevent them was one with which God was concerned, and which He could overcome. They failed to see bitter water as a matter about which God would be concerned, but He was concerned because water was necessary to preserve His people.

At the Red Sea, Israel should have learned that God was able to overcome any obstacle* (such as the Red Sea, which He parted) or any opponent* (such as the Egyptians, which He drowned in the Red Sea—the obstacle). Thus, while the Israelites sang that God was going to overcome their opponents (the Canaanites), they did not grasp the fact that He would also overcome all the obstacles to their entrance into Canaan (such as the bitter waters of Marah).

How often we fall into the very same trap.* We view God as being concerned only with the big problems of life, those which appear to be spiritual. But anything which hinders our growth, our sanctification, or our ability to do what He has purposed is a matter about which He is concerned, and which He is able to overcome. Frequently, when we encounter a problem in our lives, we do not even consider that it is something about which God is intimately concerned. We immediately begin to turn to secular solutions, without seeking God’s solution.

Jehovah-Jireh : The Lord Will Provide

What does 1 John 4:19 teach us? We love because He first loved us.
(He is the initiator. We are the responders.)

Likewise...in Genesis 22:2
Abraham (the father) loved his son first and Isaac responded with love that naturally lead to him TRUSTING and OBEYING his father
We see this as Issac "bowed", "bended his knee" in submission and LAID down and let his father bind him when he noticed there was no lamb for the sacrifice
because he didn't question his father's love for him.




Although God has the right to lead and IS the leader..
if WE don't give Him the right to lead, He cannot lead us!
Image: Someone we trust and love (husband, parent, friend) grabs our arm and tries to lead us somewhere..
We would follow.
But if it's a stranger, we would not follow!
Thought this was the perfect picture for an example..Nooree does not look like he knows where he is even going in this picture..and we are in some creepy looking woods..but because I know and trust him..I still follow....(although it looks as though I prob shouldn't in this case..but unlike our husbands, God always knows where He is taking us ..hhaha)
Do we know and trust Him??



Why do the sheep lay down?
Psalm 23:
The sheep that knows the Shepherd will lie down when He tells them to, even though everything around them looks like they shouldn't rest or lie down, because they trust the Shepherd.
They don't have peace in the circumstances, but in the one who leads them.
And as the sheep learn to follow the Shepherd, they learn to TRUST and OBEY more and more.

Definition of Forebearance: Patience, endurance, abstinence, self-control, abstaining from the enforcement of a right.
It was in the SMALL areas of life that Abraham practiced and learned to bow his knee to God..
so, when it came to the BIG thing..He was able to do it.
Because he knew that it was GOOD for him!

*Our role as parents are to teach our children to be humble before the Lord and bow their knees to God as we also bow our knees to God.

Gensis 22:1 says God tested Abraham. Why does God test us?

• 1 Peter 1:6-7 - That the genuineness of our faith would be shown and bring praise, glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

• Exodus 20:20 - So that we would learn the fear of the Lord, given the gift of the fear of the Lord and so that we won't sin.

• Deuteronomy 8:2 - To humble us (bow our knee to Him) and for us to see what's really in our hearts.

• Deuteronomy 8:16 - To humble us and to do good for us in the end.

• James 1:2-3 - To produce steadfastness.

"Faith is shown to be real when it's tested." - Wonmin Kim (hehe)

Hebrew word for "worship" is shachah or proskuneo in Greek which means to bow self-down, crouch, fall down flat, and humbly beseech.
Abraham said he and Issac were going to go worship and come back down..
He was saying that they were going to "bow down" and submit to God's perfect will.

It's hard to put our hope in God in things that we don't understand and follow Him in areas..
but Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us to not to lean on our own understanding and trust in the Lord!

We need to learn how to submit and bow down to our earthly authority figures (husbands, parents, etc..) even when they are wrong (except when they are sinning)..and it will make you stronger and we receive blessings from that as well.

Some good questions from our sisters:

• What are the "Issacs" in your life that you can't lay down before God?

• Can we prioritize God over the many little "issacs" in our lives?