The Man Who Talked to God Face to Face Lost His Temper on a Rock

He has heard the sentence from three different people and one of them was somebody who loves him.

It is always said in the same tone, which is a tolerant one. It is not an attack. It is delivered the way people deliver a fact about the weather in a place they live.

That is just how he is.

And he has started using it himself. He heard himself do it at a table about a month ago, saying it about himself in advance, half joking, and he watched it work, because it takes the pressure out of a room to name the thing before somebody else has to.

The problem is what a sentence like that does when it becomes a description of your species rather than a description of what happened.

Because if that is what he is, then there is nothing to do about it. There is only management, and being pleasant about it, and getting ahead of it at tables.

The meekest man in the book did it in public

There is a scene in Numbers that people find hard, and it is hard because of who it happens to.

The nation has no water. They complain, at volume, again. God tells him to speak to a rock.

And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly. (Numbers 20:11, King James Version)

He hits it. Twice. And the verse before has him saying, must we fetch you water out of this rock, which is a sentence said by a man who has had enough.

This is the same man the book describes like this:

Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:3)

Above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.

Both of those are in the same book about the same person, and the book does not treat one as canceling the other.

You are not summarized by the worst four seconds on record. Numbers keeps the meekness and the striking of the rock in the same collection about one man, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old pair of verses do something to a sentence said at a table.

The word for it is on a list called fruit

There is a list in Galatians and the last item is the one this turns on.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance. (Galatians 5:22-23)

Meekness and temperance, both on the list.

And the list is called fruit. Fruit is grown. It arrives on a plant that did not have it a season ago, and nobody looking at a bare branch in February concludes anything permanent about the tree.

Which is the exact difference between a description and a diagnosis. A diagnosis says what a thing is. A description says what is currently on it.

You are looking at something described as grown rather than as inherited. Galatians 5 puts meekness and temperance on a list of fruit, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as the one it grows on.

Paul does not add an exception clause

There is a sentence in Corinthians that people quote so often it has gone smooth, and the useful thing is what is missing from it.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

All things are become new.

There is no clause carved out for temperament. He does not write, except for the parts that are just how somebody is.

He had the opportunity. A sentence that sweeping would ordinarily attract a qualification from a careful writer, and he was a careful writer, and he did not put one in.

You are not the exception a sentence like that would have needed. 2 Corinthians 5 makes the claim without a qualifying clause, and it is His Spirit who makes an unqualified sentence go sharp again.

The finishing is credited to somebody else

There is a sentence in Philippians about who completes things, and it settles what a man is responsible for.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

He which hath begun.

The starting is credited outside the man, and the performing is credited to the same one who started it.

Which means the honest answer to that is just how he is, is not, no it is not. The honest answer is that the changing was never on his account in the first place, and that he has been evaluating his prospects using the wrong balance sheet.

You are not the one who has to finish this. Philippians 1 names who began it and who performs it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described everywhere else as the one doing the actual work.

And there is a warning about repeating it yourself

The most quietly dangerous part of this is not what other people say. It is what happens when a man starts saying it himself.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. (Proverbs 18:21)

They that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

That is not a superstition about words. It is an observation about what happens to a person who repeats a description of himself until it stops being a report and becomes an instruction.

A man getting ahead of it at a table, half joking, is doing exactly that, and he is doing it in front of people whose picture of him is being updated in real time.

You are not required to keep saying it about yourself. Proverbs 18 names the tongue as having that kind of power in both directions, and it is His Spirit who makes an old proverb reach a man who has been getting there first.