Is God Not Wonderous

"Then they came to Elim, where there were  twelve springs and seventy palm tree, and they camped here near the water."  (Exodus 15:27)

Hey Gang:  Time to move on from Marah.  Jamie Buckingham in his magnificent book titled A Way Through the Wilderness wrote, "Marah is now a memory as they turned inland, a trek familiar to only Moses.  Close to death they funneled into the narrow wadi between two huge mountains.  No one knows where Elim is.  Chances are it was what is now called Wadi Ferran that even today is a very beautiful oasis.  Exodus 15:27 tell us "It was a place with twelve springs and seventy palm trees." 

A tiny diversion - in the desert there are three sources of water, cisterns, wells and springs.  The Elim Oasis was fed water through springs.  When one visits Caesarea they are awed with the tremendous aqueduct system that was build in the days of Herod; it diverted waters into gigantic cisterns. Masada, Herod's summer home, had cisterns capable of holding millions of gallons of water.  But at best this is a temporary way to store water; most is obtained from wells. The problem is knowing where to dig.  To the Bedouin this is a simple matter.  Most old-time Bedouins can read the desert sands as we read a road map. 

Digging wells was one tough chore.  Think about it for a minute.  It required at least two men, one to dig and line the well with rock; the other, with buckets in hand, to haul the sand from the well and hand down rocks. Well construction was a process going 560 to 70 feet down.  God promised to these 

 pilgrims was that "they would not have to dig wells".  

Can you see the analogies between our physical walk through the wilderness and our spiritual growth? A sign of our entrance into the Promised Land is adequate spiritual nourishment that comes with our covenant relationship to God through Christ Jesus, which requires our digging our well into the Word deep enough to provide adequate water. 

We have had an abundance of water from the skies in the past couple days.  When that happens I have a pond in my yard.  If I place my dependence for my needed water supply on that pond, I would experience a world of hurt in a week or so when it dried up.

 Depending on surface water is very dangerous in our walk with the Lord. David wrote about the spiritual man who "was like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season" (Psalm 1:3).

Sooo,   The point: cisterns nor wells give us a sure supply of water.  Jeremiah warned of this when he wrote, "The people have committed two sins, they have forsaken Me, the spring of living water, and they have dug cisterns that cannot hold water." (Jer. 2:3).