Is Testing God Bad?
Many of us who grew up religious were taught not to test God. We were told that if we doubted God’s promises or questioned God’s handling of a situation, that we were like Satan in the wilderness testing Jesus and that God would be very angry with us.
So what do we do with this passage today?
They tested Yahweh, saying, “Is Yahweh among us or not?” - Exodus 17:7
This is the follow up to the situation we looked at yesterday, when God led the people to a dead end, a place in the desert where there was no water. So the people responded with great frustration and doubt and questioning God.
Interestingly, this event in Israel’s history is reflected on at other times in the Bible. It’s helpful to get some of those reflections. In the Psalms, God speaks these words: “I tested you at the waters of Meribah” (Psalm 81:7). So if God tests people then perhaps it’s not universally a bad thing to test, right? I mean, think about it: they are just doing what God has modeled for them!
One way to think about testing is perhaps to change the wording just slightly: from ‘test’ to ‘challenge.’ How does it change your experience of the text to think about God challenging the people (with a really hard situation that they’d need to figure out with God’s help)? How does it change your experience of the text to think about the people challenging God (with hard questions about whether God was always good and always present, given the hardship they were facing)?
Let these things sit in your heart for a moment and invite the Spirit to help you sort through what’s going on for you in it all.