Acknowledge the Lord for All Good Things (343) - March 28 2026

Focusing on Numbers chapter 20 this week and the incident at the Rock with Moses, Aaron and the Assembly of the Children of Israel. How important it is to be obedient to the Lord's commandments, and be led by His voice within our conscience. The importance of acknowledging the Lord for all good things in our witness to others, especially the lost as well as the saved that are still in the early stages of knowing Him. There is no such thing as chance, luck or coincidence.

This program covers the following Scriptures from the Amplified Classic version (AMPC): 1 Samuel 2:2; Revelation 4:8; Exodus 15:11; 1 Chronicles 16:29; Leviticus 20:26; Leviticus 21:8; 1 Peter 1:15-16; Ephesians 1:4; Ephesians 5:3; Numbers 20:1-13; 1 Corinthians 10:1-5.

Transcript

0:23

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) And a very good day. This is Pastor Marc Whelan with Touch of God. And this week we're going to be talking about how important it is to give glory to our Lord, especially when it comes to witnessing to the lost, to witnessing to those who don't yet know the Lord and don't understand His nature and His character. We have to be able to, as His children, as His sons and daughters, to be able to represent, to re-present Christ and the Father to those who don't know Him. They may know of Him, but they don't know the Lord. Let's start off by looking at the holiness of God. In 1 Samuel 2, verse 2, it says, There is none holy like the Lord. There is none besides You. There is no rock like our God. Revelation chapter 4, verse 8, it says, And the four living creatures, individually having six wings, were full of eyes all over and within, underneath their wings. And day and night they never stopped saying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, omnipotent, who was and who is and who is to come. In Exodus chapter 15, verse 11, Moses and the Israelites are singing, Who is like You, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like You, glorious in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders? 1 Chronicles chapter 16, verse 29 says, Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. Bring an offering and come before Him. Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness and in holy array. Leviticus chapter 20, verse 26 says, And you shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples that you should be mine. Now, obviously, he's speaking to the children of Israel. But later on, we find out that we, the Gentiles, are now a part of the promise. We are engrafted into the promise from the seed that is Christ. And we are now blessed to be children of God, for Christ to be in us, the hope of glory, for God to be in us and for us to be in God. And so who are we to say that we do not need to be holy? We are not exempt from the Lord's expectation that we are holy as He is holy. Why should we be allowed to be unholy? It is against our nature because our nature is now the nature of God since being born again with a new spirit and a heart that's getting healed and conformed to the word of God. As we are transformed by the renewing of our mind, the Lord is doing a work in us. And our soul is being cleansed and our behavior becomes more like Christ's. So Leviticus chapter 21 verse 8, You shall consecrate Him therefore for He offers the bread of your God. He shall be holy to you for I the Lord who sanctifies you am holy. 1 Peter chapter 1 verse 15 to 16, But as the one who called you is holy, you yourselves also be holy in all your conduct and manner of living. For it is written, You shall be holy for I am holy. You see, one of the aspects here is because the Lord needs to be glorified. He needs to be shown that He is the one that does the miracles. We need to represent Christ. We need to represent the Father. In order to represent God, we must also be like Him. So we must be holy as He is holy. Otherwise, the world would not be able to distinguish between those who sin and those who are children of God, children of the light, children of the truth. Ephesians chapter 1 verse 4, Even as in His love He chose us, actually picked us out for Himself as His own, in Christ, before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy, consecrated, and set apart for Him, and blameless in His sight, even above reproach, before Him in love. Ephesians chapter 5 verse 3, But immorality, sexual vice, and all impurity of lustful, rich, wasteful living, or greediness, must not even be named among you as is fitting and proper among saints, God's consecrated people. These are scriptures that reflect the holiness of God and the importance of us as His children, as His believers, as His sheep, being holy also, that we may witness effectively, but also be seen in front of the Lord's eyes as doing our utmost to be holy as He is holy, to be leading a life unstained, untainted by the world, living that righteous life. We are not the righteousness in and of ourselves. We cannot achieve righteousness without being in Christ. But the Lord has blessed us, and so therefore we are the righteousness of God in Christ. We can do nothing without Jesus. It is impossible to do anything good without the Lord having something to do with it, because He is good, and everything good comes down from Him, from the Father of lights, in whom there is no shifting shadow. He is the light. He is full of light, and He is light. He is the Great I Am. Man rejected Him at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden, after He warned Adam and Eve that in the day that they touch of that tree, that they eat of that fruit of that tree, they would surely die. Of course, that's a spiritual death He's speaking of. Yet the Lord still loves man so much that He sent His Son Jesus to suffer in man's place, to rescue man from his sin and eternal destruction. If man chooses his Son Jesus and confesses Him as Lord, and believes that God raised His Son Jesus from the dead, the Lord giving man a new spirit to replace the one that's surely dying. So the earth fell and was cursed because it was under the dominion of man when man fell by eating the fruit of that tree. The Lord we serve regretted He made man, but didn't give up, flooding the earth and saving humanity by the family of Noah, and of course the animal kingdom at the same time. Even while this world has fallen and is unclean because of sin and destruction, the most holy God in whom there is no shifting shadow, no darkness, is able to work with unclean man and cursed earth as recorded in the Old Testament. Unclean man cannot enter heaven without being washed of all sin by Christ's blood. As man confesses his sins and confesses Jesus as Lord, and believes that God raised Jesus from the dead. Romans chapter 10 verse 9 says, If those things happen, we are saved by the grace of God. And yet the great I Am, the holy God of all creation, the Creator Himself, decides to involve Himself with a cursed environment on earth and fallen man, with an initial focus in the Old Testament of His own people, the children of Israel. The Lord charged Moses, with the help of Aaron, to lead His own people out of the captivity and bondage of Egypt. And we see the longsuffering and patience of the Lord on numerous occasions when His chosen people rebel and complain against Him and worship other idols and complain in the wilderness, not putting their trust in Him, even after visible signs and miracles, such as the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire. One such episode of their complaining is recorded in Numbers chapter 20, which we're going to look at today. Starting in verse 1, and this is from the Amplified Classic Version of the Bible. It says, And the Israelites, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people dwelt in Kadesh. Miriam died and was buried there. Verse 2, Now there was no water for the congregation, and they assembled together against Moses and Aaron. And the people contended with Moses and said, Would that we had died when our brethren died in the plague before the Lord. And you can read about what happened in the plague back in Numbers chapter 16. Verse 4, And why have you brought up the congregation of the Lord into this wilderness that we should die here, we and our livestock? Verse 5, And why have you made us come out of Egypt to bring us into this evil place? It is no place of grain or of figs or of vines or of pomegranates, and there is no water to drink. Verse 6, Then Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly to the door of the tent of meeting and fell on their faces. Then the glory of the Lord appeared to them. Verse 7, And the Lord said to Moses, Take the rod and assemble the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and tell the rock before their eyes to give forth its water, and you shall bring forth to them water out of the rock, so you shall give the congregation and their livestock drink. Verse 9, So you see here that the Lord is specifically saying, Take the rod and tell the rock before their eyes, the eyes of the congregation, the assembly, to give forth its water. The Lord did not want Moses to strike it, to smote it. He wanted him to speak to it. Verse 9, So Moses took the rod from before the Lord as he commanded him. Verse 10, And Moses and Aaron assembled the congregation before the rock, and Moses said to them, Hear now, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock? Now right here we see that Moses and Aaron have deviated from what the Lord told them to do. Moses is obviously frustrated and irritated by the behavior of the assembly of the children of Israel. He has had enough of them, and he's saying, Hear now, you rebels. See, there are rebellious children complaining all the time about the lack of this, and eating manna, and all these things. But Moses is saying to them, Must we, myself and Aaron, bring you water out of this rock? When he speaks to the congregation, God is not mentioned at all. Verse 11, And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice. And the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank and their livestock. Interestingly enough, the Lord still allowed for the water to come out of the rock because the Lord loves his children, and he wanted to allow them to drink. He wasn't going to make them suffer because of Moses and Aaron's disobedience. He still allowed his children to drink, and the livestock to drink. Verse 12, And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not believe in, rely on, and cling to me, to sanctify me in the eyes of the Israelites, you therefore shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them. Verse 13, These are the waters of Meribah, Strife, where the Israelites contended with the Lord, and he showed himself holy among them. So in verse 12, we see the punishment, the penalty of disobedience. After all these years of Moses with his brother Aaron leading God's children out of Egypt and putting up with their complaining, numerous times going before the Lord on their behalf and praying for them, pleading with the Lord to hold off the Lord's wrath, such as in the plague and with the snakes and things like this. But yet you see the punishment of disobedience here because God was not glorified. He was not sanctified. According to verse 12, the Lord needed to be sanctified by Moses and Aaron giving credit to the Lord, acknowledging that the Lord was the one that produced the water out of the rock. It was not Moses and Aaron. It was not of their own works, lest any man should boast. So are we giving God glory in all good things as part of our witness to the lost and to the saved that are still growing in their faith and still working on their doubt and unbelief? See, it's not just the lost. We also need to encourage the saved because just because we are born again, immensely incredible as that is, we still need to encourage one another daily in the faith, in the word of God, and encourage them to trust more in the Lord because it is a journey. You see, God said to speak to the rock. Moses hit it twice with his rod. So in his frustration with the people, he disobeyed God. Moses said we, so he took ownership of something he didn't own. He wasn't responsible for bringing water out of the rock. It is almost as though Moses got too confident in his relationship with God that he thought he could get away with not acknowledging God for the miracle. Could pride have come in in this situation? God loves souls. He wants to save them after humanity rebelled against him at the tree in the Garden of Eden. How will the lost know about Jesus unless his children, you and I, show evidence of his goodness so that they can be convinced to be saved because some will not believe without seeing a miracle. That is because the signs such as the gifts of healings, the gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues, these such things are signs for the unbelievers, not for the believers. If you believe in speaking of tongues, you don't need someone to prove it to you. You already know that it's normal in the kingdom of God. But it is for the lost. It's for those who question the gifts that it is a sign so that they can believe. The other thing here is Aaron didn't correct Moses. Aaron should have told Moses in front of the Israelites, Moses, what did you do? Why did you smote that rock and why did you smote it twice? And why did you speak to the congregation in this manner? God specifically told you to speak to the rock so that we could give him the glory for such another miracle as this. That is why the Lord told both of them they will not lead the children of Israel into the promised land. Aaron, by not correcting Moses, was agreeing and concurring with Moses in his frustration. So be careful. If you're standing or sitting beside someone who is a believer, who is teaching someone about the Lord, and you know scripturally they are speaking a falsehood, then you must be obedient to the Lord to correct them in love so that the other person is not deceived. The believer truly may have had good intentions in their heart based on their understanding of Scripture, but if you truly know Scripture, if you truly know what the Lord means by a verse and it gets misquoted or misspoken or misexplained, you must correct the person. If you are beside a believer who is laying hands on the sick and the pain leaves and the believer does not give credit to the Lord, you must immediately correct them and say, we must give credit to the Lord Jesus, for by His stripes this person was healed, by faith in Him alone. And the stripes, the scourging at the whipping post, paid for this person's pain to go, paid for this person's cancer to go. The other interesting aspect of this chapter is when the Lord talks about the rock having its water. It's as though the rock already contained water ready to provide. The Lord did not say, I will provide the rock water as soon as you speak to it. More interestingly than even that is we find out from the letter of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 that the rock was Christ. Verse 1, For I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, that our forefathers were all under and protected by the cloud in which God's presence went before them, and every one of them passed safely through the Red Sea, and each one of them allowed himself also to be baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They were thus brought under obligation to the law, to Moses, and to the covenant, consecrated and set apart to the service of God. And all of them ate the same spiritual, supernaturally given food, and they all drank the same spiritual, supernaturally given drink. For they drank from a spiritual rock which followed them, produced by the sole power of God himself without natural instrumentality, and the rock was Christ. Verse 5, Nevertheless God was not pleased with the great majority of them, for they were overthrown and strewn down along the ground in the wilderness. How were the children of Israel overthrown? They were overthrown by their flesh, desiring the lusts they were tempted with and complaining. When they were frustrated with God, they turned to idols that they felt that they could get an answer from, that they could worship, and they somehow believed these other idols, these golden images, the sin that was in the camp would give them desires and that the reverence of the Lord was not important to them, the fear of the Lord was not important to them. Only when God showed his wrath did they really turn back to God. God chastises those whom he loves, not to force us to love him, but so that we would not end up or continue on this broad path that leads to destruction, Hell, Sheol, Hades. We are blessed to be born again. We are blessed by the grace and mercy of God that we do not deserve any good thing from the Lord. We only deserve what we have done ourselves, which is to set our own feet on the path of destruction because we ate of the fruit that day at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden, according to Genesis chapter 3 verse 6. But the holy God of Israel, the great I Am, he saw to it that his heart would decide to send his son Jesus, who said, Father, it is not my will, but yours be done. It was the Father's works that was done through Jesus on the earth. Like father, like son, the Lord must be glorified. He must be shown reverence. We need to realize that the God of Israel in the Old Testament is still the same yesterday, today, and forever. He has not become less holy. He is still the same level of holiness today, which is all holiness. God cannot be more holy than he already is. It's impossible because he is holy. He is the essence of holiness. He is full of light. He is good. He is great. But he is merciful. His love is bountiful. And he is seeking your heart today. Do not be afraid of his holiness. Have a reverential fear of his holiness, of how great he is. As Peter said, we are to be holy as he is holy. We need to strive consistently every day to be as holy as possible, to keep ourselves away from the lusts and desires of the flesh in the world, to turn the other way when someone is trying to cause us to sin. Speak to them about the discipline of the Lord. Speak to them that they must repent. And if they do not listen to you, if they do not hear you, shake off the dust off your feet and move on. But do not become embroiled in their lifestyle by hanging out with them and not being a witness and bringing them to the Lord by their own choice. Today, Lord, I thank you for your holiness. Thank you, Lord, that we would have a reverential fear of you. Thank you, Lord, that you would allow us to recognize and be more sensitive to your holiness, to bring you credit, to bring you acknowledgement, to bring you glory and what you have paid for us to have in this life. We will give you the glory for the food on our table, for the roof over our head, for the sick being healed, for the dead being raised, for the cancer to be gone out of people's bodies, for people's eyesight to be renewed, for demons to flee out of people's bodies, for people to be sealed with the promise of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Lord, today that people are free. We shall give you the glory for them being free from depression and bondage and captivity. Lord, you have delivered us all out of Egypt. Let us not act like we're still there. Let us give you the glory for you are good and you are worthy of all praise. We bless you in the name of your Son, Jesus. Amen. That is all the time we have for today. Let us be a witness for the Lord this week. Let us give him the glory. Let people know that the miracle in their life wasn't chance, wasn't a coincidence. It was at the hands of the Lord. They may not see him, but he is there. He answers prayer. He is good. He puts on our tables food. He puts on the tables of evil people food. He provides for the just and the unjust, because he is good. He is worthy to be praised. Lord, we glorify your name. Lord, we sanctify your name. We thank you for being the rock in our lives, and we bless you in Jesus' name. Amen. That's all the time we have for today. You can go to our website at touchofgod.world. You can also partner with us, send us a prayer request, and ask us questions about these teachings in the Word, or anything else you have a question on. And until next week, you have a blessed week. Amen.