1 Corinthians 10:3-4

3, 4. All… same The same baptism, the same spiritual meat, the same spiritual drink were shared by all. And all shared the same faith. The people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord and his servant Moses. This emphatic repetition of the same spiritual state of all deserves a more marked attention than has usually been bestowed upon it. Israel was now the complete Church, in which all had the same faith, baptism, and, consequently, the same regeneration. Yet the large majority of them apostatized utterly and totally, and under divine wrath their carcasses strewed the wilderness. Here not the bare possibility of apostasy is affirmed, but its actual reality. The racers all start in the same Christian race alike. The Israelites all start alike through regeneration for the promised land. Yet they fail of both the earthly and the heavenly Canaan.

Spiritual meat… spiritual drink Of which the manna and the water from the smitten rock are the suggestive similes. Like the bread and wine of the sacrament, the manna, the water, and even the rock, are all emblematical of the body or blood of Christ. Hence all Israel partook not only of the manna, but of the spiritual meat of which the manna was the emblem.

Spiritual drink The water of life, of which the water from the smitten rock was an emblem.

Spiritual Rock… Christ Hence it is not the rock smitten by Moses that St. Paul calls the spiritual Rock; but Christ, typified by the smitten rock, is the real spiritual Rock, of which they all did drink. Dr. Hodge and most other commentators involve themselves in inextricable confusion by making Paul call the material manna water, and rock spiritual.

Rock that followed them Rabbinical tradition affirmed that either the rock smitten by Moses, or the water flowing from it, followed the Israelites through all their journey from Rephidim to Canaan. If, as Dr. Hodge interprets, it is the material manna, water, and rock, that Paul means, then it follows conclusively that Paul endorses the tradition as true. And Alford not only carries the physical interpretation through, but he affirms that it is violence not to agree that Paul actually affirms the truth of the tradition! But when Paul tells us that the Rock was Christ, it is inadmissible to make him say that the material rock, or the stream from it, followed them.

That Christ was the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the angel-Jehovah, has ever been a scriptural maxim in the Christian Church. Dr. Hodge well says: “Our Lord said, Abraham saw his day, for he was before Abraham.

John 8:58. John says, (John 12:41,) Isaiah beheld his glory in the temple; Paul says, the Israelites tempted him in the wilderness, (1 Corinthians 10:9;) and that Moses suffered his reproach. Hebrews 11:26. Jude 1:5 says, the Lord, or (as Lachmann, after the ancient versions and manuscripts, reads) Jesus, saved his people out of Egypt.” Hence there was a rock and a stream that followed Israel all their journey through; but that rock was not the rock of Horeb, as the rabbins fancied, but Christ himself.

Schoettgen quotes a Jewish writer thus: “There was a rock, shaped like a beehive, globular, and it rolled itself and went with them in their journeyings. When the camps stopped at their stations, and the tabernacle stood still, this rock came and placed itself in the threshold of the tent. Then came the princes, and, standing near it, said, Spring up, O well, etc., (Numbers 21:17,) and it sprung up.”

Dr. Wordsworth says, that as there were clouds to rain manna all their journey through, so there were rocks (genetically, rock) to supply water.

“He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink as out of the great depths.” Psalms 78:15. “He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out; they ran in the dry places like a river.” Psalms 105:41.