Something Less Than Human

“Welcome to the human race.”

Doctor Who S5 E3, ‘Victory of the Daleks’ (2010)

A robot called Kismet, designed to simulate emotion-conveying facial expressions in order to test human responses to them. Thanks to Polimerek on Wikimedia Commons; licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en.

Well, it seems to have taken me ten years, but I’ve finally cracked why that scene in ‘Victory of the Daleks’ annoyed me so much. In case you haven’t got quite such an encyclopaedic memory of New Who as to be able to recall the particulars of the scene I’m talking about from that sliver of quotation I gave you above, allow me to recount it properly.¹

The Doctor and Amy are in World War II Britain, where the Daleks have been passing themselves off as weapons invented by a Scotsman called Edwin Bracewell for reasons I won’t go into here: suffice it to say that, as usual, their plans are dastardly and shall cause a great many deaths if they’re allowed to get away with them. In particular, poor Edwin is, as it turns out – unbeknownst to him – not a human being at all, but a robot created by the Daleks to give themselves a plausible backstory. Worse than that, actually, he’s a walking, talking bomb that will send the entire earth reeling into another dimension if it detonates – which, at the point we enter the scene, it’s going to do in less than thirty rels (about thirty-six seconds).²

The Doctor tries to deactivate the bomb by getting Bracewell to recall his (admittedly stolen and artificially implanted) human memories, in the hope, I suppose, that if he can demonstrate his humanity hard enough, his robotic body will be convinced of it, and leave off being a bomb instead of a person. Bracewell remembers how his family ran the Post Office by the ash trees. He remembers how his parents died of scarlet fever and the grief felt like a physical wound, worse than that even. He also remembers fighting in the trenches in the previous world war.

“Good,” says the Doctor, as the countdown continues to tick onwards. “Remember it now, Edwin. The ash trees by the Post Office and your mum and dad, and losing them, and men in the trenches you saw die. Remember it. Feel it. You feel it because you’re human. You’re not like them. You’re not like the Daleks.”

“It hurts, Doctor,” sobs Bracewell. “It hurts so much.”

“Good. Good, good, brilliant. Embrace it. That means you’re alive. They cannot explode that bomb because you’re a human being. You are flesh and blood. They cannot explode that bomb. Believe it. You are Professor Edwin Bracewell, and you, my friend, are a human being.” But when he looks, the countdown is still going. The Doctor is at a loss: “It’s not working. I can’t stop it.”

Amy steps in and tries a different tack. “Hey, Paisley. Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn’t?”

“What?” says Bracewell, perplexed.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” continues Amy. “But kind of a good hurt.”

“I really shouldn’t talk about her,” Bracewell tells her.

“Oh. There’s a ‘her’,” infers Amy, her tone intrigued.

And it’s at this point that the countdown starts ticking back down the other way – a fact which is not in any way lost on the Doctor, who immediately lends his own efforts to Amy’s plan. “What was her name?”

“Dorabella,” Bracewell replies.

“Dorabella?” the Doctor echoes. “It’s a lovely name. It’s a beautiful name.”

“What was she like, Edwin?” Amy asks Bracewell.

“Oh, such a smile,” remembers Bracewell. “And her eyes – her eyes were so blue, almost violet, like the last touch of sunset on the edge of the world. Dorabella.”

And with that the bomb is deactivated. No dimension-jumping for Planet Earth today, thanks to Amy’s line of questioning and Dorabella’s violet-blue eyes. And do you know what the Doctor says to Bracewell next? “Welcome to the human race.”

 

Like the last touch of sunset on the edge of the world. Poetic, huh.

Because apparently that’s what fundamentally distinguishes a human from a robot, or a Dalek, or a walking, talking bomb. Not, as it turns out, the capacity to feel nostalgic for the ash trees by the Post Office, or to love someone to the point where loss feels worse than a physical wound, or to inherently recognise the sanctity of human life that makes war so horrific. Nope, we’re obliged to conclude that what makes a human human is the capacity to fancy people. The capacity, furthermore, to fancy a reasonable number of different people, or the odds of one of them being off-limits would have been too low for Amy’s particular approach to be warranted. What if Bracewell hadn’t ever fancied someone he knew he shouldn’t? Whoops, well, looks as if he’s not quite human enough to stop the bomb going off after all. Sorry, Earth.

To be fair, it’s not exactly news that our culture is constantly telling us that being sexually active is a necessary component of being a normal, functioning, fulfilled human being. I think we see this most strikingly in the way that not being sexually active is put across as deeply weird, as pathetic or pitiful, as a fault to be determinedly corrected or ‘cured’. I’ll hand you over to Sam Allberry to illustrate the point:

Culture sees the kind of singleness we’re talking about as Christian believers as being laughable. So let me give you two examples of that. The first is the movie The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, and the title of it tells you, this is a comedy – because the idea of being forty years old and a virgin is comical. And I’m not wishing to spoil the movie, but it’s been out for, like, ages, so if you haven’t seen it by now … the ‘happy ending’ is when, thankfully, at last he loses his virginity and joins the rest of grown-up humanity. There’s another movie – I’ve not seen this one, but it’s called Forty Days and Forty Nights, and the tagline for the movie is: one man is about to do the unthinkable. What’s that going to be? No sex whatsoever for forty days and forty nights. Forty days and forty nights, that’s a month and a half, right? I’m forty-three years old, someone can tell me how many units of forty days and forty nights that is, and what on earth does that make me? If that’s ‘unthinkable’, to go for six weeks without sex, then we are some kind of – I don’t even know where we begin with how unthinkable we are.

That’s an extract of a talk from a Christian conference called Single Minded (which, though based in Australia, for some reason seems to book exclusively Brits as its keynote speakers). I’ve been listening to some Single Minded talks this week,³ and I thought Mr. Allberry did a really solid job of presenting a Biblical view of singleness and debunking some of the lies we often get in our heads about it. The point he made that I personally found most helpful was this: God gives people sexual desires not so that those desires might be completely satisfied through sex, but to make them aware of the greater, spiritual desire that is completely satisfied through union with Christ, for which sex is only a metaphor. In this way, not having sex is not a waste of your sexuality. On the contrary, what would be a waste of your sexuality is not realising, regardless of how much sex you’re getting, that your sexual desires are only a fragmentary picture of the great love between Christ and his bride. Not being stirred to worship by the reality behind the metaphor – that would be a waste of your sexuality.

A similar point was made by Ed Shaw in his keynote speech for a different installation of Single Minded. I say ‘similar’; it wasn’t the same. Now, I have massive respect for Mr. Shaw and his work – I seem to recall saying some rather nice things about his book in a previous blog post⁴ – but I massively disagreed with the direction in which he took this point. Let me quote him:

The power of our sexual feelings are [sic] needed by us, are essential for us, all human beings, to appreciate the power of God’s love for us; to appreciate the passion of God’s love for us; to appreciate how hard it is when we walk out on him in response to his passionate love, when we reject that love and wander away. If you want to be convinced of this, spend some time in Ezekiel 16. Read it some time soon, and recognise that God is using sexual imagery to communicate his love for his people, really powerful sexual imagery to communicate his love for his people. And recognise as you read it that you can only feel the full power of that passage, the full passion of God’s love, because you are reading that passage as a sexual being, who gets these feelings, who gets what God is on about. If you didn’t have a sexuality, if you didn’t experience sexual desire yourself, you would read that passage and be slightly baffled by it. You wouldn’t get the enormity of God’s love for you. The gift of sexuality, the gift of sexual desires, helps us appreciate his love for us, in passages like Ezekiel 16. It’s not just a one-off part of the Bible: we see that in the Bible book of Hosea; we see that again and again in the Bible book of Song of Songs, where God’s love for his people is portrayed as a husband’s love for his wife, and where some of the most graphic sexual imagery I’ve read is there in the Bible – only to be understandable to me because I’m a sexual being, with sexual desires. We can feel, we can only feel the full power of God’s love because he has given us sexual desires. If we ever ask him, Take away these sexual desires, take away my sexuality – if we said that, if we felt that, we’d be asking him to take away, I would be asking him to take away one of the things he has most used to help me get, feel, how much he loves me, which would seem to be a stupid thing to do. So next time you just feel the power of your sexual desire – you know those times when sexual desire sort of takes your breath away and overwhelms you for a moment, and you’re sort of left reeling a bit, next time that happens, just reflect that God’s love for you is like that all the time.

“You know those times…” he says. No, I reply to the screen. Literally cannot relate to that at all. And heck, I’m only, like, further towards the ‘asexual’ end of the spectrum than most people seem to be; there are some human beings out there who legit do not experience any sexual feelings, not even heavily abstracted, depersonalised ones like mine.⁵ If you don’t believe me, try talking to someone who identifies as asexual and see how she likes it when you tell her you know what she’s capable of feeling better than she does. But according to Mr. Shaw, experiencing sexual desire is something which is needed by us, essential for us, all human beings, to appreciate the power of God’s love for us. So what about those of us who are less sexual by nature than he seems to think is necessary, then? I suppose we’re doomed to never truly be able to understand God’s love for us. I suppose if we’d been in Bracewell’s position, the Daleks would have succeeded in propelling the earth into another dimension. I suppose we must be something less than human.

 

Apparently this Dalek is just on permanent display at a bookshop in Charing Cross. Amazing. Thanks to the anonymous photographer on Wikimedia Commons; licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en.

In other words, while Mr. Shaw’s position avoids the Forty-Year-Old Virgin error of suggesting that it’s necessary to be sexually active in order to be a proper member of grown-up humanity, it falls instead into the Victory of the Daleks error of suggesting that it’s necessary to be sexually desirous in order to be a proper member of grown-up humanity.

You’ll have already gathered that I don’t in any way dispute that God does use sexual imagery to communicate his love, and indeed invented sex for that very purpose; nor that it’s good to use whatever we experience in the way of sexual desire to reflect on God’s love. What I dispute is that it’s impossible to grasp God’s love to the extent that he would have us grasp it if we don’t relate to what it is to desire someone sexually. I argued last week that the number-one-priority thing to pray for fellow-believers revealed in the Pauline epistles is increased knowledge of God’s love. That’s basically our first and highest aim for Christian living, because everything else springs out of it. Are people who lack the requisite amount and form of sexual desires in some way excluded from pursuit of that goal by the God who has called them to know him? Now that’s what I’d call unthinkable.

Of course, that wasn’t what Mr. Shaw was arguing. He was arguing based on the premise that all adult human beings, by virtue of being adult human beings, know what it’s like to be overwhelmed by sexual desire for someone, and I would hope that, with that assumption disproved, he would adjust the rest of his argument accordingly. What, then, about passages like Ezekiel 16? Well, I’ve read Ezekiel 16,⁶ and frankly, I feel a bit insulted at the idea that, just because I don’t personally really know what it feels like to sexually desire another person, I ought to be ‘baffled’ by the imagery in play. I have such a thing as an imagination, after all. I have learned to empathise with all sorts of feelings that I don’t experience personally, by extrapolating out from feelings I do experience personally. That’s something we all, as adult human beings, learn to do. In fact, isn’t that a better criterion for what it is to be human, in emotional terms, than experiencing sexual desire – the will to understand the feelings of others? Doubtless each of us will find that particular bits of scripture make particularly vivid sense to us because of our personal experiences, but that doesn’t mean that we’re doomed to never truly understand the other bits, especially if we’re well situated in a community of believers with varied experiences who can help us to understand better. In sum, the fact that God uses sexual imagery to describe his love does not automatically mean that it is a requirement to directly relate to those feelings in order to comprehend what he’s on about. After all, he also uses the image of being a Father to us his children: are people who don’t have children excluded from the opportunity truly understand God’s love because they haven’t for themselves experienced that sort of love? Unthinkable.

So Mr. Shaw is wrong that sexual desires are a necessity to help human beings appreciate God’s love. But he’s not wrong that they’re a gift to help human beings appreciate God’s love. Indeed, are they not all the more precious a gift because they are not a necessity? In giving people sexual desires, God is not merely granting them the bare minimum of what they need to know and understand his love; he is showing additional generosity on top of that. I don’t imagine it feels much like an extra-especially-generous gift in those breathless and overwhelmed moments – y’all actually get those? Wow – but that part of Mr. Shaw’s argument stands, and indeed, stands all the firmer.

What I’m urging, then, is that we shouldn’t correct one error only to fall straight into another. Our culture is wrong that it’s necessary to be sexually active in order to be a proper adult human being, and it’s also wrong that it’s necessary to be sexually desirous in order to be a proper adult human being. The manner in which sexual desires manifest themselves in you, and/or the manner in which they don’t, is irrevelant to your ability to know and love God. If he has called you to himself, then he has placed no limit on your capacity to know him better. If he has called you to himself, then he has called you to devote your whole self, including your sexuality, whatever it looks like, to loving and serving him. And that, in the end, is how we access the greatest, fullest version of what it is to be human: by becoming more like our Lord.

Footnotes

¹ And if you want to start work on said encyclopaedic memory, all episodes are currently available on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006q2x0/doctor-who.

² I love little world-creation details like different units of time: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Rel.

³ Here they are, should you feel inclined to do the same: https://www.singlemindedconference.com/past-events.

⁴ His book is called The Plausibility Problem and I think it’s well worth a read: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/18437/the-plausibility-problem. The previous post I mentioned it in was ‘The Trouble With Romance’s Monopoly on the Vocabulary of Affection’, back in April 2017.

⁵ I’m not going to make this post even longer by doing the bit where I explain my sexuality, but long story short, I’m what the world calls ‘demisexual’, and even though I’m none to keen on labels in this sphere, I have to say it’s been quite a relief to know that there’s a word for my weirdness.

⁶ So can you; here it is: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ezekiel+16&version=ESVUK.

John Piper is Wrong About Masturbation

Mindy:        Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s my masturbating time.

Eleanor:      When isn’t it?

The Good Place S1 E12, ‘Mindy St. Claire’ (2017)

 

All right, not my cleverest cover picture ever, but I challenge you to think of an appropriate one for a post like this.

Well, with a title like that, I should probably kick off by clarifying that there are a heck of a lot of things I think John Piper is thoroughly, and thoroughly helpfully, right about. He’s pretty undeniably a very astute and very godly chap, and I’m as much of a Desiring God article junkie as any evangelical of my age. I draw attention to this issue, then, not as an example of the common pattern but as a notable exception to it. Nor is Mr. Piper by any means the only one to hold the view he does on this topic, but given that he’s articulated said view very neatly on a very influential platform, that seemed a good place to start.

This is what John Piper says about masturbation:

Is masturbation wrong? Let me address the issue mainly for men. I cannot imagine sexual orgasm in the loins without sexual image in the mind. I know there are nocturnal emissions, which I regard as innocent and helpful, but I doubt that they are ever orgasmic apart from a sexual dream that supplies the necessary image in the mind. Evidently God has constituted the connection between sexual orgasm and sexual thought in such a way that the force and pleasure of orgasm is dependent on the thought or images in our minds.

Therefore, in order to masturbate, it is necessary to get vivid and exciting thoughts or images into the mind. This can be done by pure imagination or by pictures or movies or stories or real persons. These images involve women as sexual objects. I use the word “object” because in order for a woman to be a true sexual “subject” in our imagination she must in reality be one with whom we are experiencing what we are imagining. This is not the case with masturbation.

So I vote no on masturbation. There may be other reasons why it is wrong. For now I rest my vote on the inevitable sexual images which accompany masturbation and which turn women into sexual objects. The sexual thoughts that enable masturbation do not help any man to treat women with greater respect. Therefore masturbation produces real and legitimate guilt and stands in the way of obedience.¹

All right, he’s talking about men. And maybe, if I were to meet with an onslaught of evidence of sufficient volume and reliability demonstrating that his claim is true of men, I might be prepared to believe it. But I can tell you right now that it’s not true of women. At least not this woman, nor others she knows.

I’ve said before that the world’s label for the form in which my sexual inclinations tend to manifest is ‘demisexual’.² Long story short, nobody in the entire world is romantically appealing to me until we’ve had a lot of conversations about things that matter and he’s shown that he gets me. Erōs, for me, is conditional on philia; the pink heart of the Sims 2 relationships panel (‘crush’) is conditional on the double green smiley faces (‘best friend’).³ Anybody who falls outside that parameter is automatically unattractive; so, due to other reasons, are many who fall inside it, and so right now, there’s nobody at all whom I actually fancy. But that’s not to say I don’t have a sex drive. I want to have sex; I just don’t want to have sex with anyone specific.

Now, on one level, this makes me really lucky, because there are some kinds of sexual temptation that are just not even on my radar: I’m never going to be tempted to sleep around or have a one-night stand or even to entertain lustful thoughts about some celebrity or other. On another level, though, you can probably see the natural conclusion towards which my natural inclinations incline. Masturbation is an ideal solution to the demisexual problem, precisely because it does not require the reference point of any particular individual. For the demisexual, it is perfectly possible to achieve sexual pleasure in the loins without a sexual image in the mind, and in actual fact, the introduction of any specific image or character into the imagination would rather ruin the whole thing. Envisioning romantic contact with a particular individual human is weird and gross and unpleasant; masturbation is tempting because it’s a site of sexual satisfaction that’s free from the need for romantic contact with a particular individual human, real or imagined.

And in this way, John Piper’s entire argument about why masturbation is wrong collapses to the ground with one blow. Leaving … well, leaving what, exactly? If we’ve nullified the one reason we had to call masturbation a sin, can we even be sure that it is?

I once had a lengthy conversation in a pub with a Christian who reckoned it wasn’t.⁴ If I remember rightly, she appealed to Matthew 5:28, the bit about how looking at a woman lustfully counts as committing adultery with her. Based on that principle, she argued, the sinful thing about lust is that it’s an offence against its object; the object of a lustful thought has not consented, cannot consent, and if what takes place in the mind is to be reckoned as if it had taken place in reality (a sobering thought, to be sure), that makes lust essentially a kind of mental sexual assault. Masturbation is different, she continued. It’s not any kind of attack on anyone else, but rather a way of getting to know your own body, which is important for people – in particular women – to feel able to do, especially since things of a bodily and sexual nature – in particular of a female bodily and sexual nature – have often been disdained as sordid and taboo in the past.⁵

There was much there that I was ready to agree with. The point about Matthew 5:28 and the nature of lust rang true. I certainly concur that historic suppression and contempt of female sexuality is something to be resisted. But instinctually, the conclusion that masturbation isn’t wrong didn’t sit right with me. I needed to give the matter more thought.

Of a certainty, the sin of masturbation is not lust. Lust is an offence against its object; masturbation requires no object and so entails no such offence. But still, if we’re arguing that the proper context for sex is between a man and a woman as husband and wife, then masturbation does still take sex out of its proper context.

Because of this a person shall leave behind father and mother and adhere to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, and I say (this) with regard to Christ and the Church.

Classic bit of Ephesians 5 quoting Genesis 2 there.⁶ The ‘one flesh’ thing is clearly about sex, and what Paul then says is that marriage and sex (which is, ultimately, the one thing that distinguishes marriage from any other sort of relationship) are a ‘mystery’ representative of Christ and the Church. By calling it a ‘mystery’ he tells us that we’re dealing with something with a hidden meaning: a metaphor or type whose true significance is only known by divine revelation.⁷ Marriage, and marital sex, is a type of the relationship between Christ and the Church, an imperfect prototype or preview, a picture or stage-play of the real thing. For this reason, to engage in sexual activity of any sort outside that context is to break the type. And God is really not happy about people breaking types, even when they don’t understand them. Take a look at Numbers 20:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Take the staff, and gather the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock, before their eyes, and it shall give its water. And you shall bring out for them water from the rock, and give drink to the congregation and their cattle. And Moses took the staff from before the LORD, as he commanded him. And Moses and Aaron gathered the gathering before the rock, and he said to them: Hear now, O rebels; from this rock shall we bring out for you water? And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, and much water came out, and the congregation drank, and their cattle. And the LORD said to Moses and to Aaron: Because you did not believe in me, to hallow me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this gathering into the land which I have given them.⁸

Note the deliberate placing of ‘as he commanded him’ after Moses took the staff, not after he rebuked the people and struck the rock twice; the latter actions don’t come under the category of ‘as he commanded him’. And we know that disboedience in itself warrants severe punishment – but blimey, isn’t it striking that this episode is the one on whose account Moses and Aaron (both of them; the second-person verbs here are plural) are excluded from entering the Promised Land? And indeed, it continues to be mentioned as such until their deaths. You’d have thought that if anything was going to get Aaron banned from the land, it would have been that whole golden calf business back in Exodus 32, but no: it was this. Why such a big deal?

Well, in 1 Corinthians 10:4, Paul explicitly identifies the rock from which the people drank in the desert – ‘the spiritual rock following them’ – as Christ.⁹ The rock was a type of Jesus. And by the time we get to Numbers 20, we’ve already had one episode where the rock was struck to bring forth water,¹⁰ just as Jesus was struck once for all the sins of his people and brought forth streams of living water welling up to eternal life.¹¹ That time, God told Moses to strike the rock. This time, he told him only to speak to it. Because in terms of the typology, to strike it again was to re-crucify Christ. Moses and Aaron wouldn’t have been aware of the type, but in disobeying God they broke it, and the punishment was severe.

Returning to the matter at hand, then, I very much suspect that one reason why the Torah prescribes such severe punishments for sexual sin is because sexual activity outside the proper paradigm amounts to type-breaking. There may be other sins involved, sins of lust or theft or betrayal, but even if none of those necessarily apply in the case of masturbation, the issue of type-breaking does. Marital sex is a type of Christ and the Church; to pursue sexual pleasure in the absence of an appropriate partner, then, is, in terms of the typology, to sever Christ from his bride, to demand the blessings brought about by the union while spurning the union itself, to throw aside the hope we have of being with our Lord as his beloved forever and ever.

Is it really as significant, as terrible, as all that? I think so. Then again, I think most sins are more significant and more terrible than we generally realise. And if this is an area in which you’re struggling, O righteous and much-beloved sister or brother in Christ, I say this not to condemn you but to provoke you to fight. The stakes are too high to drift into complacency. Tell somebody about the nature of the temptation you’re battling; get that person to check up on you as often as need be. Set boundaries to avoid tempting scenarios, if you can. Most importantly, pray and pray and pray, because it’s God who achieves your sanctification; you stand no chance in your own strength. (God knows I’ve learned that from experience as well as from scripture.) And preach the gospel to your weak and battle-bruised soul, that God gives strength to stand and grace should we fall, that Jesus was struck once for all and has once for all purified us from all our sins, that all transgressions shall be forgiven human beings provided they acknowledge the power by which Jesus achieved what he did¹² – and that that same power now dwells in us to enable us to live holy lives. You’re not alone, and you’re never too far tainted for forgiveness to find you; and you’ve been freed from your slavery to sin, and by grace through faith you’ve been made capable of conquering and killing your former captor.

John Piper is wrong about masturbation. The sin of masturbation isn’t lust, much as it’s possible that lust and indeed any number of other sins might be involved in it; the sin of masturbation is type-breaking. We are blessed that the mystery, the hidden meaning, of marriage and sex has been revealed to us; let’s strive to treat that mystery with the reverence due it, rather than twisting and breaking it for the indulgence of our flesh. In this as in all sins, adelphoi, confess to your comrades, rely on your Captain, and fight.

Footnotes

¹ What I’ve quoted constitutes most of the article, but if you want the introduction and conclusion as well, here it is: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/missions-and-masturbation.

² See ‘More Conversations with my Internal Hopeless Romantic’, under May 2018 in my blog archive.

³ If I seem to be spouting gibberish at this point, ‘The Sims 2 and C. S. Lewis on Friendship’, under September 2017 in my blog archive, should help to clarify.

⁴ Said Christian blogs at Christians for Feminism, https://christiansforfeminism.wordpress.com/. I don’t agree with everything on there, of course (not a blog exists that I agree with everything on, even my own), but it’s definitely worth a bit of your time. Try ‘Queen Vashti and the Power of Women’, from August 2017, to kick off.

⁵ Sincere apologies are due if I have misrepresented my colloquary’s position in any way. The conversation was some time ago and, you know, I wasn’t taking notes.

⁶ Do check it out in context: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+5&version=ESVUK.

⁷ The complete list of instances of the word ‘mystery’ in the New Testament, for your perusal and conclusion-forming: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=SBLG|strong=G3466&options=GVUVNH&display=INTERLEAVED.

⁸ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=num+20&version=ESVUK.

⁹ Again, whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+10&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ Back in Exodus 17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ex+17&version=ESVUK. That took place at Rephidim, which was then nicknamed Massah and Meribah; the events of Numbers 20 took place at somewhere called Meribah. Same place? Same rock? Surely it must be.

¹¹ I here allude to John 4:14.

¹² And I here allude to Mark 3:28-30.