Lesson Plan - OT - Numbers 20

My next LDS primary lesson, on Sunday 15th May, will be on a section of the Book of Numbers from the Old Testament. The LDS Primary Come Follow Me lesson plan recommends focusing on Numbers 12 (where Moses' siblings expressed discontent at what Moses was doing), Numbers 21 (the story of the brass serpent) and Numbers 22 (the story of Ballam, the priest who was asked to curse Moses, but who refused to do so).

I've been thinking about a different take on this lesson, which focuses on a story from Numbers 20. It's going to involve some messy water play...

Photo by Lubomirkin on Unsplash

It tells the story of Moses carrying out a command from Heavenly Father:

Crucially, whilst Moses was instructed to talk to the rock, he instead hit it, thus disobeying HF. The way this event unfolds is in contrast to an earlier, similar episode in Exodus 17, where Moses is instructed to hit a rock, does so, and water emerges.

The question is why did a seemingly small difference in Moses' approach end up having a big difference in the outcome? There is an interesting discussion on Stack Exchange about this, with several commenters thinking that it shows lack of faith on Moses' part. (It also discusses how you could interpret water coming from a rock after it's hit, by reframing this as digging for water in underground acquifers.) This article on BibleStudyTools reaches a similar conclusion.

There's the potential to do some interesting science around this point, where not following the instructions to the letter can result in a significantly different outcome. Anyone who's baked according to a recipe, or done a lab experiment where you have to follow a protocol, will be familiar with this. A1 was asked to think of a situation where doing things slightly differently would result in very different outcomes. His answer was to think about how he might wake up A2 in the morning. Gently shaking him awake could invoke one outcome, whilst <ahem> "farting in his face" would invoke another. 

I spent some time thinking about a suitable science experiment that we could do on this topic. One idea was to use a "no bake" recipe (e.g. from this site with 60 no-bake recipe ideas), where we flip two of the steps. In the end, I settled on a physics experiment from this page on DIYEverywhere.com, on temperature sensitive experiments. We're using experiment 3, which is described in this YouTube video:

The coloured water experiment. Screenshot taken from YouTube video.

In this experiment, the idea is to take two cups and fill them with water, one with cold and one with hot water. A food dye is added to each cup. Then the cups are placed one on top of another, with the top cup being inverted so that the water in each cup is in direct contact. (This part is messy! You need to put a plastic film over the cup whilst inverting it, then slide it out when the cup is in position, but when we tried this, we often got water going everywhere...)

We would expect that the water would mix if we do this, but the result actually depends on which cup is on top!

If you do this in one orientation (warm water on top of cold) then the two colours won't mix, whereas if you do it the other way (cold water on top of warm) then the colours do mix. It's a neat trick that entertained A1, A2 and A3. The reason is that cold water is denser and sinks, so if it's at the top, it will need to mix with the warmer layer underneath. 

I would recommend doing this lesson in a kitchen...  : )

The idea would then be to link this concept back to the spirtual theme from the lesson, where it can be important to follow the steps given to us, otherwise the outcome may not be what we are looking for. Some examples of this include:

• In sacrament meetings, if the blessing prayer isn't spoken exactly right, then it has to be restarted.
• When translating the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith didn't take sufficient care the first time. He was rebuked, and he lost his ability to translate the text for a period of time. (LDS.org page with more details)