During Israel's wilderness journey, the people feared that they would die of thirst. At God's command Moses struck the rock at Horeb, and water came from it so that the people could drink. In Exodus itself the event demonstrates God's patient provision for an undeserving and complaining people. The rock is not explicitly identified there as a prediction of the Messiah.

Paul nevertheless gives the event a distinctly Christ-centered interpretation in 1 Corinthians 10:4, writing that Israel drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them and that "the Rock was Christ." This makes the connection unusually strong as New Testament typology. Paul sees Christ as the ultimate source of God's sustaining provision for His people and uses the wilderness generation to instruct the church. The physical water from the rock preserved Israel's life in the wilderness; Christ provides the spiritual life and sustaining grace of which that miraculous provision becomes an anticipatory pattern.