Intro
One month in the wilderness and the Israelites are hungry, without food. That wasn’t in the travel brochure when Moses freed us from the Egyptians. Now our feet are tired and our legs weary. Sand and stones irritate in our sandals. Snakes and scorpions infest the ground we walk. Death looms large while we ache for food.
And so stomachs growled and the people grumbled. They cried out, “What poor leaders we have! Is Moses really God’s man for us? How can he be when everything is going so badly? This is his fault. He brought us out here to starve in the wilderness.” And so the people grumbled.
Main Body
We are no different. The New Testament Israel, the Church, has also grumbled in her wilderness wanderings. We grumble, collectively and individually, when we don’t get our way. When we don’t get what we want, when we want it, in the way we want it, we grumble. When life gets difficult or disagreeable for us, we grumble.
Many of us don’t remember our Egypt, when God rescued us from our house of slavery and brought us to journey toward the Promised Land. Most of us were but babies at the time we made our exodus, when God led us through the Red Sea of baptism and declared us His chosen people. It was then that He said, “I am the Lord, your God.”
Yet, like Israel of the Old Testament, we still have a strong attraction for the stew pots of slavery. That’s our old inherited, sinful nature. True freedom frightens the sinner. Living in absolute dependence on God is scary. Life seemed easier in Egypt--and certainly a lot more pleasurable than wandering in the wilderness.
Yet going back to Egypt would mean spiritual and eternal death. And so we need to be warned whenever we hunger for the Egyptian menu. We need to be warned when we want to become a pagan and live a life that mocks God, living in license instead of true liberty, greedy to wallow in the world’s filth instead of God’s holiness. We were not made alive in Christ to live such a life.
Make no mistake--we are not yet in the Promised Land! We are still making our way in the wilderness. That’s why life is still so hard. We’re still between the Red Sea of baptism and the Promised Land of the resurrection. It’s a time of testing and growth, when God calls us to trust in Him and to cling to His word and not in ourselves. But in our wilderness, God still comes to us to nourish and nurture our faith, to shape and strengthen us. It’s where God disciplines us in the art of being free.
In the Old Testament, God let His people get hungry in the wilderness. He let them feel the emptiness, the deep inner pang. He let them grumble. But He didn’t let His people starve. For they were His Israel, His people. He was committed to them. He promised to take care of them. He heard their cry, grumbling although it was.
And so God still fed them, even amid their grumbling. Every morning, God provided a thin layer of a flaky substance that covered the ground. That was their bread in the wilderness that He gave them.
That bread was unlike any other. It looked white, like coriander seed; it tasted like wafers made with honey. “What is it,” the people asked. In Hebrew, they said, “Man hu?” What is it? “It’s the bread the Lord has given you to eat.” What is it? Man-na. That’s what it is: bread from heaven, from the hand of God.
Manna was a gift from God. But as with all gifts from God, He force-feeds no one, no matter how hungry he might be. You didn’t have to eat this manna, this bread, if you didn’t want to. But in the wilderness, the alternative was death.
God’s gifts are received in His way, in the way God gives them, at the times and the places He chooses to give them. Every morning, the manna appeared on the ground after the dew dried up. If you were lazy and didn’t feel like getting up in the morning to gather your manna, you wouldn’t find any in the afternoon. The sun’s heat would have melted the manna by mid-morning.
If you got greedy and gathered more than you or your family needed that day, you were in for a foul surprise. The manna had no shelf life. The next morning, it would stink and be wriggling with maggots. It was daily bread; there was no hoarding. The manna was renewed every day, just like our Lord teaches us to pray for daily bread.
The only day that manna kept overnight was the sixth day. On the sixth day, God provided manna that lasted a day longer than the other manna during the week. And so the people gathered twice as much, because the seventh day was the Sabbath day, a holy day to rest in God’s Word. They weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath; it was their day off. If they decided to go out and gather manna on the Sabbath, there wouldn’t be any.
Some tried; they tested God’s Word. They tried to keep some manna overnight, but the results were revolting. They tried going out on the Sabbath to look for manna, but none was to be found. They learned that God means what He says and says what He means. His Word is true. Receive God’s gifts in God’s way, and you will receive what He wants to give you. If you try to get God’s gifts in the way of your own choosing, you won’t. And if you go hungry long enough, you will die.
We try as well. We are lax and loose with God’s Word, bending His mandates to suit our own agendas, our felt needs, our culture and circumstances. We want grape juice instead of wine. But that’s our wishes and not God’s Word. We want entertainment instead of repentance. Entertainment is fun, repentance isn’t. We seek a heavenly Burger King, where we can have it our way instead of God’s way. We want choices, options, and alternatives. We prefer a cafeteria line, where each person can delight in his own interpretations, where we can pick and choose from what we like and leave behind what doesn’t suit our religious taste buds.
But that’s not God’s way. Manna was Israel’s wilderness diet for forty years. The manna ended with the first harvest of grain in the Promised Land. But for forty years, it was the same-old, same-old, boring bread from heaven, day in and day out, six days a week, year after year, for forty years!
How boring! Can’t God get creative and spice up the diet. It was monotonous. Not surprisingly, the people grumbled about that--just as we grumble about repetitive liturgies, hymns that actually teach us something, or sermons that confront our sins a bit too strongly. In case you haven’t noticed, variety isn’t the spice of God’s feast. It’s a steady diet of manna, bread from heaven. It was back then, and so it is today.
In the end, everyone in Israel had enough to eat. No one had too much; no one too little. God was good and gracious and generous. His people were not always happy, they usually grumbled, but were always fed. They learned to trust the God who brought them out of Egypt. They learned to take Him at His Word, to receive His gifts, to pray not only with their lips but also with their lives: “Give us this day our daily bread.” And they learned that “man does not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
Jesus is manna for the wilderness. He is the bread the Father sends to feed you, to nourish you, to fill you, to strengthen you on your pilgrimage from baptism, through the wilderness, to the Promised Land of the resurrection into eternal life. He is your Food. Jesus didn’t come down from heaven to deliver bread. No, He came to be your bread, to be your Bread of Life. He came to give His life that you may feast on Him and so live.
Jesus is the Bread of Life. He said, “The one comes to me will never go hungry, and the one who believes in me will never be thirsty.” What happens when you eat? When you eat bread, you unlock and absorb all the nutrients and energies that are stored in the bread: the nutrients of the soil, the energy of the rain and the sunshine, the vitality of the grain. All that is taken in becomes yours when you eat bread.
To believe in Jesus, is to feed on the Bread of Life Himself. To believe in Jesus, is God’s work in you by His Word and Holy Spirit. To believe in Christ, is to feed on His life and death. It’s to unlock and absorb all the blessings and benefits of His incarnation, of His perfect life, of His innocent death, of His victory over death and the grave, and His power over death and the devil. All that becomes yours through faith in Jesus.
So where is this heavenly manna, this Bread of Life to be found? Where do we gather our daily bread of life? It’s as near as the manna on the desert sands in the wilderness. It is as near as your Bible; open it and read it. It is as near as the Church, where the Word is preached; come and listen. It is as near as your baptism. It is as near as the pastor who absolves you. It is as near as the Lord’s Supper of bread and wine, Jesus’ body and blood. That’s the way God set it up for His New Testament Church. And so that’s where and how He feeds you.
Conclusion
We can grumble because we find God’s ways boring just like the Israelites found manna to be boring. Yes, we can grumble--but we would be sinning just like the Israelites of old! For we are to delight in the ways God comes to us and feeds us, not wish for something else. Wishing for something else comes not from faith, but from unbelief.
And so it is here, what Jesus wants to give you. It is here in His Supper, where we get an even deeper sense of what it means that Jesus is the Bread of Life. In the bread, Jesus comes and gives us hidden manna (Rev. 2), heavenly bread, His own body--born of Mary, broken on the cross, raised from the dead, ascended and reigning over your sin and death. His true body given into death for you, He gives to you as bread.
What is it? “It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat.” “This is my body, given for you.” Come and eat. For you do know what it is--Jesus’ body and blood given for you for the forgiveness of sins. And where there is the forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation. Amen.
