After Jesus was baptized, the Gospel writers say that Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness where He was tempted by the devil for 40 days (Matthew 4:1-11; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4:1-13). During that time, Jesus ate nothing. At this point, the devil attempts to use Jesus’ hunger to distract or to tempt Him. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread” (Luke 4:3). Jesus responded, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone’” (Luke 4:3).
“One does not live by bread alone” (Luke 4:3). Very familiar words … words that were very familiar to the Jewish people even before Jesus spoke them and, in fact, Jesus spoke them for that very specific reason. “One does not live by bread alone” (Luke 4:3). Anyone know who first spoke these words? They were spoken at a time when the Israelites were in the wilderness and were sorely tempted to turn around and go back to Egypt.
The first place that the Israelites came to after they had been liberated from bondage in Egypt was the wilderness of Shur. They only had a few days’ supply of water when they left Egypt and their supply was getting dangerously close to running out. They needed to find water … and soon. At first, it seemed like their prayers had been answered. They came to “Marah” but they could not drink the water because it was bitter (Exodus 15:23). Frightened and justifiably concerned, the people approached Moses and complained. “What shall we drink?”
“[Moses] cried out to the LORD; and the LORD showed him a piece of wood; he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet. Then the LORD made for them a statute and an ordinance and there He put them to the test. He said, ‘If you will listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God, and do what is right in His sight, and give heed to His commandments and keep all His statues, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians for I am the LORD who heals you.’ Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees; and they camped there by the water” (Exodus 15:25-27).
God took care of their immediate problem … the lack of water … by making the waters as Marah drinkable but He also had a long term solution to their problem … leading them to a place that had 12 springs and 70 palm trees … and I love that last line: “they camped by the water” (Exodus 15:27). They went from no water … a dire, life-threatening situation … to one where they were camped by an oasis where they could drink all the water that they wanted. Surely proof that God not only hears our prayers but will answer them in pretty amazing and miraculous ways, amen?
From Elim the Israelites leave the wilderness of Shur and enter the wilderness of Sin. There is no theological significance to the name but it could be foreshadowing of them traveling to Mount Sinai … which was in the wilderness of Sin. Luke makes the point that this happened “on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 16:1) … which was exactly six weeks after they had fled from Egypt and crossed the Red Sea.
Again, the people began to grumble. “If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Exodus 16:3).
It is so, so easy to pass judgment on these people … but can we? We need to put ourselves in their shoes … or sandals, in this case. Yes, they had seen YAHWEH do astounding feats of power that brought the Pharaoh to his knees and forced him to let them go … but in letting them go they had left behind everything. Even if it was miserable, it was familiar and predictable. Now they’re being led by some old shepherd and his brother into unfamiliar territory heading to some “Promised Land” flowing with milk and honey … a place that, frankly, sounded too good to be true and, given the fact that they’re about to run out of food, sounded more and more like a hopeless fairy tale. They had to leave in a hurry in the middle of the night, so they took what food they could … that’s what Moses said God commanded them to do but now they were faced with a very dire and life-threatening situation … again! First it looked like they were going to die of thirst … now it looks like they are going to die of hunger … both very unpleasant ways to die, amen? So their “grumbling” is understandable.
Their lack of faith is also understandable. Who is this “YAHWEH”? They had been slaves for 400 years, surrounded by a powerful pagan people and their many idols. They had to help build monuments and temples to their captors’ gods. There was no Jewish Temple. No priests. No 10 Commandments or Torah. Some old man hobbles into Egypt with a stick in his hand and says that YAHWEH … the Great I AM … the God of their ancient ancestors … Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob … told Moses that He was going to liberate them and lead them to a place they had never heard of … a place more beautiful than they could possibly ever imagine … and, yes, they had witnessed incredible power and miracles … but to what end? To be led out into the wilderness to die of hunger? Who was this “YAHWEH” … and why should they listen to Him? Trust Him with their lives? But that was exactly the purpose that God had in mind … for them to learn to listen and to trust Him.
Notice how the people react to their situation. They don’t go to God to complain … they go to Moses and Aaron. Verse 2 doesn’t say that they complained against God. It says that they complained against Moses and Aaron. They don’t blame God … they blame Moses and Aaron for their poor leadership and they confront Moses and Aaron to complain and hopefully find out if they have a solution to their dire situation or not. When people face drastic situations like these people are facing, well, the bad old days don’t seem so bad after all, and we tend to romanticize the past. “If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread” (Exodus 16:3). I mean, if you’re going to die better to die with a full belly than to die of starvation in the middle of nowhere chasing a promise and a dream, right?
For 400 hundred years, the fate of the Hebrew people was in the hands of pharaohs and political elites … and so, logically, they are still dependent upon the skills or whims of human leaders. Now they are being asked to trust their lives, their fate into the hands of a Power that ignored their pleas and turned a blind eye towards their plight at the hands of their captors and abusers. Yes … they had seen God’s power crush the Egyptians but you don’t mentally go from being slaves to a free and independent people over night. They had been oppressed … used and abused for 400 years … and they carried the physical and mental scars of their experience with them into the wilderness. They had a lot to un-learn and a long way to go in learning to trust this YAHWEH … and God understood that.
When Moses brings the peoples’ complaints to God, God doesn’t rail against their ingratitude or their lack of faith. He uses the opportunity to show them His love and to teach them to trust Him. “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instructions or not” (Exodus 16:4).
When God says that He will “test” them, it’s not a “pass/fail” exam like in school. Like God said, it’s to see if they will trust Him enough to follow His instructions or not. In a way, He is testing their willingness to test Him by trusting Him to provide them, in this case, with daily bread or “manna.”
There is another point to God’s “testing.” The people complain to Moses but Moses is just the channel that God uses to speak to the people. As Moses points out, “Your complaining is not against us but against the LORD” (Exodus 16:8). It wasn’t Moses who forced Pharaoh’s hand … it was YAHWEH’s. It wasn’t Moses’ staff that parted the Red Sea and drowned Pharaoh’s army … it was God’s hand. It wasn’t Moses’ wisdom that turned the bitter waters at Marah sweet but God’s. And every day, it wasn’t Moses or Aaron who would provide the people with meat and manna but YAHWEH … a lesson that would be repeated six days a week for the next 40 years. For 12,480 days, the people would wake up and gather up the manna that the LORD had provided and for 12,480 days they would roast and eat the meat that Yahweh would provide for them around their campfires in the evening … until they reached the Promised Land … a land flowing with good pasture land, abundant fruit trees, and fertile farmland.
God’s plan to foster the people’s trust in Him is deliberate and very carefully planned out. “Gather as much of [the manna] as each of you needs, an omer to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents” (Exodus 16:17). Historians have calculated that an ‘omer’ equals 7 ½ pints. “The Israelites did so,” says the Bible, “some gathering more, some less.” In other words, some people took more than they needed, more than God commanded and others took less but … but … when they weighed what they took … whether it was more or less than the LORD commanded, guess what? Everyone still ended up with an ‘omer’ or 7 ½ pints of manna … two omers … or 15 pints of manna on the sixth day.
Everything goes exactly as God had ordained. Those who tried to hoard manna found that the manna had spoiled and was full of worms. Now … think about that for a moment. If they had “leftovers” it means that they took more than they needed. In other words, they had “leftovers” because they couldn’t eat it all … they couldn’t finish what they had gathered the night before … and they didn’t need it because God would supply them with new manna in the morning. Hoarding was a sign of their distrust. “Sure, God provided us with enough manna for today but what about tomorrow?” And the only way to know if God is going to provide you with enough for tomorrow is, in fact, trusting that He will indeed provide enough for you tomorrow, amen? And so, God boxes them in so that they have no choice but to rely on Him.
Notice that the Bible keeps referring to the people as gathering a double portion on the “sixth day” and not the “Sabbath.” Technically, God has not yet commanded them to observe the Sabbath as a perpetual covenant and a day of solemn rest (Exodus 31:15-16) … but here we see where God’s testing is actually a form of training or preparation … a way of building their trust in God who will one day soon command them to do no work on the Sabbath but will continue to provide for them so that they can rest and be refreshed (Exodus 31:17).
When the people see “manna” for the first time, they exclaim: “Manna?” “Manna” is a Hebrew expression … better yet, a question … that means “What is it?” When they grumble to Moses and Moses shares their complaint with God and God answers their prayers, they don’t even recognize the answer to their prayers when they see it. Moses has to explain it to them. “It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat” (Exodus 16:15) … which is how we have come to know “manna” as bread or “bread of Heaven” and it brings up a point that we should remember. When we pray and it appears like God is not answering us, maybe He is and we just don’t see it or understand it even though it’s happening right in front of our eyes.
The idea was to take the eyes of the people off of themselves … off of Moses and Aaron … off of their circumstances and turn them towards YAHWEH. Give thanks for the meat and manna? Certainly! But also to give thanks to YAHWEH, the source of our daily bread, amen? As I have so often pointed out to you … we put too much faith in our politicians, our scientists and doctors, our leaders, and pastors like me to solve our problems. My role as pastor is the same as Moses’ role was the wilderness … to faithfully, correctly, and consistently point you to our Provider … to whom all our praise is due, amen?
We see more foreshadowing in verse 10. “And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the wilderness, and the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud.” They will see the glory of the LORD again when God descends on Mount Sinai to enter into a covenant with them … a covenant that they will freely enter into because they have experienced God’s providence and care for the past 40 days and are now willing to trust Him to deliver them and to take care of them and provide for them for the rest of their lives and the lives of their children and children’s children … right up to this present day and beyond … a trust and bond that has been proven by God day after day after day as He continues to provide our daily bread, amen?
Something that we need to remember is that this is was as new and as challenging for Moses as it is for the Israelites. It is only later on, when Moses has had time to reflect on the past events of the people in the wilderness that he is able to glean some purposes to God’s actions. In Deuteronomy 8, Moses explains that to people as they are about to enter and occupy the Promised Land: “[God] humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone” (v. 3). Hum … let me repeat that: “[God] humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand” … what? … “that one does not live” … say it with me … “by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. … For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing …. You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that He has given you” (Deuteronomy 8:3, 7-10). God brought them out of Egypt … and provided daily bread for them on the journey … bread that looked like coriander seed and tasted like [pause] … “wafers made with honey”
(Exodus 16:31). How beautiful is that, amen? Everyday God provided them with bread from Heaven. Everyday the manna reminded them that God provided what they needed yesterday and reassured them that He would provide for them tomorrow … but the manna was also a daily taste of where He was leading them … to a land flowing with milk and honey. God is so good, amen?
As they stood on the banks of the Jordan River and prepared to cross over into the Promised Land, Moses reminds them and cautions them:
“Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep His commandments, His ordinances, and His statues, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then DO NOT EXALT YOURSELF, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of slavey, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good” (Deuteronomy 8:11-16; emphasis added).
“One does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 8:3). This is what Jesus quoted to Satan when Satan tried to tempt Him in the wilderness. But Jesus didn’t need to learn what the Israelites had to learn in the wilderness. He already knew that the LORD would provide. The words that God spoke to the Israelites … the words of His promise … the words of His commandments … the words of His covenant … were as sure and as dependable as the manna that covered the ground each morning and the meat that He provided for them each evening. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, Jesus lets Satan know that He intends to rely on His Father’s provision rather than seeking it by His own means. He could have easily turned the rock in Satan’s hand into bread but His purpose in coming was to show US the way to a faith that is utterly confident in God.
Just as Moses had to encourage the people to look past him to God, Jesus had to do the same thing. Just as God provided manna for His people in the wilderness, Jesus provided bread for the thousands who came to hear Him teach and preach about the Kingdom of God. When the people followed Him over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee the next day, Jesus tells them that they are seeking Him out for the wrong reason. “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves” (John 6:26). Like the Israelites who wandered in the wilderness, they were seeking temporary relief from their physical hunger. The bread that Jesus gave them earlier fed their bodies but only for awhile … just as the water that the Samaritan woman offered Jesus at the well could only satisfy her physical thirst and not her spiritual thirst. To satisfy her spiritual thirst she would need the living water that Christ came to offer us and, in order for us to satisfy our spiritual hunger, we would need the spiritual bread that Jesus came to offer us.
“Do not work for food that perishes,” Jesus explains to them. Remember … the manna that the people gathered in the wilderness only lasted for a day. “Do not work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” Joh(John 6:27). When the people demand a sign from Jesus so that they know if His claims are true, pointing out that God gave their ancestors manna in the wilderness, Jesus, like His Father, didn’t rail against them for their lack of faith or understanding. Instead, like Moses in the wilderness, He tries to point them past the miracle of the bread and the feeding of the 5,000 to the Maker of the Miracle itself. “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:32-33) … and like the woman at the well, who asked where she might get some of this living water so that she might never thirst again, the people in the crowd beg Jesus to give them some of this bread from Heaven (John 6:34) … whereupon Jesus explains: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35) … which only confuses the people even more. It’s one thing to walk outside your tent or your home and see manna covering the ground, but what’s He talking about? “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” they murmur and grumble amongst themselves (John 6:52). Again, rather than rail at them and criticize them for their lack of understanding, Jesus tries to explain it to them:
“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. …This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever” (John 6:53-56, 58).
In the midst of the spiritual wilderness that we find ourselves in today, our serenity … our comfort … our confidence comes from the fact that God provides us with our daily bread, amen? He gave us exactly what we needed yesterday … not what we think we needed … but exactly what and how much we needed … and He is doing that for us right now … today … and the thousands upon thousands of days in which He has provided us with our daily bread in the past and taken care of our daily needs reinforces our faith that He will continue to do the same thing today and tomorrow … and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that … amen?
