Have you ever made a bargain with God? Have you ever said, “God, just get me out of this and I’ll never ask for anything again!” Or “God, if you help me pass this test I’ll come to church every Sunday for a year!” Or “God, if you get me this job I’ll never call in sick again!” If you have, you’re not alone. But if you’ve kept your side of the bargain, you’re definitely in the minority.
The Israelites had begged God to help them. If you remember your Biblical history, they moved to Egypt some 400 years before when Joseph was Pharaoh’s right-hand man, but the political climate had changed. The Hebrews were enslaved, and then when forced labor didn’t seem to be enough to keep them down, their male children were killed at birth.
Because they were miserable, suffering, and desperate, God appeared to Moses in the burning bush at the beginning of the book of Exodus. “The LORD said, "I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey...” [Ex 3:7-8]
Now, the Bible doesn’t tell us if the Israelites promised to do anything in return for deliverance, but it does tell us that when Moses came to the Israelites and told them what God had said, and performed the signs that showed them that he really did speak for the God of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, “they bowed down and worshiped.” [Ex 5:31] Which kind of implies obedience. But.
God didn’t perform up to their expectations. Before things got better, they got worse. The first thing that Pharaoh did when the despised, smelly, underclass started demanding their rights - and all they asked for at first was to go out to the desert to worship - was to order them to make bricks without providing the necessary materials. So they would have to gather their own straw from the fields, which meant working harder but getting less done. Which gave Pharaoh an excuse to deny their request for time off.
And what did the Hebrew people do? Well, of course! They blamed Moses and Aaron.
Over the next few weeks or months - we don’t know exactly how long this all took - God brought the 10 plagues down on Egypt, each one worse than the one before, in order to show Pharaoh who was really in charge. Well, by the end of all this even Pharaoh knew that the Hebrews’ God was the hands-down winner in this contest. He knew it even though acknowledging the truth threatened everything he lived by, from his authority to his labor force to his pretensions to divinity. And of course the Hebrews knew it as well. If there was still any doubt in any of their minds, it must certainly have been done away with, you would think, by the time they got to the Red Sea.
But no. There on the shore to which they had been led by pillars of cloud and fire, someone turned around and saw the Egyptian armies coming up on them in the distance. And instead of assuming that God had something equally spectacular in mind to get them out of the trap, what did they say? They said to Moses,
Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness. [Ex 14:11-12]
Well, you know what happened. The Red Sea parted, the Israelites passed through safely, and the Egyptian armies were all drowned.
When our text begins, a month has passed since Israel departed from Egypt. They had run out of water a few days before, and complained, and God had provided. The tribes had now reached the beautiful oasis of Elim, filled with abundant springs and palm trees. But they were running out of food. And so what did they do? They complained again. And they started to think about the good times back in Egypt. Remember the good old days, when they had cried out to God for help? Remember the whips of their taskmasters, and the murder of the boy babies? Well, the view from under the palm trees of Elim was a little different.
The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, “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. [Ex 16:2-3]
The children of Israel had learned nothing from their past experience of God. At the first sign of difficulty, they forgot. They forgot how bad things used to be, and they forgot what God had already done. Their first response was to complain, and their second was to look around for someone to blame. Does this sound familiar? Why is it? What does it tell us about human nature?
Probably the most important thing it tells us about ourselves is that we hate change. As the old saying goes, better the misery you know than the mystery you don’t. And the first thing that happens is that our vision starts to blur. The past starts to glow with an unrealistic light. The good old days get idealized and romanticized. The inconveniences, the injustices, the sins and follies of earlier ages disappear. How many of us look back on the 50's, when Father Knew Best and Ozzie and Harriet stayed married for 50 plus years? We never remember that air-conditioning was only for the very rich, and that cancer was a death sentence. We ignore the fact that black people couldn’t vote in large parts of the country and that battered women had no place to go. The past glitters like Atlantic City at night; the hookers and the homeless, the gamblers and the junkies fade right out of the picture.
Part of the problem is that gratitude has a very short shelf-life. As soon as the impact of a gift wears off, we start looking for the next one. How many of your children’s toys get broken or forgotten within days - if not hours - of unwrapping them? How long does it take before they start agitating for the next video game, or Barbie outfit, or CD? How easy it is to take for granted the things we already have, and to become obsessed with what we don’t have.
The second thing that happens during times of stress and change is that people exaggerate difficulties. They weren’t starving! Furthermore, they weren’t going to starve. The tribes had livestock with them. After all, that was one of the reasons the Egyptians looked down on them: they were herdsmen, keepers of sheep and goats. They weren’t big meat-eaters, this wasn’t a matter of not wanting to slaughter animals that they would need in the future. No, they would have had both milk and cheese. Of course with grazing pretty sparse the milk and cheese production would be way down and certainly wouldn’t be enough for the long term, but why were they borrowing trouble? They were upset by change and uncertain of the future, and they dealt with their uncertainty by complaining.
Another thing that this story tells us is that the Israelites didn’t plan ahead. Granted, they hadn’t had time to bake fresh bread for their journey. That’s why they brought unleavened dough. But they did have time to take gold and silver and fine clothing from their Egyptian neighbors, and they certainly could have packed up bags of beans and flour and raisins and other staples that keep; for goodness’ sake, they’d been planning this journey since Moses arrived from Midian! So why didn’t they? Did they need someone to do all their thinking for them? Or could it be that they never really expected Moses could pull it off?
Well, how does God respond? It’s early in the story, and we haven’t seen him lose his patience yet. Except of course with Pharaoh. So he’s gentle with them. He gives them what they want. God tells Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” [Ex 16:4] And Moses tells the people, but not without getting a little dig in first: “Your complaining is not against us but against the LORD,” [v. 8] thus directing their attention back to where it should have been in the first place:
God has only freed the Hebrews from slavery, guided them with cloud and fire, parted the Red Sea, drowned the Egyptians, and provided water in the desert. It’s not enough for them yet to believe he’ll stick around and continue to provide. We are, after all, slow learners. But this time he adds a twist. This time God includes a test in the instructions.
In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.” [Ex 16:5]
God wanted to see if, in return for feeding and caring for them, they would be willing to trust him, willing to obey him. But they weren’t.
God told them to gather only enough for one day, promising to provide for them each day except the Sabbath. But if we read a little further along in the chapter, we discover that they couldn’t even manage that. They tried to get more than they needed, just in case God didn’t come through. But manna has a very short shelf life. By the next morning it was all rotten and maggoty, and they had to throw it out. God built the lesson right into his gift.
But then God adds another twist. On the sixth day, they are to gather twice as much, and this time God says it will last twice as long. God does this so that they won’t have to work on the Sabbath. He’s not unreasonable, you see, he doesn’t give them conflicting instructions. And so most of the people did as Moses told them, and guess what! It worked! While those who did go out and look for manna on the Sabbath didn’t find any.
I could get all metaphorical about this and point out that God still behaves in pretty much the same way. When we try to hang on to something beyond God’s due date, whether it’s a relationship or a job or a program, it turns sour. And when we try to get around God’s instructions, feeding ourselves on our own timetable, we’re not likely to find much nourishment.
But the point of all this is that the test is for the benefit of the Israelites, and the tests that we receive in life are for our benefit. They are designed to teach us how to obey God. That is what it means when God “tests” his people. The problem is, both with the Israelites and with ourselves, is that all too often we turn around and try to put God to the test instead.
These desert experiences are reflected in the NT also.
We see the same kind of miraculous provision when Jesus feeds the 5,000. But like everything else in the NT, Jesus puts his own spin on those desert lessons. He feeds the crowd with food for the body at the same time he is trying to teach them to work for things that last, not for things that don’t. “Do not work for the food that perishes,” says Jesus, “but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” [Jn 6:27] In effect, Jesus is telling them, and us, “by this time you ought to know that God can provide food for your body. Now it’s time for you to learn than God also provides something even more important, and that is food for your soul.”
The whole book of Hebrews explains the parallels between the Old Testament experience and the New Testament experience. Everything that God did for his people in the OT is a shadow of what he has done for us in Jesus Christ, but even with the gifts we have been given, the church is still in the wilderness. This truth is mirrored also in our own individual desert experiences, as God tests us and teaches us, and in congregations, and in denominations. And the grumbling and complaining that God hasn’t done enough for us is just as big a temptation now as it was back in the Sinai desert.
What’s your favorite flavor? Is it exaggerating the present difficulties? Is it idealizing the past? Is it looking around for someone to blame? Is it ignoring your own responsibility both for getting here and for getting out? Most of us are tempted to respond to change and challenges with one or more of these things.
But we mustn’t forget that this IS wilderness. We’re just passing through, and the tests are for our good. God doesn’t want us to get so comfortable we stop depending on him. Absolutely the worst thing that can happen to us, much as we would wish for it, is to have everything we want right here and now. We’d stop traveling, and miss the Promised Land.
We mustn’t judge God’s love for us by the state of our stomachs, or the state of our bank accounts, or by comparing today with yesterday. Given what God has already done for us, why do we look back to the past, wishing for yesterday’s manna, when we know for a fact that tomorrow’s manna will be there when we need it?
One of the problems is that we don’t recognize manna when we see it. The word actually means “what is it?” because the Israelites had never seen it before.
Are we right now in the presence of manna? Is there some gift of God right in our midst that we stare at in blank incomprehension, saying “Manna? Manna? Whaddya mean, manna? I want a cheeseburger!”
Wishing for what we do not have is the surest way of missing what we do have. We may have to go out and gather it, but if we remember God’s instructions, his provision is certain.
