The life God gives He sustains.
That is the simple, basic truth for which evidence is supplied in the next two episodes: the gift of manna, and the provision of water. The manna will occupy us in this chapter, the water in the next. God will have it that we enjoy, not life merely, but life abundant. He not only gives us being; he gives us well-being.
The key verse is Exodus 16:12 (said to them in the desert, remember): "At twilight, you shall eat flesh, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread: then you shall know that I am Yahweh your God." ... "I am Yahweh." In the study of God's name we saw that that phrase is a formula which always heralds a fresh revelation of God. His name means: "I am what I will reveal myself to be," and in episode after episode, the revealing goes on.
In Egypt He has shown Himself to be Saviour and Redeemer, Who delivers His people into a whole new life. The episode at Marah revealed Him to be our Healer (15:26, "I am Yahweh, your Healer"). Now He is revealed as our Sustainer. Because He has fixed His love upon us, and because He is GOD, the Redeemer and Creator, we can trust Him for everything: for bread - real honest-to-goodness daily bread - as well as for the deeper spiritual sustenance of which bread is the symbol.
For forty years God sustained His people marvellously in a desert land.
Note on Miracles:Something has to be said somewhere in the course of these studies about those mighty works of God which are so characteristic of the Exodus narrative - the miracles (though the Bible prefers to call them signs and wonders).
I take the view, unashamedly, that all these things happened exactly as the Scriptures record them. Unless that view is taken, then it seems to me that they are emptied of any worth or meaning they might have for faith. Unless God did what it is said was done, then no basis in truth or fact is supplied at all to encourage us to trust Him.
The Exodus narrative does not read like parable or allegory, it reads like documentary. The Bible does at times use parable and allegory to convey truth; they are legitimate literary devices for doing so ... and no-one used them better for that purpose than our Lord Himself. The judgment we make about the sort of narrative we have at any given point in the Bible has to be a literary judgment, of course, and rules can be applied to distinguish one sort from another, chief among them being whether details in the text are historically verifiable. Details of the Exodus narratives are. They are written as fact, not fancy. They leave us in no doubt that God is revealing His presence and His power by His deeds - real deeds in real life. They are not invented tales which can only tell us what notions about God men of old spun out of their imaginations.
For myself, I have no difficulty in believing that God can do such things as bring the plagues on Egypt (and lift them), and part the waters of the sea, and sweeten bitter waters and supply manna in the wilderness, and all the rest. If He is the Creator, then He is creation's Lord. And I find it no harder to believe that nature can respond to His will, than that the bit of nature which is my body - and of which He has made me lord - responds to my will. I snap my fingers, for example: the mere exercise of my will produces an event in nature - the bit of nature which is my body. Why should it seem incredible that the mere exercise of God's will should produce events in nature (over a wider field of nature, of course)? Nothing is impossible to God.
But having said that, there is no need to go further than the Scriptures themselves go ... as you do if you see nothing but the supernatural in all of it. There is an intriguing blend of natural and supernatural elements in all these deeds of God.
• The plagues that afflicted Egypt were a natural feature of life in that land, quite familiar in that part of the world;
• the waters of the Red Sea were said, quite plainly, to have been parted by a strong east wind which God made to blow all night, as the plague of locusts had been lifted by a strong west wind.
• the bitter waters at Marah were sweetened, not purely by Moses' prayer of faith, so to speak, but by throwing into them a tree which God showed him.In line with all this, manna is a known natural phenomenon in the Sinai Penin-sula. As Werner Keller records in his book 'The Bible as History', "In good years, the Bedouins of Sinai have been known to collect up to 4 lb per head in a morning - enough to satisfy a grown man's hunger." ('The Bible as History', Hodder & Stoughton, p. 31)
That is not to say that there is no miraculous element at all in the Exodus narrative; there is. The natural occurrence of manna in the Sinai region, even today, can by no means explain how its supply in those days so exactly matched the needs of so large an assembly, nor can it explain how the manna fell in six-day cycles so regularly for forty years. That happened by the Word of the Lord.
There is, as we said, a blend of natural and supernatural elements in all these signs and wonders, and it is wrong to ignore either. When God works miracles, He does not just brush nature aside. It is truer to the Biblical view of miracles to say that God makes nature serve Him than to say that He over-rides its laws altogether. The laws by which God 'works' nature when He does what we call miracles may be higher laws than any we have yet perceived (spiritual laws included, not merely scientific laws); but it does God little credit to suppose that He can only get done what He wants done by 'cheating' on nature.
This should be said because it has a bearing on the way we strive to exercise our faith. If we recognise that there is this blend of the natural and the supernatural in the way God works (the touch of God on things familiar) we shall be protected from two extremes of error to which Christians are prone - in these charismatic days especially.
One is to suppose that you have witnessed an act of God only when it defies all rational explanation; and the other is to suppose that God only ever works within the natural order of things, so that it is a mistake to look for anything that can be called a miracle at all. The truth lies between the two. To say, for example, that healing is divine healing only when it happens in response to the prayer of faith, without benefit of medication or surgery, is simply nonsense. God is just as present in our hospitals as He is in the place of prayer - and as busy.
The realm of nature is His Creation, and His instrument, therefore. But so is super-nature His Creation and His instrument, and it is a great foolishness to imagine that we can say in what proportions God must blend them in any given circumstance. I get equally worried by the Christian for whom everything is special and marvellous as I do by the Christian for whom everything is routine and ordinary.
Now back to the Exodus narrative. The salient points of ch. 16 may be identified under four headings: The Quarrel they Had, The Provision God Made, The Response God Wanted, and The Witness they Received.
The people have been on the march a month now, and their complaint to Moses suggests they had had to bring in rationing: "In Egypt we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. You've brought us here to kill us all with hunger."
They were not literally starving, notice. The diet was getting monotonous and the helpings were no more than adequate, but as yet, only the threat of hunger disturbed them. They had today's bread. It was tomorrow's they feared for; and having no eyes for God, either in their today or in their tomorrow, they shouted, "Stop the world - we want to get off!"
Their gripe was not just with Moses - it went deeper than that. "Would that we'd died in Egypt," they said, as though you or I were to say, when the going gets rough and nothing is to our liking, "I wish I'd never become a Christian at all." They wished they had never started, wished they had never agreed to be God's people and put their lives in His hands in the first place. All this self-discipline and self-denial made them want to go back on their commitment. Do we know the feeling? That is why Moses and Aaron said to them (v. 8), "Your quarrel is not with us, it's with God."
Of course, the people did not openly blame God for their difficulties: they said it was Moses' fault. But Moses knew that what he had done, he had done in obedience to God. So the people's quarrel was really with God.
Over years of pastoral experience, I have become persuaded that this is an insight we greatly need to recover. I have met many folk who have a quarrel with life. They do not openly blame God; they blame their wives, or their husbands (or their lack of one or the other!); they blame their jobs, or their bosses, or the work-mates they are stuck with; they blame their in-laws, or their health, or their lack of education ... anything! When you press them, so it becomes obvious these accusations are hardly fair, they cling to their bitterness just the same. They say in the end that "it's life," or they "never got the breaks they needed," or "it's the way God made me." Then is when the truth begins to show through. More often than not, I believe, there is no cure for them until they recognise that it is God they blame really; it is with Him they have their quarrel. They are afraid to admit that, even to themselves. To tangle with God seems dangerous, if not blasphemous, to them, and they cannot bear to face the possibility that that is really what they are doing. But only when they face it, and are reconciled to God, will their bitterness be healed.
Our circumstances have God's consent to be as they are. He knows that the frustrations under which we fret are just the right raw material with which to fashion our growth in faith, and grace. We say of our situation: "It won't do; it's got to change." But God is saying to us (if we would listen), "No, my child. It's you who won't do - you must change."
Whether we realise it or not, the sword of our complaint, when we lash out blindly with it, cuts through the screen of circumstance and pierces God Who stands hidden behind that screen. And it is when we see the wounding our bitterness inflicts on Him, and understand how He suffers to bear with us, because He will not give up on us, it is then that we find the cure of it. In His wounds, we find our healing ... the wounds we inflict, which He suffers out of love for us.
And that, in the end, is the only way our wounds are ever healed.
We sing it cheerfully, "He's got the whole world in His hand." But do we really believe it? Because if we do, then He has in His hands the bit of our world that we are complaining about so bitterly; and if in answer to our prayer He does not change it, it is because the one thing not yet fully in His hand is our heart. Not my situation perhaps, but I must change ... and that change must begin in my attitude to God.
Once it does begin, life moves forward again.
Had I been the father of such an ungrateful family as those Israelites were to God, I should have wanted to teach them a lesson - put them in their place.
Not God. No doubt that is what they thought He was about to do when Moses summoned them to appear before God: "Come near before the Lord, for He has heard your murmuring." (v. 9) And when they looked toward the wilderness, and saw the glory of the Lord appear in the cloud, it is my guess that many a heart began to quake. They were going to have to face the music. They were going to be disciplined. God was going to clobber them.
But not a bit of it! In what He had to say to them God made no mention of their beefing. Not a word ... "At twilight, you shall eat flesh, and in the morning you shall eat bread to the full. I am Yahweh, your God!" (v. 12)
There! As though the captain were to burst in on a crew that had just agreed to mutiny, and shout, his face radiant with good cheer, "Shore leave for all, and dinner tonight in the best restaurant in town - on me!" They were shamed out of their mutiny ... by kindness. Their sin was met - to use Biblical language - with grace. Four times over in this chapter, the people's murmurings are referred to, and each time they are said to be the reason for God's gift to them of the manna. That was God's response to their peevishness. They were 'punished' by a grand benefit, hauled into line by hearty generosity.
God does not take the rod to His children first. Rather He chooses to shame our want of confidence in Him by a fresh wonder. He is slow to anger. When He must, He will punish: but while He can, He will encourage. It is His way to overcome evil with good. "Do you not know," cries Paul, "that God, by His kindness, would lead you to a change of heart?" (Romans 2:4)
It is our faith He is after, not our humiliation. His best gifts He can only give to a trusting heart: but even unbelief touches His heart with pity, and what He can give us, even in our unbelief, He does give, so as to melt our hard hearts with tenderness. We multiply transgressions - He multiples mercies!
The danger point comes only when we presume upon His kindness, and fancy (since the stroke we feared has never fallen), that we "shall be safe, though we walk in the stubbornness of our hearts." (Deuteronomy 29:19)
Verses 4 and 28 must be coupled together for us to see this.
In v. 4, God shows Moses that the gift of the manna, and the manner in which it is given (forgive the pun) will have the effect of "proving the people, to see whether they will walk in my law or not." And the crunch comes in the paragraph vs. 22-30 where it is related that a double ration of manna fell on Fridays, so that their Sabbath rest on Saturdays should be fully secured to them. The temptation to go out after an extra helping on the Sabbath was too much for some of them, and they yielded to it. "I mean, if no manna fell on Saturday, it might not fall on Sunday. So hang the commandment, I want my freezer full!"
But the Sabbath rest was as truly a good gift of God as the manna; could God not be trusted to arrange things so they enjoyed both? But no; lack of faith led - as it always leads - to greed and disobedience, and there are always those with so little trust in God that they will store up for themselves (or would if they could) enough to last them a lifetime after all their teeth have dropped out.
The point here is simply this: faith can never be exercised in an act of disobedience.
We will often be tempted, even when we fancy ourselves to be true believers, to make doubly sure of God's provision for our needs by cutting some moral corner. We will feel that we shall lose what we have been promised, that the prize for which we have waited patiently and for so long will be snatched from us at the last moment unless we take some doubtful action to secure it.
... like Abraham, who
cannot wait for Sarah to bear him promised Isaac, but must make sure
of things by taking Hagar to wife and begetting a heap of trouble to
himself in the shape of Ishmael;
... or like Saul, impatient for Samuel to come as he watches his army
slipping away, and desperately takes it in hand to offer the
sacrifice himself with unconsecrated hands.
Faith waits. Faith obeys. Faith believes. Faith does not 'do a desperate' in case God forgets to keep his promise. God 'proves us' to see if we will walk in His law or not.
It is a lovely touch, that provision for an omer of manna to be preserved in a jar and placed before the Ark of the Testimony, to be kept throughout the Hebrew people's generations.
In the years to come, did fathers in Israel ever lead their children by the hand (after they had told the story of God's faithful provision through those wilderness years), bring them to the door of the sanctuary, and in the stillness of the Holy Place tell them of that sealed jar bearing within the hidden ark its silent testimony to the miracle they had lived with every day for so long? "There is the proof, my child, of what God did for us." And if they did, what a marvellous thing it was to be able to do.
They surrendered at times to discontent because the way was hard, it is true; their faith failed here and there; they had many times to repent of their waywardness of heart; yet even so, because they had responded to God's beckoning hand and thrown in their lot with His servant Moses, they had a testimony to bear that was marvellous, and was theirs alone to bear.
Then let us set our hearts on such a tomorrow as was theirs. Never mind the hardness of the way; forget what lies behind with all that it contains of failure in faith and of waywardness oft repented; let us make it our ambition - because we once responded to the call of God and threw in our lot with His Holy Servant Jesus - to have a testimony to bear at the end of the day that is marvellous - a testimony no other can bear, a testimony that is our very own, a testimony to what our faithful God did for unfaithful us.
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