Manna from heaven everyday. If you grew up in the wilderness for the first forty years of your life, you wouldn’t know anything different. Many people have tried to imagine what manna could have been had God chosen to use natural means. Even if you could narrow down the sap of some tree, this was enough food for more than two million people!
Another challenge of the natural phenomenon theory of feeding God’s people is that, sure for a day, maybe God bent the laws of nature and made it happen, but this was for forty years! The manna continued where ever God’s people went during those forty years until they set foot in the land flowing with milk and honey, Canaan.
I think now is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that God’s Old Testament people were wandering around for forty years as a judgment for their unbelief. Growing up, I was always under the mistaken impression that it take forty years to walk from Egypt to Israel. No, it doesn’t. In fact when little Benjamin asked his mom why they were going in circles, that had to have been a humbling conversation to explain that God was waiting for that generation to die.
This was Jesus point in the Gospel lesson. It wasn’t received well. Your Fathers ate mana in the dessert and still died. I offer you bread that when you eat it, you will never die! We talked about this food last week. This is the spiritual food that nourishes the soul not the body. We need to hear of God’s love and forgiveness in Jesus. We need to hear that our God still loves us even after our greed and selfishness.
Want to hear more? Watch this week’s message taken from Exodus 16: Manna from heaven.
Book(s): Exodus
Tag(s): Providence
Speaker(s): Fred Guldberg