Exodus 16--Manna From Heaven

Bread from Heaven​
16 They set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the people of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. 2 And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, 3 and the people of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not. 5 On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily.” 6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the people of Israel, “At evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against the Lord. For what are we, that you grumble against us?” 8 And Moses said, “When the Lord gives you in the evening meat to eat and in the morning bread to the full, because the Lord has heard your grumbling that you grumble against him—what are we? Your grumbling is not against us but against the Lord.”

9 Then Moses said to Aaron, “Say to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, ‘Come near before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.’” 10 And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. 11 And the Lord said to Moses, 12 “I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’”

13 In the evening quail came up and covered the camp, and in the morning dew lay around the camp. 14 And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground. 15 When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. 16 This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Gather of it, each one of you, as much as he can eat. You shall each take an omer, according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent.’” 17 And the people of Israel did so. They gathered, some more, some less. 18 But when they measured it with an omer, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. Each of them gathered as much as he could eat. 19 And Moses said to them, “Let no one leave any of it over till the morning.” 20 But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank. And Moses was angry with them. 21 Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the sun grew hot, it melted.

22 On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers each. And when all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, 23 he said to them, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord; bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning.’” 24 So they laid it aside till the morning, as Moses commanded them, and it did not stink, and there were no worms in it. 25 Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. 26 Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none.”

27 On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. 28 And the Lord said to Moses, “How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my laws? 29 See! The Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Remain each of you in his place; let no one go out of his place on the seventh day.” 30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

31 Now the house of Israel called its name manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. 32 Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations, so that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.’” 33 And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar, and put an omer of manna in it, and place it before the Lord to be kept throughout your generations.” 34 As the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the testimony to be kept. 35 The people of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land. They ate the manna till they came to the border of the land of Canaan. 36 (An omer is the tenth part of an ephah.)

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Before we get started on today's passage, I want you to recall something that you've probably already read in the New Testament related to this.  I'll just post the link because it is a long passage--https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A22-71&version=ESV.  In that passage, among other things, Jesus refers to Himself as the Bread of Life after the Jews try to tell Him that Moses gave the people manna from heaven to eat--WRONG!  It was God who provided the bread for the people to eat, not Moses, and Jesus says that He is The Bread of Life come down from His Father in Heaven and all who eat of Him (we've talked about what this means before, but it does not mean cannibalism) will live forever, and His words are the words of life and are spiritual food, and unless people were willing to "eat His flesh" and "drink His blood," they did not belong with Him--even the disciples called this a "hard teaching."

Alright, with that out of the way, let's talk about today's text where God has just brought His people across the Red Sea and miraculously turned bitter water into sweet water for them to drink, and led them to an oasis for water and shade and shelter.  While it's only been a couple of chapters in our Bibles, it's been two-and-a-half months that the people have been camped out here near the Red Sea.  Can you imagine the grumbling and complaining about "Why aren't we moving?" "Are we there yet?" and all the rest.  Once they start to move though, the people realize they no longer have enough provisions for the journey due to the delay--again, I think this was intentional so that they would look to God to provide for all their needs according to His riches in glory.  (See Philippians 4:19).

They again question if God brought them out into the wilderness simply to kill them (notice a recurring refrain?) not by the death of Pharaoh's army, or of drowning, or of dying of thirst, but this time of starvation.  Their food supplies are dwindling and they are in the middle of a desert where, pretty much by definition, there is no source of food able to support even a few people, let alone the millions of people making the Exodus through the wilderness of Sin right now.  Yet, the people longed for their bellies to be full with the meat that they used to be able to eat in Egypt.

God does not appear to get angry with them as I would expect, but instead hears their grumblings and interprets them as cries for help.  He speaks to Moses to give him instructions to give to the people regarding the provision He is about to provide.  He is going to make "bread" come down from heaven (though this is probably not the best word because the people call it "manna" meaning, "What is it?," so it's probably unlike any "bread" that they knew of).  The people were instructed to go out each morning and collect just enough for each day according to the number of people in their household--an omer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omer_(unit)#:~:text=In%20traditional%20Jewish%20standards%20of,separate%20therefrom%20the%20dough%20offering.) for each person for each day. And God made sure to tell them not to collect more than they needed because it would not keep until the next day with the exception of not collecting manna on the Sabbath, so they were to collect a double-portion the day before so that they would have enough to eat on the Sabbath as well.  Also, God heard their cries for meat and said that He would provide them meat in the evenings and bread in the mornings and by this they would see the glory of the Lord.

Quail came and covered the camp--the number of quail we're talking about here is inexplicable, and the quail always showed up at their camp every evening so that the people didn't have to go hunt for anything, and the manna from heaven came down with the dew in the morning so that when the dew dried up, the manna was left behind.  All the people needed to do was go out and collect it, but it was readily available to them, but God would not force-feed it to them.  In the same way Jesus, the Living Word, and the Bible, the written Word, are right there available to feed us every morning and every evening in abundant supply, but we must still do the work to hear the words and meditate on them and apply them to our lives.  God gives us exactly what we need for each day, but we should not expect the Word that we received for today to be sufficient to get us through tomorrow.  We must approach these "words of life" that The Bread of Life has brought down from heaven to give to us and make it "our daily bread" which is part of the Lord's prayer--"Give us this day our daily bread."  I believe Jesus is referring to spiritual food, not just physical food in this prayer.

Some did not listen and tried to save some, not trusting God to provide each and every day, but God sent works to eat what was leftover every day with the exception of the day they gathered double on purposes so as to not break the Sabbath.  Only that day did the Lord not send the worms to eat the leftovers and make them stink.  Each may was to fully eat and digest what the Lord had provided for Him for that day because he could not carry over today's "daily bread" into tomorrow.

Again, some people didn't listen to the Lord's command and tried to gather on the seventh day, even though they were commanded not to, and there was no manna given to them that day, and those who had not prepared went hungry.  God had given the people the seventh day as a day of rest from the beginning (see Genesis 1 and 2).  We'll see this clearly when we get to the fourth commandment in Exodus 20,

8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

As a bit of an aside here, this verse among others just like it is why I believe in literal, six-day special creation.  God commands His people to rest on the seventh day of the week because that's the model He set for them in creation (really the Sabbath was given to all men, not just to the Jews, though only the Jews have been faithful in observing it).  Paul will address the issue of Christians meeting on the first day of the week instead of the seventh day of the week when we get to the Pauline epistles--it's one of the reasons I saved them for last, but the idea of the Sabbath will not go away, even for Christians.  As I said, it is a day for all men, and a day that is supposed to be special, set apart and "holy" so that it is like no other day in the week.  God wants us to not be about our common business (like collecting quail and manna) and to give 100% of our attention to Him that day and listening to what He has to say to us.

At the end of today's passage, the manna is described as being, "like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey,"  but that's not really the important part of this paragraph.  God ordered that certain things be kept as a memorial of what God had done for the people and there would be something called "The Ark of the Covenant" later.  We'll see it all throughout the Old Testament as a physical reminder of God's presence to the people of God and the other nations assumed that this was the "god" of the Israelites and that it was some kind of idol that had special powers that gave the people of Israel blessings and military victories and that all they needed to do was steal the Ark and those blessings and victories would belong to them--it didn't work out that way though.

Why do I bring up the Ark?  Because God would command three things to be kept in the Ark, and we see God ordering the people to prepare for that here.  The first would be an omer of manna.  The first would be Aaron's staff that would bud, the second an omer of manna, and the third would be the stone tablets with the Law written on them.  These are signs of God's power (power to bring life from something that is dead), His provision that can give life to His people in the desert, and the Law which we think as something that brings death, but God meant for it to protect His people from harm and to bring about life and blessings if they obeyed it.  All of these symbols were to show that the covenant God made with His people was one where He provided salvation, protections, and provision in impossible times and it was only of Him, by Him and for Him that we have our life.  When God's people looked to the Ark of the Covenant they were supposed to look and remember that these things though not visible to them were still on the inside of the Ark and it was there as a reminder.  The other nations who did not have this history had no idea what was on the inside that they could not see, and therefore they could not see the Ark with the same kind of eyes as the Jews did.  The power would not lie within the box of gold--even if you watch the History channel today, they seem to talk about the Ark of the Covenant this way.  The power was brought by the presence of the LORD living among His people in the Shekinah glory of the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire that chose to dwell on the "Mercy Seat" of the Ark of the Covenant in the Tabernacle once it was set up--again, we're getting there, but I think it's important that we realize that the Tabernacle and all of it's instruments are physical representations of something greater--we talked about this in the book of Hebrews, and they model things that are in heaven.  It was important for them to be made to exact specifications because they were designed after real things, but in they were to point towards something even more real than the physical representation here on earth to tell us something about the realm that God lives in called heaven and as we study these things moving forward, we will see how the entire Tabernacle is a picture of Christ when "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling (literally "tabernacled") among us."

So, application questions for today.  Are you more like Paul saying, "And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus." or are we like the Israelites that every time we hit adversity we grumble and complain that God must just want bad things to happen to us and never intended to fulfill His promises to us?  Do we trust for him to provide for us physically, financially (the context of Philippians 4:19), and spiritually on a daily basis?  Do we somehow imagine that we can get everything that we need for the entire week on Sunday (like the Israelites) only to realize that if we try to carry that through to another day that it rots and stinks and is full of worms?  Have we learned the spiritual discipline of getting up early every morning to meet with the Lord and gather our daily bread for the day?  (Notice they didn't have all day to gather, because as soon as it started to get warm, the manna melted away like frost would).  Do we consume everything that God has for us digest each and every day?

As we continue to study about the Exodus, maybe see anew the words of Proverbs 3:5-6, "Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths (or some versions say "make your paths straight")."  All the people needed to do was trust in the Lords provision and follow the pillar of cloud/fire when it moved and set up camp when it stopped.  Understand anew what Jesus meant when He said, "Give us this day our daily bread," as He is The Bread of Life and we need our daily portion of Him each and every day.  Unless we "eat His flesh," we have no part in Him.  Hard words?  Yes, absolutely!  But truer words have never been spoken.  Look to Jesus in the same way that the people of Israel looked at the manna come down from heaven.  Without that bread they would have died physically, and it's not something they could just eat once, but something they had to come to daily--Jesus is just like that for us spiritually.

Do we take God's supernatural provision for granted?  Do we ascribe God's provision to someone else in the same way that the Jews did in the time of Jesus where they said that it was Moses that gave them manna to eat in the desert (do we give credit to our pastors and spiritual leaders where the glory belongs only to God)?  Do we see God's glory revealed through His miraculous provision as He intended?  Is His provision something that we treasure in our hearts like what was inside the Ark of the Covenant?  I'm sure the Holy Spirit can speak to each of you personally and ask you even more things as He leads you into all truth as Jesus promised.