Bread and Water and More Complaining

 Exodus 16-17

            One month out of Egypt, and the Israelites are complaining again. There complaint is really astonishing, too: “Better to live in slavery than to die free and hungry.” The ingratitude is amazing. Same thing with the complaint about water; once again they’ve forgotten that the Lord will provide.

            As I said yesterday, their discontent is understandable. Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which says that all human well-being begins with having basic physical needs met? It’s hard to have your best life when you’re hungry and thirsty. But, still, it doesn’t change the fact that they are really close to God’s mighty actions against the Egyptians and for them and it seems remarkable that their faith stumbled that quickly.

            The Lord doesn’t take it amiss. (The day will come when their grumbling will incite the Lord to anger, but that’s in their future at this point.) He miraculously provides water, and in a way that the miraculous nature of the gift cannot be denied. And He miraculously provides food, especially bread, which they name manna. ‘Manna’ is a cool word; it literally means, “What is it?” It was truly a new thing. They’d never seen anything like it before. The very name should have reminded them of the blessing it was. Of course, within a year, they were sick to death of it and had lost all sense of its wonder. Numbers 11:4-6,, “Again the Israelites started wailing and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!”

            How do we bring this forward to our day? There’s the general sense I mentioned yesterday about how easy it is to focus on what we don’t have and to lose sight of what we do have. I have a job I love and my weeks are filled with all sorts of gratifying things: making music, time with my wife, time with friends—but I still find myself longing for a vacation. The blessings become routine, and from routine they become boring, and then I want something different. We Lutherans don’t talk much about the seven deadly sins, but here’s an insight from them. The sin of sloth is not just laziness but a symptom of indifference or boredom.

            Jesus talks about the bread of life in John 6, and, when you read John 6, it’s hard not to think of the Lord’s Supper. I wonder if sometimes our worship suffers the same sense of routine and boredom that the children of Israel faced with the manna. Here is a gift where Jesus Himself is present and all the benefits of His death and resurrection are distributed and the veil between heaven and earth is thin and we are closer to God’s own holiness then any other time in our life. And it becomes routine.

            As I mentioned yesterday, we’re not so different that those discontent, complaining Israelites. Thanks be to God that He continues to bless anyway!