Exodus 16-17

Scripture Reading

2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord‘s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” 4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”

27 Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none. 28 Then the Lord said to Moses, “How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? 29 Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where he is on the seventh day; no one is to go out.” 30 So the people rested on the seventh day. 31 The people of Israel called the bread manna. It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. 32 Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the desert when I brought you out of Egypt.’ ” 33 So Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it. Then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come.” 34 As the Lord commanded Moses, Aaron put the manna in front of the Testimony, that it might be kept. 35 The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan. Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).

Intro

Still need a catchy introduction for the hook. But need to finish sermon I think to get there. Something disruptive.

Block One

We have been saying for some time now that the book of Exodus is the gospel story of the OT, its the salvation story. And we just hit the moment last week where the salvation story is demonstrated to the people of Israel. They are saved and rescued by God’s hand and power and that salvation is not metaphysical, it is not just eternal, it is a real life, applicable now salvation. It foreshadows humanity’s need to be rescued hot just into heaven when we die, but away from sin and death here and now. To move from bondage to freedom.

But today in Exodus 16 and 17 there is a shift in the story. Coming out of Exodus 16 Moses and Mariam lead a song of praise celebrating the salvation of God.

And then not too long after, the tide turns and the new reality ebgins to set in.

Exodus 16:2–3 “In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Now that the Israelites are on the other side of the Jordan and are confronted with the new journey ahead, filled with potential difficulty and danger they immediately look back to grasp for the comforts of Egypt.

They would prefer the known and miserable to the unknown that requires trust in God.

And that is the friction point of them being in the desert.

Because it is God who has led them there to the wilderness, where life isn’t meant to be sustained. Remember at times God has been appearing before the people of Israel and leading them, so they are going from place to place because God is taking them there. So when they get to where God has led them and it’s the equivalent of wandering out in the high desert of Eastern Oregon with no food or water the people of Israel lose heart.

They confess that they had it better in Egypt. And if you know the story you know that they are going to spend 40 years wandering the desert, but the question is why would God lead them to the desert?

And we have to remember that the Israelites have been saved, they are a new people, they have been rescued from oppression of Pharaoh, but they are not yet a changed people.

There belief system is still stuck in what they have always known and has not been made new.

So while God saves them in a moment, He rescues them from Egypt in a moment, it’s instantaneous. There freedom is immediate. They cross the Red Sea, it’s a military act of victory and freedom that manifests in an instant, but the issue we are confronted with in today is that...

You can get people out of slavery in an instant, but you can’t get the slavery out of people except through a long process.

You can get people out of slavery quickly, but there is no quick way to learn how to think differently and believe differently, to reorient all you have ever known into a new category of trust. That takes time, it takes a process. And that is why when Israel crosses the Red Sea they don’t head straight into the Promised Land because these new truths and trust in God need to be worked into their lives.

Israel’s exodus from Egypt was only the beginning—what God truly desired was to deliver their hearts from bondage and restore them to Himself.

That is the point of the desert. It becomes the place of transformation for the people of Israel moving the truth of who Israel is into their heart by means of a process.

In Deuteronomy 8 Moses says ““Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart …” and Moses says this as he is moving toward death, he is reflecting and saying the reason the wilderness was so important is because you din’t know your own hear and you still didn’t know who you were.

Meaning the purpose of God taking his people to the wilderness was never intended to be a rapid, quikc fix, hack to life with God. It was meant to be a slow learning process. It was meant to teach, to educate, to train, to counsel a different way of being human, a different way of being God’s people.

Let me give you an example. What if there is a little boy who grows up in a high achieving house hold. Mom is a doctor and dad is a lawyer and the experience of this child is that mom and dad are impossible to please. Everything he does is always at least a little bit wrong, there is always room for improvement, and mom and dad are always dissatisfied. And when that boy grows up he turns into the textbook result of what you would expect.

He lacks a bit of confidence, he always overworks, he’s a bit scared of commitments because he doesn’t want to disappoint anyone or maybe even deeper down he doesn't even trust himself enough to really commit to anything thinking that everything he touches is doomed to not be good or good enough.

But then one day he encounters the good news of Jesus. And that the a part of the gospel is that when you believe in Christ, youo become God’s beloved child in whom He is 100% totally pleased. And he experiences for the first time in his life this idea that God is pleased with Him. And for the first time he feels like he can catch his breath and breathe deeply. That he can rest in what God says. And that excites him and he believes in that.

But the tension we hit is that if this experience of first encountering the gospel happens on Friday, then come Monday all the problems are done away with right? No more self confidence issues, no more workaholic tendencies, trusts himself and others? Of course not because He is liberated, He is saved by the good news of Jesus, forgiven in full, liberation is done.

But what is going to happen is that over the course of life that theological reality that truth about being liberated takes time, and most often trial and difficulty to work our actual freedom into life.

It sometimes takes the suffering of life to move something from our heads to our hearts. Where we take a principal or a truth that we believe with our minds and began to trust it and depend on it in a new way. Where the idea of something being true, even my assertion that something is true moves to a testing where if I am going to say this is true then it means I should be responding or acting in this way. I should live like I believe this.

And that is what gets worked out, or rather worked into God’s people in the wilderness. And I understand that this grates against preferences toward all of life being a playground, full of fun and happiness, where everything is always up and to the right, its always moving forward and getting better.

But that seems to be the desire of humanity which stands in contrats to the pace and the work of God.

But the wilderness is a place of transformation for the people fo Israel, its the place where the liberation begins to get worked down deep into their belief system and confronts the way they live.

And God’s heart in this is about getting slavery out of the hearts of His people. It’s about releasing His people to be reconciled fully, not partially, not a little bit, but fully to Himself.

And we see that in the way that god provides for the people of Israel. In this moment when they are in the wilderness being confronted with no food and no water in Exodus 17, God chooses to reveal something about who He is. The simple way to say it is that God is faithful to provide for His people where he leads them and that’s important. But I think a bit more nuanced than that it’s helpful to see that the places on earth that ought to yield death, when God is there and He is leading you there, those places actually are full of life.

That there are places in life that are supposed to be sweet, but without God feel empty and places that are supposed to feel empty or deathly, but with God feel alive and vibrant.

I think the best example of this is that over the last 10-20 years the idea of what a wedding is has shifted quite a bit in our culture. And there is nothing more ackward in my opinion that a God-less wedding ceremony. I remember the first one I was at and I was just sitting there wondering what are we even doing here? What ius going on? What is being promised and to whom? To take the beautiful institution of marriage and divorce it from God who created it left it dry and meaningless and ackward. What is intended to be a bright moment in life void of God just feels void of meaning and purpose.

And the inverse, a place of darkness in life that is actually redeemed, is a funeral or celebration of life when we get to come together and celebrate that a person who we desperately and deeply loved and knows Jesus now lives in the fulness of the presence of God. A dark moment in life made beautiful because of God’s goodness.

And that is what is going on with the Israelites here. They enter into the desert, guided by God for the sake of aligning their heart with their new reality and God turns the wilderness a place of death, into a place of life.

Exodus 16:4–5 “Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.””

And he gives instructions to His people about how He is going to provide for them. He takes a place there should be no bread and gives them bread. And the instructions around sabbath, a command that has not yet come int he story, are stated for the sake of operating in the rhythm of creation, but more so to capture the heart of sabbath rest, to remember who God is and who it is that actually provides for my life. It’s not just me and the best I can do, but God is actively at work and God gives a rhythmic way to embody that in our life. That sabbath is not about just doing my favorite things on a day off, but it’s about receinvg God’s grace which I do not earn. And so the absence of work and me doing valuable things as I perceive them is not so much about work being bad, its not, but its about normalizing God’s grace as something I receive in my life each and every week.

And there is this interesting relationship between being in the desert to grow and to mature and then God providing something for you to do, something for you to go and get. To gather each day, but twice before sabbath.

And there is this subtle invitation in that this bread from heaven believed to taste a bit like honey, a bit of what is to come in the land flowing iwth milk and honey, that there is this invitation that God will give it to you, but you also have to go get it. You can reject the sweetness because of the frustration of the wilderness, but if you do that you die. You become bitter. You get angry at the wrong things and the wrong people. Or you can choose the sweetness and live.

And that is the picture that unfolds through God providing manna. Again later in the Torah, in the book of Duteronomy chapter 8 Moses is reflecting on the wilderness and he says Deuteronomy 8:3

“He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

And what Moses is after is that in the physical wilderness manna was a gift of grace that God gave, but the physical wilderness represents much more, it also represents the personal wilderness, the spiritual wilderness, the emotional wilderness, the sort of wildernesses people inthis actual room are going through and the manna points us to the stregnth that is provided through every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Or what Tim Keller says is “You have to learn how to turn truth into bread.”

You have to consume the Scriptures. The words of the prophets, the words of the apostles, the words of Jesus. You have to believe it, subscribe to it, turn it into food that gives you strength.

Jesus’ prayer “Give us this day our daily bread” he isn’t just talking about physical food and provision, He is talking about the Word of God that sustains my soul. It’s a quote from Deutronomy 8 in reference to this story in Exodus.

And here is what Exodus is after, and Deuteronomy is after, and Jesus is after.

God is relationally present to you everyday and His desire is to sustain you in every way He created you for especially in seasons that feel like deserts, but you have to be willing to receive it from His hand and not your own.

You cannot sustain yourself.

Only God can give you life.

And that’s humbling. Especially when things are going well.

I remember going through my first faith crisis after Jacque and I had gotten married and it was specifically tied to this. We were young and kids when we got married, but we had built a simple life around following Jesus, but I remember the feeling and the question I asked out loud. I have a beautiful wife, a child, a good job that pays all our bills, a house that we are on our way to owning, all of the measuring sticks we use to “assess” a good American life, we are happy and healthy, all the things and I remember having the honest out loud realization of what does it mean to depend on God now?

What does it mean to have all of our needs solidly met, and depnd on God?

And that question is the basis of the manna story.

Who do you depend on to give you life?

And again while the exodus story is about a physiucal reality, its intended to be a picture of a spiritual and emotional reality that extends beyond our physicla circumstances.

And our life, if you know our story at all, has been upended mutliple times in different ways than we expected. And our life has regulalry remained in a state of dependence upon God, even receviving a prophetic word a couple years ago that “it was the Lord’s hand that kept us from being destroyed.” A prayer that I needed because I was desperate.

He gives them manna, but there is an interesing note here that feels worth mentioning as we launch our Community Launch Course today and invite you all to press into a small community of people who follow Jesus together. There is this reality that when God gives manna to the people he doesn’t give it to them individually. He gives it to them communally. He gives enough for each, but doesn’t place it in their tent, he gives enough for everyone to have what they need but they have to rely on one another to each get what they need.

There is a reality that for everyone to get what the Lord intends for them we all have to participate with honesty and humility.

Bu we have to start to actually believe that the fulness of hte body of Christ, the great whitness to the world that they will know Christ because of our lvoe for one another actually requires something significant of us. It will mean that we are availabel to our needs being met by others and others needs being met by us. That’s what Jesus does, what love does, it sacrafices our benfit for the sake of the good of others.

But I think there is something else that is important to see in this passage, and this chapter Exodus 16, really embodied both chapetrs 16 and 17, the primary difference being moving from huinger in 16 to thirst in 17. But the premise in a lot of ways is quite simliar.

In fact, that’s my last point around this text. That God is more patient than we give him credit for. In Exodus 16:4

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions.

And what I want us to see is the patience of God in the journey to be transformed. In verse 4 I want us to notice that it says

“In this way I will test them...”

So God knows that He has set them on a process of being transofmred, of coming into alignment with their new reality, and he gives them manna each day and instructions of how to receive His gifts, to receive each day, but not on the sabbath day. And then in Exodus 16v27 it says...

Exodus 16:27 “Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none.”

So God provides for them and gives them instructions and says this is a test. And they fail. They fail the test. But this isn’t the SAT’s or a one time assessment to demonstrate whether you have passed or failed, believed or not believed, demonstrated understanding or not.

We see even on the backside of them failing this test in Exodus 16v35 that

Exodus 16:35 “The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan.”

That God’s response to their failure was His abundant patience to try again tomorrow. That over and over, day after day, God lovingly and patiently shows up to His people for the sake of them learning, growing, developing the habit and rhythm of trust in God and what He says.

A father tests too. For example, imagine a father who takes his little boy, maybe 11 or 12, and they go off into a cabin in the wintertime. He says, “Son, I’m going to teach you something about splitting wood and feeding the fire and something about ice fishing.” One of the things he says is, “Tonight, I’m going to show you how to split the wood and how to stoke the fire, so in the morning, when you get up, you put wood in the fire so we have a nice, warm stove, and the cabin will be warm.” His father gets up the next day, and he says, “It’s cold. What happened?” The son says, “Oh, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t get to it. In fact, I was wondering. I didn’t know why I had to do it because I figured we wouldn’t freeze if I didn’t do it. You were going to do it anyway.”

What does the father say? He says, “Son, I wanted to teach you. I wanted you to grow up. I didn’t want you to be a little kid. I didn’t want you to be a helpless, little kid who is dependent. I wanted you to become an adult. I wanted you to become mature. That’s why we’re doing it. Tomorrow, we’re going to try it again.” Because a father’s tests are different than a professor’s tests. The father doesn’t test to qualify the child. When the child fails, it doesn’t disqualify the child. In fact, the more your child fails, the more your heart, as a father or mother, goes out to the kid.

That is the status the children of Israel have.

In the wilderness when bad things happen its not aimless punishment from a retributive God. Because we all know that good Fathers and Mothers discipline their children. Maybe in this situation the father would actually say to the child, “Because you did that wrong, you disobeyed me. Here’s the punishment.” But it’s not retributive punishment. It’s not like, “If you rob the bank, you go to jail,” which doesn’t help the son in anyway. The father brings pain sometimes into the child’s life, but only enough pain so they’re not going to be disobedient, they’re not going to lie, and they’re not going to cheat to avoid greater pain later.

In the wilderness, Moses said, “You have never, ever gotten what you deserve. The bad things that have happened have never been a retribution kind of punishment, but God has simply brought you along trying to grow you, trying to change you, and no matter how often you failed, he continued to work with you.”

God’s aim is for them to grow up a bit, mature a bit, trust a bit more than the day before.

It’s why what Andrew introudcued last week is so important, that it’s God’s power, that demonstrates God’s love, that teaches us to trust Him. That is so imprtant. Because while some of us are in desert seasons right now, not everyone is.

So we ought to be storing up truth, ought to be storing up stoires of God’s fiathfulness and love.

When we read this story we read it with a bird’s eye view perspective. Knowing where things are coming from and where they are going. We often may even get frustrated with the Israelites because of their grumbling in Exodus 17, but you just came from doubting in Exodus 16, and you were just singing songs of deliverance in Exodus 15, and God’s signs and wonders in Exodus 14 and 13 and so on. But that isbecause we have perspective.

But when you are in the story, in the desert, you don;t have that perspective anymore. You don’t see clearly like you once did or will again in a different season. Your just trying to figure out how you got somewhere so dry and desolate and where in the world the water is.

And that’s when we need two things: We need to have a long account of God’s faithfulness in our lives and the lives of others to remind us where to place our trust. We need to know the stories of the Scriptures, the truth about who God is and His character.

And we need to have our life embedded in community because in that season your community can hold faith for you when you can’t find it for yourself anymore. They can remind you of the stories, there stories and your stories, so when you hit a difficulty it doesn't dismantle you, but they come around and along you and help you see more clearly than you could see by yourself.

Recently I read an article that pointed out the disparity between old evangelicalism and new evangelicalism.

They said old evangelicalism was about the joy of escaping difficulty when we die and the gift of eternal life with God.

But new evangelicalism is much more tied to the question of what will you do with your sorrows when you live?

And I think the invitation of this story in Exodus is to become a people rooted in truth, able to survive the wilderness by choosing the sweet provision of God that sustains our soul. Knowing He has, not abandoned us, but actually led us to where we are and trusting Him regardless of what it is we see.

Will you trust God’s process in transforming you?

Will you thank God for His patience with you?

Pray.