To Feast
Sermon on Joshua 5:9-18
Title: To Feast
Theme: God provides until it is needed no more.
Goal: to encourage Christians that God provides until it is needed no more.
Need: We often feel stretched and we do not know how God will make the ends meet.
Outline:
Introduction: new years diets. Stomachs growling this morning. Let’s talk about food.
1. Unleavened bread- provision for freedom.
2. Sweet Bread From Heaven- provision when in the empty times.
3. The Pickings of the Land- provision in fulfilled promises.
Conclusion
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
I know many of us sitting here ate just a little too much over the holiday season. I am probably not the only one sitting in the congregation trying to eat a little healthier for the next little while. Knowing that, I should probably warn you right now that the sermon today is about food. GRUMMLLLLLL. I am very sorry.
We have been looking for the last couple of weeks at the events surrounding Israel’s entrance into the promised land.
Today we step on to the next part of chapter 5. This is the last week we will be dealing with Joshua since next week begins the Redneck pastor’s preaching series. Redneck because that was the restaurant on Front street where we met the first time, and apparently the name Red neck pastors has kind of stuck already in the Frankford church.
But today, we get to look at Joshua 5’s telling of a wonderfully meaningful time for the Israelites. They get to celebrate the Passover. And the end of the wilderness provision, manna.
Read Joshua 5:9-12
The males have been circumcised. This shows they have cut away the ceremonial uncleaness from their bodies, and hopefully been cut to the heart, made clean within as well. Circumcision was also something required a male was considered clean to be a part of the Passover.
This celebration of the Passover should stand out immediately to us. Any time the Passover is mentioned in the Bible it should make us stop and take notice. To the Hebrews, the Passover is just that important.
What really had me curious though, is that this hugely significant event of finally partaking of the Passover is hardly given any attention. If I would have written the Bible, thank goodness I didn’t, but if I would have written it, I probably would have spent even more time putting down the events of that first Passover in the Promised Land. But the fact there isn’t a whole lot said about this Passover meal, it shows us that the passage is pointing us further. Instead of stopping and marvelling at the saving power of God’s hand, the passage is telling us through the different food, that we should be assured that God is the perfect provider of perfect provisions.
The first provision found in the passage is the mention of unleavened bread. This bread is the provision of freedom. The unleavened bread is something they were commanded way back at the beginning of Exodus. Exodus 12 said
17“Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. 18In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. 19For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel, whether he is an alien or native-born. 20Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.”
After the Passover came the celebration of the Feast of Unleavened bread. The Israelites do this finally as they enter into the land. Even though they have yeast and they could have the warm fluffy fresh baked bread. They eat Matzah. Flat, hard unleavened bread. The Jews still do that yet today.
Why no yeast. Deuteronomy 16:3 tells us, 3Do not eat it with bread made with yeast, but for seven days eat unleavened bread, the bread of affliction, because you left Egypt in haste—so that all the days of your life you may remember the time of your departure from Egypt.” No yeast because it is supposed to remind you of the speed in which you left Egypt. Cloaks tucked into you belts, don’t even sit down for the feast. Because it is time to go!
Sometimes tastes will bring you right back. Maybe you had some of your favorite holiday snacks around Christmas, if you had those some other time of the year it would taste like Christmas with the family no matter when you are eating it.
This unleavened bread was probably like that. It wasn’t just food. It was an experience of faith. The unleavened bread, throughout the history of the Israelites has been the provision of freedom. A reminder of the freedom they have from Egypt.
We eat fluffy white bread when we have the Lord’s Supper served to us. Do you know what Christ used. When he said to his disciples at the last supper, this is my body which is for the forgiveness of your sins, Jesus was holding up a piece of unleavened bread. He was holding up this bread the special provision of freedom. The reminder that God provides freedom.
When we take the Lord’s supper, what does it taste like? Does it taste to you like freedom? Does it taste to you like the haste Israel had to go through to leave Egypt’s oppression so that you could be free. When you taste the bread, does it remind you that deep down into the depths of your soul, you were made free? The unleavened bread is the reminder of God’s provision of freedom. The bread of the Lord’s supper is the reminder of our freedom from sin. It’s the reminder of how God stooped down so greatly to provide us with freedom.
Bread of freedom. Freedom from sin. Freedom also that reminds us that in freedom we are able to love. And its freedom that allows us to be inspired in an uninspiring world. It allows us to have an identity of freedom to be with God. Sounds good doesn’t it.
The next provision of God we should look at is that sweet bread from heaven, God’s provision in the empty times. We all know the stuff as manna. Another incredible miracle in the desert as they wandered.
Manna means, what is it? There is no food an where. The people are starving. White waffers on the ground, they taste like they are made with honey. I picture frosted flakes. Mmmmmm, frosted flakes. But forty years might be a little much.
Sometimes you might have heard it said, God will never give you more than you can bear. It sounds nice, and I know it is said to give comfort. Its actually a misunderstanding to say it that way. You see, God’s provision in the wilderness actually tells us, as we follow Christ, we will go through things that are too much for us to bear. The wilderness was too much for the Israelites to bear. They would have died out there. But the provision in the wildreness of manna tells us that God’s grace is sufficient for us in the places that we cannot possibly make it through.
When the apostle Paul asks Christ to take away an illness that he calls his thorn in his flesh, Christ says, his grace is sufficient for Paul, not healing.
To take possession of this promised land, the Israelites had to realize first the lesson that is found in those tasty yet repetitive flakes from heaven. You might be going through hell in your life… the deepest wilderness physically, emotionally, spiritually, but the grace poured out through Jesus Christ is there for you to eat modestly on to carry you through.
The manna, that grace that is sufficient for today is only sufficient for today. For the Israelites, they have learned now, hopefully what it means to rely on the power and the grace of God. Through the red sea, through the wilderness, through the jordan river. God’s grace-filled power ought to be sufficient for them. The trials in our life build us up in the same way by breaking us down.
Let’s move on reading Verse 11-12
11The day after the Passover, that very day, they ate some of the produce of the land: unleavened bread and roasted grain. 12The manna stopped the day after they ate this food from the land; there was no longer any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate of the produce of Canaan.
Unleavened bread and roasted grain. They must have tasted like delicacies after years of manna, manna, manna.
The manna doesn’t need to continue. God’s provision in the wilderness has ended because now he is giving the permanent provision. They begun to receive the bread of the land, the provision
Now, this year really brings with it a lot of uncertainties. We might be fraught with all kinds of pressures and troubles. Uncertainties. I wish that this pulpit where the good news is preached could also be a place where a type of good news was preached that everything in the economy will turn around, everything in your loved ones health will be resolved, that the unbreachable wall between you and your child or spouse will come crashing down. That the effects of the devils wretched schemes won’t touch you.
That would be good news, and we hope that it is true. But the good news that we need to think about, celebrate, that we need to meditate on and be captured by to the driest places of the souls wilderness, we need to know that our life is not in doing whatever we can to fill our stomachs, fill our wallets, or fill our free time. We should be filled up with the words of God from Scripture, and we should be filled up with the Jesus, who is also called the Word of God. We don’t live by bread alone, but by every…word that comes from the mouth of God.
Picture the scene in the wilderness in the New Testament. Jesus and the Devil. The Temptation.
“Come on Jesus. No food for forty days, turn the rocks into bread and eat.” Devil, no! And Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8. Let me read that for you. “
1Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land that the Lord promised on oath to your forefathers. 2Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 3He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers 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.
We can eat the Lord’s supper and remember God’s provision for our freedom from sin and free to love. But what is the feast that is laid out before us. It is getting to know Jesus Christ even better by living out the commands that he leaves us with. How do we truly live through the toughest times. We feast on every word of God. We let that nourish us. And we remember that God’s grace is sufficient lasting throughout everything until we step into the promised land of the new creation. Life forever feasting in the presence of God.
AMEN.