Today's Verse
When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, 'What is it?' For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, 'It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat.'
Exodus 16:15
Historical Context
Exodus 16 falls about six weeks after the Passover night and the crossing of the Red Sea. Israel is now in the Wilderness of Sin, a stretch of scrub and rock between Elim and Sinai, moving south along the Sinai peninsula toward the mountain where God will give the Law. They are a nation of former slaves, perhaps two million people with flocks, traveling through terrain that cannot feed them.
The complaint in verse 3 is not a small thing. In their memory Egypt has already been rewritten: pots of meat, fill of bread. In reality they were beaten, their sons were drowned, and they cried out to God for rescue. Hunger has a way of editing the past. Slavery with a full stomach starts to look better than freedom with an empty one.
Into this God speaks a strange promise: bread from the sky, every morning, gathered day by day, with a double portion before the Sabbath. The Sabbath command has not yet been given at Sinai, but here it is already built into the rhythm of provision. Before Israel is told to rest, they are trained to rest by the way God feeds them.
The word manna is a play on the Hebrew phrase the people speak when they first see it: man hu, 'What is it?' They name the bread after their own confusion. They will eat this same food every morning for the next forty years, until they cross the Jordan into Canaan and the manna stops (Joshua 5:12). It is the longest sustained miracle in the Old Testament, and it begins with a complaint.
Reflection
Notice what God does with the grumbling. He does not strike the people down. He feeds them. But he feeds them on his own terms: enough for today, gathered today, with no stockpiling allowed. The manna that was hoarded bred worms and stank (v. 20). God is not just filling stomachs. He is retraining hearts that learned in Egypt to trust in barns and pots and the security of stored things.
We do the same editing Israel did. When life in Christ gets hard, the old life starts to glow. The sin we were rescued from grows warmer and more forgiving in memory than it ever was in fact. We forget the whip and remember the meat. And from that false memory we complain, sometimes against the pastors and leaders God has given us, though as Moses says plainly, the complaint is really against the Lord.
God's answer to our grumbling is not to indulge it and not to abandon us to it. His answer is daily bread. He gives us what we need for today, and he asks us to come back tomorrow. He will not usually let us store up a year of confidence, a decade of certainty, a lifetime of felt security. He gives us today's grace for today's need, so that we will seek his presence continually, as the psalmist puts it.
And when we first see what he provides, we often say what Israel said: what is it? This is not what I asked for. This is not what I pictured. Moses answers us the way he answered them. It is the bread the Lord has given you. Take it. Eat. Live.
For Reflection
Where in your life right now is God giving you 'enough for today' when you were asking him for enough for the year?
Prayer
Father, forgive us for the way we rewrite the past and grumble against your goodness. We have looked back at Egypt and forgotten the chains. Teach us to receive today's bread with thanksgiving, to trust you for tomorrow, and to seek your presence continually. When your provision does not look like what we expected, give us the humility to say, this is the bread the Lord has given, and to eat it with joy. In Jesus' name, Amen.
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