Essentials Of The Faith / Sunday Morning Sermon Series / Exodus

Exodus 16 Part 1 02/22/04

Message Title: ‘Soul Food’ pt. 1                                                                                                                                      Text: Exodus 16:1-36

Introduction
ILL: Two robins were sitting in a tree. "I’m really hungry", said the first one. "Me, too", said the second. "Let’s fly down and find some lunch." They flew to the ground and found a nice plot of plowed ground full of worms. They ate and ate and ate ’til they could eat no more. "I’m so full I don’t think I can fly back up to the tree," said the first one. "Me neither, let’s just lay here and bask in the warm sun", said the second. "OK", said the first. They plopped down, basking in the sun. As soon as they had fallen asleep, a big fat tomcat snuck up and gobbled them up. Do you know what that cat was thinking? "I love baskin’ robins."
Tommy Burrus

It’s amazing what hunger will do to us. People will forage in garbage cans, beg for money and if you have ever watched Survivor on TV, they will eat, whatever they can find.

Explanation: Hunger is real. I understand that over 11 million people worldwide die every day of starvation. Hunger is real. Just ask the 2 million Israelites in our text who were traveling in the dessert.
For them, hunger was not something they read about or saw in the news, they experienced it. And what it caused them to do is a lesson for us all to learn.

Transition: Our text is one where Moses does a lot of verbal acrobatics. By that I mean he says something and they repeats it later in greater detail all the while talking about something else. Because of that, we will not travel through the text verse by verse. Instead, we will try to follow the flow of what the people do and how God responds.

Read: Ex. 16

 
The people’s situation and response
 

The Israelites have been on the road to the Promised Land for one month. The grain they needed to make their food staple, bread,  was gone. Everything was gone. Two million people require a lot of food. And they had no idea how long they would be in the dessert.

They were hungry. They had a legitimate need…but they tried to solve it in an illegitimate way. Instead of trusting God,  they grumbled and complained to Moses.
Grumbling..the Israelites had become good at that by now. There are few things we need to know about grumbling.

1.    Grumbling is usually the result of some kind of pain or problem.
    a.    In our text the Israelites are hungry and their growling stomachs led to grumbling lips.
    b.    We almost never grumble when we are happy and things are going our way.

2.    Grumbling usually distorts the truth.
    a.    Notice the Israelites said they had sat around pots of meat and ate all they wanted. They were slaves. Pharaoh had dramatically increased their workload,
           remember? There wasn’t time to sit around pots, and there wasn’t an abundance of meat in those pots.
    b.    They said that Moses brought them to the dessert to starve to death. No one had died of starvation yet. It is interesting that at the slightest sign of hunger,
           they begin to complain about starving, certainly at this point in their journey, an exaggeration.
    c.    We never do that do we? We never make the past sound so much better than it really was just to prove how much we are hurting and suffering now?
          We never exaggerate situations to get others to side with our grumbling. Do we?

3.    Grumbling usually reflects a problem with submission.
    a.    The people grumbled and complained to and about their leaders. It is your fault I am hungry, I am tired, I am not sleeping in a soft bed every night.
    b.    We never grumble and complain to and about our leaders do we? Whether it’s our political leaders, our employers or the leaders in the church,
          we grumble and complain when we don’t like something.

4.    Grumbling is contagious.
    a.    What probably started out as a few disgruntled Israelites ended up being everyone grumbling and complaining.
    b.    The truth is, this is often our plan. We don’t want to grumble and complain alone because we know it is not right. So we gather support and if ‘everyone’
           is doing it, we don’t see it as sin.

No matter how you look at it, no matter where you go in Scripture, grumbling and complaining is sin.

Read: Phil. 2:14-15 ‘Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe’

When we grumble and complain we’re not blameless, we’re not pure and we fail to shine the light of God to those around us. We all need to remember that the next time we catch ourselves grumbling and complaining.

Transition: The Israelites were guilty of sin and since they all grumbled and complained, their sin was great before the Lord. So what does our holy God do?

God’s response to his people’s situation

First, God makes sure his people know who they are really grumbling and complaining about and to. It wasn’t Moses and Aaron, it was God. After all, it was God, in the form of the Pillar of Smoke and Fire that led them in the desert.

Second, God feeds them. God’s people asked for meat and God provided quail, in great abundance, every night. God’s people asked for bread and God provided manna, a flour like substance for them to make bread. He provided it in abundance, every morning. I wouldn’t have expected that. They approached the situation the wrong way, they deserved to be disciplined for their sin, especially since this was not the first or second time they showed their lack of faith. But they were hungry.
God would have ample opportunity to teach them about submission and obedience over the next 40 yrs as they wandered in the dessert. But with great compassion and love, he fed them, he met their immediate need. And he promised to do so for as long as they were in the dessert.

That is grace and mercy in action brought about by the love of God for his people. In spite of their and our sinful conditions, God loves us anyway. While that doesn’t give us freedom to sin, it does show us the bottom line for Christians, God loves you, period.

However, while God’s love and grace are unconditional, I believe there is more to his love and grace than the blessings they bring. There is an educational element to God’s love and grace.  You see God, in his great love for us, doesn’t want us to become complacent as Christians. He desires us to grow in our faith, to deepen our trust in him. So, here God displays his love for his people as well as his desire for them to grow spiritually by requiring their obedience to him. How do I know this? Because the means of his grace and the possibility for spiritual growth was directly related to the people’s obedience to the rules God set for enjoying the food God provided. Let’s look.

1. They could take as many quail as they wanted. There was no limit.

    This was to teach the people that God’s blessings are abundant.

2. They could take only enough manna as they could eat in one day.
   
    This was to teach the people to trust that God would be faithful to his promise to provide the manna every day. Doesn’t this remind you of the words to the Lord’s Prayer ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. See how God’s Word is connected?

    I also think taking only what they could eat in a day was to teach them self control. They can’t have it all now. When the manna was eaten every day, they had to wait till the next morning to get more. Sometimes I wish God still worked that way, I would be about 30lbs lighter.

3. They couldn’t save any manna for the next day. If they did, it would spoil so that they could not eat it.

    This was to teach the people that they can’t rely on past obedience, they had to trust and be obedient to God every day. Any connection today? We won’t grow as Christians if all our demonstrations of obedience to the Lord happened years ago. What about today? Obedience to God is an ongoing discipline.

4. They were to gather twice as much on the sixth day because no manna would be provided on the seventh day.

    This was to teach the people the lesson of Sabbath rest. Of keeping one day a week holy or set apart for the Lord. This is the first mention in Scripture of the Sabbath. It is interesting that God forces them to obey the Sabbath by not providing any food for them on that day. And this was before Sabbath observance was made part of the Law. God wants us to not only cooperate with him in his work, but in his rest as well.

5. They were to gather the food themselves.
   
    This was to teach the people that they had to cooperate with God. God provided the manna  and quail, the people each had to gather it and take it for themselves.
Spiritual growth is a cooperative effort. God provides and we apply, God leads and we follow, God blesses and we share the blessing with others.

Conclusion

We will continue this message next week. But before we end, there are two major lessons we must not leave here without learning.

1.    God wanted his people to know that it was he who brought them out of Egypt. It was he who is the Lord, it is he who is their God. There is no other.
        Are you assured of that?

2.    God wanted them to know that those who are his by faith are loved by him, no matter how weak that faith may be at any given moment in their lives.
        Are you assured of that?

That’s love. That’s God’s love for us. We need to truly understand this love, we need to grab hold of this love, we need to display this love to others.

 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”    Jn 13:34-35

'Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.'   1 Pe 1:22

'Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.'   1 Jn 4:11