October 03, 2011
Morning Manna
Always faithful, last Sunday my morning paper wasn’t in the driveway,
on the grass or under the cars. By the time the paper arrived two hours late my
day was really out of sync and I was out of sorts. I thought about the
Israelites having manna provided to them every morning for 40 years in the
desert and I had to laugh. I can just imagine the first day God failed to have
breakfast waiting for His people. No doubt there were a few of them too who
were out of sorts looking under bushes and behind rocks and knocking on one
another’s tent door asking about their morning manna. “The day after the Passover, that very day,
they ate some of the produce of the land: unleavened bread and roasted grain. The 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.” (Joshua 5:11-12 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----It’s tempting to look at Israel in the desert with manna falling from the sky and the rock following them about giving water and think how greatly God comes to the aid of His people. These people were actually fed and watered by God’s miraculous work every day for forty years. But the Christians in first century Rome were not as fortunate. Neither were those of Constantinople when it fell to the Muslims. The sheltering hand of God was not readily visible during the Black Death. In fact, the natural processes of cause and effect, action and consequence, carry on throughout history in such overwhelming normality that God’s care of Israel in the desert is now regarded as a fairy tale by most people.
-----People walk away from this conceptual situation making three mistakes. The first is not considering why God’s care for Israel was special. To God, Israel, through all her history, is like a word. She has a meaning intended by God for man to understand. To whatever point in time history has progressed, any man humble enough to consider that history would discover something particular about God. Through Israel God shows Himself, including the life and times of Christ, the wanderings of Israel until 1948, Jacob’s Trouble coming to Israel (the Tribulation,) and the nation of Israel during the Millennial Kingdom. So it was that Israel had their manna and water from the palm of God forty years in the desert, that her King and Messiah was born to a virgin, lived a perfect life, and raised Himself from the dead. And so it is that even more wonders than these are yet to come about and around that special people.
-----The second mistake is taking “normal” like a daily drug. The earlier part of the Twentieth Century saw the cruel and sickening use of lobotomies for dealing with problematic people. The message of the Bible is problematic to many personality types for many reasons. But it all pretty much boils down to Its problematic request for submission from people who do not desire to submit. Even a modest application of arrogance to the eyes and ears will effectively filter from them any special sights and sounds of Israel’s history, leaving a normally numbed mind presuming the Bible to be common literature filled up with fairy tales. Normal certainly is a big part of almost every day. But Mt. St. Helens, 9-11, and the Muslim Spring attest to the existence of days outside the definition of normalcy. Normal is not a drug, it’s a lobotomy.
-----That lobotomy by normalcy leads to the third mistake - thinking God is uncaring and detached from us, or that He doesn’t exist at all. God really does produce caring and safeguarding effects in the lives of people. He even makes a certain sense of propriety out of tragedy. It should not be astonishing that He does this in the lives of everyone, His people and people not His. His plan will finally be served once the activities of everyone’s lives have become history. So anyone who has enough sense to salve their eyes and ears with just a modest amount of humility will see Him working subtly in the circumstances of their own lives and hear of Him doing the same in those of others. People who have salved their minds with the Word of God understand that even the tragic events of our lives work to the production of His message, and that we should desire this message more than even our own temporal security and lives.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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