A few weeks into the Israelites’ wilderness journey, they were squarely in the middle of the wilderness, and had eaten through all the food supplies they’d brought along with them from Egypt. (It didn’t take long.) They were hungry and looking for something to eat. So what did they do? Did they humbly cry out to God, “God, you have been faithful to us thus far. We trust you! Show us the way.” That’s not what my Bible says in Exodus 16:2. No, it says, “And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.” Exodus 16:3 then shows us specifically what that grumbling sounded like. It was magnificently stupid:
“If only we had died in Egypt, where we sat by pots of meat and ate bread to the full!”
(First of all, what are pots of meat? I’m in for that.) But just think about what’s going on here. They’re like, “Man, we had it so good back there! It was like we were living at the Golden Corral: ‘All you can eat’ pots of meat and unlimited yeast rolls service, plus a queso fountain you could hold your chips under and let the queso run all over your fingers and back down in the fountain—you know, just like it has for the previous hundred patrons. Man, we had it so good back then!” This, of course, was a ridiculous statement, because this is precisely not how it was back in Egypt. The Israelites are doing what we always do with sin, what the entire entertainment and media complex does with sin—romanticizing the pleasures and minimizing the devastation.
Adultery is amazing! But let’s not talk about the devastated lives in both families that suffer from it.
Vengeance feels so empowering! But let’s not talk about the bitter person you become when you hold anger in your heart.
If I were God, I’d be about done, but God is a God who is “slow to anger” (cf. Exodus 34). Which means that while he does get angry, it takes him a while. By the way, in Hebrew, “slow to anger” is literally “long of nostrils.” You may be wondering, “Why would they use ‘long of nostrils’ to mean slow to anger?” Just think about it: What happens when you get angry? Your nostrils flare. Your heart rate increases, and you start breathing quickly. And if you're quick-tempered, all of that happens right away. But if you're slow to anger, you close your mouth and breathe through your nose … slowly. In other words, you can make God mad, but you really have to work at it. God is more patient than the most patient parent … thank God.
So God, being more patient than I… what does he do? He feeds them. And in royal fashion, too. Exodus 16:13 says, “In the evening quail came up and covered the camp, and in the morning dew lay around the camp.” Literally, that evening, quail just came and landed by their tents. I mean, that’s better than GrubHub. The animals just fly up to your tent, land on your porch, and say, “I’m here, ready to be eaten!”
That night, the dew fell on the ground, and when it dried up, it left this little fine, flake-like thing all over the ground, almost like a frost covering the ground. Exodus 16:31 says, “Now the house of Israel called its name manna.” “Manna” in Hebrew is man’hu, which literally means, “What the heck is it?” The verse continues, “It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.” I translate that into the modern culinary world by thinking of manna like a mix between a Twinkie and a protein bar. Not bad. But here’s the important thing: God was doing more than simply teaching them that he’d provide; he was also teaching them lessons about how he’d provide. The manna was an object lesson lesson in trust.
God gave Israel a crucial rule about the manna: You can only gather enough for one day. If you tried to stockpile it—you know, put an extra stash in your closet or try to fill your prepper-bunker with it, fearful that maybe there won’t be any tomorrow when you wake up—what you stockpile will go bad. Literally, Exodus 16:20 says, it will “breed worms and stink up your house”—which, if that happens in one night, that’s like varsity-level going bad. Sometimes at our house, we’ll leave leftover pizza out overnight, and the next morning I’m like, “Can we still eat this?” (ChatGPT tells me the answer is “no,” but I’m not about to let a robot tell me what to do.) But imagine, after one night, you opened the box and found it had bred worms and stank. This manna was some mysterious stuff.
The one exception to this rule was on the eve of the Sabbath. You see, on the Sabbath, no manna fell because God didn’t want people out gathering on the Sabbath; that was too much like work. You could say that the Sabbath was their (ahem) “manna-pause.” So on the eve of the Sabbath, and on that day alone, you were allowed to gather enough for two days, and God would preserve that manna from going bad for an extra 24 hours. All of which raises the question, Why make the manna go bad at all? After all, if God was able to miraculously make the stuff fall from the sky, certainly he could miraculously preserve it. So why didn’t he? Simple: God made the excess manna go bad because he didn’t want them to trust in it instead of him. Manna wasn’t their security for tomorrow; God was—and if they tried to make manna their security, God made it rot. That’s a symbol of what happens to anything you trust in more than God—even good things, like money, or marriage, or family, or whatever. Whatever you cling to for security in the future, except God, ultimately will rot on you and stink up your life.
- If you depend on money, you become greedy and materialistic, always worried about money and constantly comparing yourself.
- If you depend on marriage or family, you become possessive, co-dependent, or bitter that you don’t have the marriage or family that you’ve always wanted.
- If you depend on control, you become manipulative and domineering.
- If you depend on your looks for the future, you become jealous and obsessive about diet and skin products and plastic surgery, increasingly frustrated by the relentless march of time.
You may not even recognize how much this rotting manna is stinking up your soul, but I can assure you: Everybody else does! Whatever you depend on instead of God rots on you and stinks up your soul.
Which makes me ask myself: What is it that I look to as security for my future? Is it our church? My preaching ability? My marriage? Those are three wonderful blessings to me, but if I start to trust in them more than God, they will sour and rot on me. I already experience that sometimes when I preach. I feel like, “You know, the future is bright ... I’ve been successful in the past, and obviously I will be in the future.” That’s always led to a rot in my soul. I get jealous of those who are more gifted than I am, and there are plenty of those. I get worried about someone coming along who is better than me—some young, cooler, funnier guy, or (God help us) an AI preacher. I annoy Veronica by needing affirmation: If I preach a bad sermon one weekend, Veronica has to scrape me up off the floor with a spatula. That’s because “preaching ability” was my trust, but it’s not secure. Those who live by preaching ability will die by preaching ability.
The same thing is true with whatever you trust in: your job, your marriage, your looks, your boyfriend, whatever. Remember, idols are not usually inherently bad things; they are usually good things you turn into God things, which makes them turn into bad things. So what are you clinging to for the future? Is it the manna, or the manna-provider? Because if it’s the manna, it will go bad on you!
Pastor J.D. completed his Ph.D. in Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Chick-fil-A, serves as a Council member for The Gospel Coalition, and recently served as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Pastor J.D. and his wife Veronica are raising four awesome kids.
"Editor's Note: Pastor JD Greear's "Ask the Pastor" column regularly appears at Christianity.com, providing biblical, relatable, and reliable answers to your everyday questions about faith and life. Email him your questions at [email protected]."
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