Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.” (Exodus 16:4-5)
“However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them.” (Ex. 16:20)
“Some people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none.” (Ex. 16:27)
Moses was given simple instructions by God. It was an easy way to feed the Israelites who were hungry in the desert. This manna thing was new to them. They had no idea how it worked. What is more strange about this story is that the God of Moses is not new to them. Don’t you think by this point they would have figured out that the God of Moses and the Israelites meant business. God was not fooling around. The instructions were strange—but God had delivered them.
Let’s take a balcony view for this scene. You are an Israelite and you are hungry. You are a stranger in a strange land. If you did pack food for the journey—it is gone. So you complain to Moses who has been a pretty solid leader up to this point. Moses tells you that tomorrow morning the ground will be covered with ‘some kind of bread.’ You will be able to collect enough for one day. It will do you no good to hoard. It will go bad by the next morning. The shelf life of this weekday Manna is one day. However, on the sixth day, collect enough for two days—because on that day, the shelf life is extended to 48 hours. What are you to think? On the seventh day- there is no manna on the ground!
How do you read that story? It is a story about having faith. It is a story about trusting that God will provide. It has been read as a story about the capricious nature of a whimsical God. It can be read as story about members of the tribe who lacked faith.
What would you do? Place yourself in that story. The instructions seem completely arbitrary. Would you hoard the manna? The word ‘manna’ came up in a Bible study recently and it made me think of our reaction to COVID-19. At first, the instructions seemed random. Some people took the idea of social distancing seriously and others it took some time to warm up to the idea. Some people went to the market and loaded up on groceries, and others had a more ‘wait and see’ approach.
What happened to the folks that collected far more manna then they could eat? The manna went bad. Did the greedy people learn a lesson? Did the people who had to throw away manna, while others hungered actually understand that it did them no good to collect more than they could consume in one day. It should be noted that no one went hungry. There were recommendations about how much one family could collect on any given day.
There is an element of trust and faith that we will come through these times. We will. Sure, things will be different. For all we know, families that had collected enough manna shared with families that didn’t collect enough. But at the end of the day- hopefully, everyone had enough.
I think the Manna principle could be applied to many areas of our lives. People have an idea that there is a finite amount of love or grace, which there is not. On the other hand, people have an idea that there is an infinite amount of natural resources, which there is not. Is it possible to collect enough, based on faith and trust- to get us through the day knowing that there will be more tomorrow?
Scarcity is scary. In these anxious times, I pray that people will find the balance that they need for their lives and share the infinite love and unlimited grace of God with all.
