Exodus
16:2-15
2 The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and
Aaron in the wilderness. 3 The Israelites said to them, "If only we had
died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots
and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to
kill this whole assembly with hunger." 4 Then the Lord said to Moses,
"I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people
shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them,
whether they will follow my instruction or not. 5 On the sixth day, when they
prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other
days." 6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the
evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, 7 and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has
heard your complaining against the Lord. For what are we, that you complain
against us?" 8 And Moses said, "When the Lord gives you meat to eat
in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, because the Lord has
heard the complaining that you utter against him—what are we? Your complaining
is not against us but against the Lord." 9 Then Moses said to Aaron,
"Say to the whole congregation of the Israelites, "Draw near to the
Lord, for he has heard your complaining.' " 10 And as Aaron spoke to the
whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the wilderness, and
the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. 11 The Lord spoke to Moses and
said, 12 "I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them,
"At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your
fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.' " 13 In the
evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a
layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the layer of dew lifted, there on the
surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the
ground. 15 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.”
When life is going
well, when things are running smoothly, we seldom pause to ask why. When things
go our way, when we seem to get everything we need and want, we seldom (if
ever) stop to ask how. But when life hits a bump, when things aren’t going so
smoothly, when things aren’t going our way, when it seems we’re not getting
anything we want…well, we’ll ask all sorts of questions. Won’t we? “Why me?”
“Why now?” “What did I do to deserve this?” “When will this end?” “Where is all
of this coming from?” Often when we ask these questions, we project our voices
towards the heavens, as if our demanding an answer from the Almighty will
produce a response. When those difficulties come, when our mind races with
questions, we are too often left without answers—and we don’t like not having
answers when we have questions.
Perhaps that is a product of our constantly-connected
culture; we live in a time when the answer to every question can seemingly be
found in our pockets. Can’t remember the capital of Venezuela? Ask Siri. What
was the name of that guy who as in that movie with that other guy? The answer
is on your IMDB app. Where’s the cheapest place to buy gas in Jacksonville?
What will the weather be like tomorrow? Where are the Braves playing this week?
How tall is Mt. Everest? You can find the answer to these questions and a
million others if you just “Google” them. Gone are the days when we’d have to
guess at an answer, look it up in an actual encyclopedia or dictionary, ask
someone else who might actually be educated in the subject, or (heaven forbid) we
might have to simply be ok with not knowing, letting our imaginations wonder. Answers
are easy to get; they’re cheap, so to have a question without an answer,
without certainty, creates within us such anxiety that we’ll become defensive
to the point of regression in order to find that level of certainty again. But
this isn’t a new phenomenon born in the age of smartphones and 4G data
connectivity—it’s a condition as old as humankind, a condition shared by those
liberated Israelites in the Sinai desert nearly 3,500 years ago.
Can’t you hear their questions? “Are we there yet? When
are we going to stop for a break? How much farther? Where are we going anyway?
I forgot something; can we turn around and go get it? What are we going to do
for food out in this desert? Who’s in charge of this mess we’re calling an
exodus anyhow?” It’s been about two months since they’ve left Egypt: they’re
tired; their bread has grown moldy or run out altogether; they’re sunburned;
the kids are complaining to their mothers, who are complaining to their
husbands, who are complaining to each other, and all the people are complaining
to and about Moses and Aaron. When they can’t get answers to their questions,
they complain. (What is it about the people of God and complaining, especially
to and about their leaders?) The complaining of the Israelites is so constant
that it becomes a sort of theme throughout the entire narrative of their desert
wandering. Why are they complaining? They’re complaining because they’ve
seemingly hit a snag in their travel plans, and things aren’t going the way
they think they should.
We can see such a snag in verse 3 when they say, "If
only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by
the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this
wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." Remember,
they’re two months out of Egypt. Most of them probably weren’t thinking it’d
take this long. They likely had visions of what things were going to be like in
this Promised Land: they’d be settled in their own house, on their own land,
with their own gardens, growing their own food. They’d have to taskmasters to
answer to, no schedule to keep, no monument to build except the ones they chose
to build. After two months though, when the food they brought with them was running
out, when the kids were crying, when the ribs on the animals they brought with
them were showing, those lovely visions of life in the Promised Land were
starting to fade. The certainty of life back in Egypt, back in bondage was
starting to sound more and more appealing.
That’s how it goes, isn’t it? When our present
predicament creates questions without any answers, when our visions and plans
seem to be unraveling before us, we convince ourselves that the old way was
better, that we should retreat to a time when it seems we had all the answers,
when things (at least in hindsight) seemed easier and all the problems of the
present were non-existent. We convince ourselves that the “good ol’ days” were
better than today, that the “way things were” is better than the way things
are. That’s what the Israelites are saying: “It’s so bad out here in this
desert that we’d rather be back in bondage, under the whip of the taskmaster.
At least back there we had full bellies and we knew what to expect!” Their
reaction to the seeming shortage of food reveals just how deep their faith
is—that’s our critique anyway, but we know the rest of the story.
We know that God is going to provide them bread from
heaven; we know that they’ll make it across the Jordan and into the Promised
Land; we know and they’ve witnessed the way in which God brought them across
the Red Sea and out of the sights of Pharaoh’s army. With all we know, it’s
easy to say things like, “well, if they had just had faith, if they had just
held on a little longer, they would have seen how God was going to provide for
them.” To tell the truth, though, I don’t think we can’t be too hard on the
Israelites. After all, we’re not too different, are we? God can show up in
powerful and amazing ways in your life one day, and the next—when things aren’t
going the way you want—you’ll wonder if God is even real. We can have a
lifetime of stories detailing the ways God provides, the way God shows up, yet
when a difficult season comes, when the ground is hard and dry, when the work
isn’t there, when it’s harder to get out of bed, we’ll long for the days when
we didn’t have to worry about things like our faith, when things were easier
and answers were handed to us.
I think that’s how we’re all alike, how we’re like the
Israelites, how they’re like us, how all us people are just like each other. We
have short-term faith memory; we’re quick to forget the ways God has brought us
to where we are once we encounter trouble. We long for certainty, for answers.
We want a plan, not some aimless, thrown-together wandering. We want a faith
that runs on a rail, not a faith that wanders in the wilderness. The Israelites
wanted certainty: “how are we going to eat out here in the desert? when will we
eat? what will we eat?” We want certainty: “where is God? how did we get here?
where did we come from? where are we going?” None of us want to live with
questions—we want answers! We want to know what’s next. We want certainty. We
want to have the answer in our back pocket, ready to dispense it to whomever
may ask us a question. We want things black-and-white, cut and dry, lines
clearly defined. We want to know who’s in and who’s out, what’s right and
what’s wrong. We want a schedule, a checklist, a program, an agenda. We want
certainty—answers, NOT questions. We want certainty because we believe it is
only when we have all the right answers that we have the right faith, but I’m
learning something the longer I travel on this journey with Jesus, with God:
faith flies in the face of certainty. Faith isn’t found in the answers: it’s
found in the struggling, the wrestling with the questions.
You see, the Israelites (who, by the way, are named for
the patriarch Israel, whose name literally means “to wrestle with God”) wanted
the certainty of the fleshpots of Egypt, the certainty of knowing where their
next meal would come from. They wanted to retreat to the time and place—before
God’s deliverance—when it seemed they had all the answers to all of their
questions. And when the Lord had heard their complaining, when God had heard
the Israelites and the way they complained against Moses, the way they
complained against God, the way they wanted answers, what did the Lord give
them? God gave them manna, in Hebrew,
man hu, the literal translation “What
is it?” What did God give the Israelites when they complained? Yes, God gave
them sustenance, food, but what was it God gave them when they wanted
certainty, when they wanted answers? Why, God gave them a question, “What is it?”
Isn’t that something? For
forty years, God sustained the Israelites with a question—not an answer or a
list of answers, but a question. To me, that’s what faith is. Faith is living
with the questions; it is the search for the answers, not the answers
themselves. Church isn’t a place to come get all the answers, but it ought to
be a community of people in which it is safe to wrestle with the questions. I’m
learning as I get older, as I grow closer to Christ, that I’m not supposed to
have all the answers, and I know that frustrates some of us, to think we’re not
supposed to have all the answers. I know we want answers, and we want
certainty. We want to be able to say things like “the Bible clearly says…God can do this, or God can’t do that…” We want clearly
defined boundaries and lists of rules and regulations. We want the answers so
we can be sure we’re in. But having all the answers, all the rules figured out,
all the criteria written down, being completely certain…that’s not faith. Faith
is not having all the answers. Faith is wrestling with the uncertainties and
questions of existence. Faith is trusting that even if you never have the
answers God is still God (and you are not!).
So to those of you who are wrestling with the questions,
those of you who feel as if you’re always asking, “Why?,” those of you who feel
like the way things were is better than the way things are, those of you who
feel like you’ve got to have all the answers—to all of us who wrestle with the
questions of life, faith, and existence, I say this: hold on, keep the faith!
For the Lord led a nation out of bondage, through the wilderness, and into the
Promised Land, and God sustained them on that journey with a question. May the
Lord sustain you on your journey with the questions of faith that call us into
closer relationship with Christ. May this church be a community where questions
are welcome and answers aren’t required. May we have the kind of faith that
calls us ever on, relying on God when we don’t have the answers. Amen.
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