Bread of Heaven

[00:00:00] Let's pray once more. [00:00:02] O Lord our God, we thank you for the promises that you speak to us in your word, that there we find all that we need. We ask, O God, that you, by the help of your spirit, would open our hearts, that we might have understanding of the truths that you revealed. We pray yet further that you would grant us greater faith. [00:00:30] Greater faith to trust, O God, that you are indeed at work in our lives and at work in the Word that you proclaim that we might have an assurance that we can trust in your Word, and that we might rely on it, and that in it we might trust that we are truly receiving Jesus and all his blessings. [00:00:54] Lord our God, we confess and acknowledge that we are weak, that we often doubt these promises, and that indeed in our sin we deceive ourselves about many things. [00:01:10] We thank you that you are true and your Word is truth. And we ask that you would clear up these things for us and draw us closer to Christ and in him to you. For his name's sake, we pray. Amen. [00:01:25] Please remain standing. We're going to read again from God's word this time our sermon text from Exodus chapter 16. Exodus 16. We'll read together the whole chapter. [00:01:40] I should say, remain standing if you're able. [00:01:44] It is a little longer. [00:01:49] Hear now God's word as he speaks to you in the reading of the word. [00:01:55] They set out from Elim and all the congregation of the people of Israel came to the wilderness of sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the 15th day of the second month, after they had departed from the land of Egypt. [00:02:12] And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. [00:02:21] And the people of Israel said to them, would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt. We sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full. [00:02:36] For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. [00:02:46] Then the Lord said to Moses, behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day that I may test them whether they will walk in my law or not. [00:03:05] On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily. [00:03:13] So Moses and Aaron said to all the people of Israel, at evening you shall know it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt. And in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against the Lord. For what are we, that you grumble against us. [00:03:32] And Moses said, when the Lord gives you in the evening meat to eat, and in the morning bread to the full, because the Lord has heard your grumbling, that you grumble against him, what are we? [00:03:45] Your grumbling is not against us, but against the Lord. [00:03:50] Then Moses said to Aaron, say to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, come near before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling. [00:03:59] And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. [00:04:10] And the Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them, at twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God. [00:04:27] In the evening, quail came up and covered the camp. And in the morning, dew lay around the camp. And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine flake like thing, fine as frost on the ground. When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, what is it for? They did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, it is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. [00:04:53] This is what the Lord has gather of it each one of you as much as he can eat. [00:05:00] You shall each take an omer according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent. [00:05:07] And the people of Israel did so. They gathered some more, some less. [00:05:14] But when they measured it with an omer, whoever gathered much had nothing left over. And whoever whoever gathered little had no lack. Each of them gathered as much as he could eat. And Moses said to them, let no one leave any of it over till the morning. [00:05:35] But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank. And Moses was angry with them. [00:05:45] Morning by morning, they gathered it each as much as he could eat. But when the sun grew hot, it melted. On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much bread, two omers each. And when all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, he said to them, this is what the Lord has commanded. Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will, bake and boil what you will boil. And all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning. [00:06:17] So they laid it aside till the morning, as Moses commanded them. And it did not stink, and there were no worms in it. [00:06:27] Moses said, eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord. Today you will not find it in the field six days you shall gather it. But on the seventh day, which is the Sabbath, there will be none. [00:06:41] On the seventh day, some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. And the Lord said to Moses, how long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my laws? See, the Lord has given you the Sabbath. Therefore, on the sixth day, he gives you bread for two days. [00:06:59] Remain each of you in his place. Let no one go out of his place on the seventh day. [00:07:05] So the people rested on the seventh day. Now the house of Israel called its name Manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. [00:07:19] Moses said, this is what the Lord has commanded. Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations so that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt. [00:07:32] And Moses said to Aaron, take a jar and put an omer of manna in it and place it before the Lord to be kept throughout your generations, as the Lord commanded Moses. So Aaron placed it before the testimony to be kept. [00:07:49] The people of Israel ate the manna 40 years till they came to a habitable land. They ate the manna till they came to the border of the land of Canaan. Now, an omer is the tenth part of an ephah thus far. God's word. Please be seated. [00:08:17] At the very end of this section, Moses gives a somewhat curious instruction from God. [00:08:26] God commanded that a portion, whatever this portion of an omer is, I'm not really sure, but a portion of this manna was to be placed in a jar and kept in the testimony, eventually put in the Ark of the covenant. [00:08:44] Once they build that ark, and it was to be kept in the tabernacle for all time, so that the descendants of the Israelites, those who didn't wander in the wilderness, but their children and grandchildren and so forth, they would have a sample of this manna, this bread, and they would know. It says they would know. [00:09:07] They might see. It says, literally, they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness. [00:09:16] There was a point to this. Like so many things in the Bible, it was kind of, you might say, like an object lesson, a symbol. [00:09:27] What's going on here? Well, it gives us a clue that the whole question, the whole problem or matter of this hunger and manna and bread in the wilderness, all of this embodied a lesson, a very simple lesson. But it embodied a lesson for the people of Israel. And that was a lesson that they were supposed to learn and teach their children. And then their children were to teach their children. And God's people were to always remember and learn and keep this lesson close to their hearts. And the symbol of that was this little jar of manna that was kept in the tabernacle before the testimony. What is that lesson? Well, that lesson is very simple. They were to learn to trust God in the wilderness. If you're taking notes, that's our theme, trusting God in the wilderness. [00:10:25] God orchestrated all of this, the whole thing, we're going to work through it, but all of it he orchestrated so that his people would learn to trust him, to believe in him, to have faith in Him. We'll look at this theme of trusting God in the wilderness under three points. First, wilderness travel, wilderness travel. Secondly, wilderness testing. So wilderness travel, wilderness testing. And thirdly, wilderness provision. Wilderness travel, wilderness testing, and wilderness provision. [00:11:06] First, then the wilderness travel seems so brief. At the very beginning of the story, very beginning of chapter 16, it says they set out from Elim and all the congregation of the people of Israel came to the wilderness of sin, which is between Elim and Sinai. [00:11:28] Why do we have a whole point on travel? Well, if you glance back to chapter 15, verse 22, it says Moses made Israel set out from the Red Sea. And there's a couple stories that happen at the end of chapter 15. And then we come to our story of today. [00:11:49] My point in drawing our attention to this travel. There's a travel log, you might say here, a story of travels that, that in which are embedded these events, the stories that happen in each place that they stop. There is a travel log from the Red Sea to Sinai. And if you continue through the Pentateuch, the rest of the five books of Moses, you find this travel log continues. It's almost like today we have blogs, people that travel the world, they write blogs and post them of traveled here, I went here, I did this, I saw this. You have this travel log of Israel's journeys from the Red Sea all the way to the land of Canaan. [00:12:34] But as you begin this travel log here, very early on in Exodus 15 and 16, if you've never read, you've never heard this story before, and this is the first time you're reading Genesis, you gotten partway through Exodus, you would probably be a little concerned. You would be wondering, what is God doing? [00:12:58] Let's go back to why did God bring the Israelites out of Egypt? Well, of course they were Enslaved. But he had promised them, and he had promised their great, great, great great grandfather Abraham that his descendants would be enslaved in Egypt, but that he would bring them up out of Egypt and bring them to the land of promise, Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey. And yet, as you begin to read this travel log, we're two months in. It takes another month before they get to Sinai. Takes another 40 years after that before. Well, actually about 43 years before they make it all the way to the Promised Land. God, what are you doing? Why aren't you taking your people to Canaan instead? You're leading them down into the Sinai Peninsula, down into the desert between Sin, the wilderness of Sin, and Sinai. [00:13:52] What is God doing? Why doesn't he take them to the Promised Land, or at least take them directly to Sinai? [00:14:03] After all, God had told Pharaoh, let my people go, that they may come and worship me. [00:14:09] So wasn't the goal at least short term to bring them straight to Sinai? It didn't take two months to get over to Sinai. What is God doing? [00:14:21] Why does God lead them into the wilderness? [00:14:27] What's going on? We could go in detail through here. But just think about this point. It looms large in the story if this is the first time you're reading it. God makes them spend three whole months trekking through the desert. And you people know about deserts because you live in one. Not a friendly place, not a destination, unless you got lots of water, right? Nowadays we have these conveniences and we can go into the desert with our water bottles. This wasn't a nice place to go. You didn't go vacationing in the desert. [00:15:02] There was a purpose to all this. God was teaching his people to trust in himself. [00:15:10] In the wilderness, there was nothing. There was no food, there was no water. God deliberately brought them there, made them spend time wandering in the wilderness long enough that they would run out of food and long enough that they would run out of water. It was deliberate. They followed his cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. They went where God took them. He took them into a wilderness. He kept them there until they ran out of food and water. And he did it on purpose. [00:15:44] Now, what should they have done? [00:15:48] God led them there. God kept them there. [00:15:51] This is the God who had poured out his wrath and the plagues on Egypt. All kinds of creation miracles. Then he divided the Red Sea. They saw and experienced all of this. [00:16:06] God brings them out here. He allows them to run out food. What should they have done? [00:16:13] Well, certainly they should have turned to God. For help. [00:16:17] But what do they do immediately? Verse 3. The first thing they do would that God had killed us in those plagues in Egypt, because at least we would have died fat and happy. We had lots of food there now. They grumbled and complained. They're practically calling a curse on themselves. [00:16:41] This is terrible stuff. [00:16:44] They grumble and complain. This is the exact opposite of trust in God that they're expressing, isn't it? [00:16:52] Now, before you say to yourself, as we often do, as we're reading Exodus or the Book of Numbers, we say to ourselves, those silly, stubborn Israelites. And we tell our children, don't grumble and complain like the Israelites, right? And to a certain degree, that's okay. But before we say that to ourselves, we should consider this. [00:17:14] The Bible teaches us in other places we'll go through them, that God has left his church, the New Testament church, you and I, us. He has left us in the wilderness. [00:17:28] God saved us from slavery to our sins, just like he saved Israel from slavery in Egypt. [00:17:36] But he hasn't yet led us to our promised land. [00:17:42] He brought us out of slavery, but we're not yet in heaven, nor are we yet in the new heavens and the new earth. [00:17:51] God hasn't brought us to our promised land. So where are we? [00:17:56] We're not in heaven yet. We're in a kind of wilderness or desert. [00:18:04] Peter says in 1 Peter 2:11 that Christians are sojourners and pilgrims, people who are wandering. They're headed somewhere, they're going somewhere on a journey, but they're not at the destination yet. They're not home yet. They're sojourners and pilgrims. The writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 13:14, here we have no continuing or no lasting city. [00:18:32] This isn't our home, he says, rather, we seek one that is to come. [00:18:40] We're pilgrims, sojourners. We don't have a lasting city here. Ours is the heavenly city. [00:18:48] Where again in Revelation 12, 5, 6, we find that John, as he's seeing these visions, he sees a vision of a woman. [00:18:58] And that woman represents the church. [00:19:01] And God brings the church for a time into the wilderness. And he keeps her there for a time, where she remains, but he nourishes her and cares for her. God has brought us, the church, out of the kingdom of darkness. We heard about that this morning. And he's brought us into a desert, a wilderness. [00:19:21] Or do you disagree? [00:19:23] Do you think God has brought you into the promised land? [00:19:27] Does this world, as you experience it, around you, does it look and feel like heaven? To you, this is a world filled with misery, problems, trouble. Jesus says, in this world you will have trouble. If you're my disciples, you're going to have problems. Here. [00:19:49] It's a desert. And just like the desert out there, there's nothing really to feed or sustain us. [00:19:57] That is our souls. The new life that every Christian has in him, that new birth that we receive by the power of the Holy Spirit. There's nothing in this world that can sustain that new life. [00:20:14] And God has left us here various reasons, but one that's clear from this text. He's left us here to learn our need for him, to learn to trust in Him. [00:20:29] Now, as you struggle through this life and its miseries, when you get to the end of your rope, whether it's financially, whether it's in your relationships with others, in your marriage, problems, at your job, maybe you struggle with depression or anxiety, maybe trouble with your children, things can get really hard. [00:20:54] You need to begin to see this as God driving you to himself. [00:21:01] To see. [00:21:03] This is not my ultimate hope. This is not what feeds my soul. [00:21:09] God is. He's what I need. Now. The temptation for us is very strong to grumble and complain, isn't it? [00:21:19] I know what I do as soon as things get hard. 911, mom and Dad. I call my friends. I call. Well, I call Pastor Friends now. I used to call my pastor Pastor. Everything's going terrible. What do I do? I call my friends. Everything's terrible, right? [00:21:36] That's what we do. [00:21:38] And of course, not all of that calling for help is bad. We've been given one another to encourage one another, pray for one another, fellowship with one another. [00:21:47] But often that's our first response. Isn't it just like the Israelites to look at our problems, to grumble and complain. [00:21:57] And after we're done doing that, what do we do? We may turn to the world and look for solutions there. [00:22:04] I can't fix my problems. Maybe somebody or something out there has an answer. [00:22:10] Maybe we even begin to try to resolve those problems in a sinful, worldly way. [00:22:17] Maybe we even give up on God and on his church. [00:22:22] The wilderness is hard, but the wilderness of this world is given by God to us to teach us our need for Him. Listen to these verses from the Psalms. [00:22:36] It's a very, very good thing when we begin to learn this lesson that the world has nothing to offer us. [00:22:44] As the deer pants for water, Brooks, so pants my soul for you, O God. [00:22:54] My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear Before God. You hear that psalmist? He's learned the lesson. [00:23:06] Nothing, nothing can satisfy his needs but God or another. O God, you are my God. Early will I seek for you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you. In a dry and thirsty land where there is no water. [00:23:26] This is a good hunger, a good thirst for God that comes from having realized why God has left us in the wilderness. Because we need Him. [00:23:39] This is, of course, the starting place for trusting, learning about God and our need for Him. But God doesn't leave us or the Israelites in the lurch. He's training us. He's testing us. So let's look at the wilderness. Testing. [00:23:55] God led them into the wilderness to test them. He brought them from an oasis at Elim with lots of water, lots of date palms. There was food and water aplenty. He leads them out into the wilderness. [00:24:08] He lets them run out of food, supplies. [00:24:11] They don't look to God. They complain. [00:24:14] But God is the one who led them out. [00:24:20] He hears they're complaining, and we see something very interesting. They complain in verse three. Who responds? [00:24:27] They complained at Moses and Aaron, but God responded. [00:24:35] God responded, you think you brought a complaint against them? No, no. I brought you out here. And look at verse four. [00:24:45] Pretty clear. He says, I brought you out here to test you. He sets up a test. [00:24:53] I'm going to rain bread from heaven that I may test the people. [00:24:59] He brought them out to test them. [00:25:02] And how does he test them? Well, there's two parts to the test. [00:25:07] First part, he says, every day he's going to rain bread from heaven. And they need to gather what they need for that day, and they need to eat all of it. [00:25:17] All of it. [00:25:19] Gather only what you need. Gather as much as you need, but eat all of it. [00:25:25] And then sort of the second part, a different part, is that on the sixth day, which for us would be Friday, right? Saturday was their Sabbath. On Friday, they were to gather two days worth of food, eat half of it, cook all of it, eat half of it, and have some leftovers for the Sabbath, the Saturday. [00:25:47] Those are the two parts. [00:25:49] Now, God is very, very specific about this. Look at verse 17 and 18. [00:26:00] The people of Israel did so. They gathered some more, some less. But when they measured it with an omer, everyone whoever gathered much had nothing left over. Whoever gathered little had no lack. Each of them gathered as much as he could eat. And Moses said, don't leave anything until morning. [00:26:21] Take and eat everything you've received. [00:26:24] What is God doing with his test? [00:26:28] He's teaching them to trust that he will give them enough today for today and that tomorrow again he'll give them enough for tomorrow. [00:26:40] They needed to learn to receive today's food, today's bread in faith, trusting that God tomorrow would once again be faithful and provide tomorrow's bread tomorrow. [00:26:54] Now, how do they respond? [00:26:57] Well, some respond in faith. They gather what God tells them to gather, and only that. And they eat all of it. And they don't leave any for the next day. [00:27:08] But then you see that some of them gather extra and they leave it for the next day and it goes rotten. And of course, God is displeased. [00:27:18] The same kind of pattern, but in a little different way, happens on the Sabbath day. You see that in verse 23. That day, on the day before the Sabbath, Friday, they're supposed to gather twice as much. [00:27:33] And on the Sabbath day, they're not supposed to go out. [00:27:37] Again, trusting in God's provision on the Sabbath day that what he gave them on Friday would last through Saturday. So that Saturday, the Sabbath day, they could spend it worshiping God and looking to him once again, some belief, some will respond in faith to exactly what he says. They trust him and others don't. [00:27:59] Again, you see, by this pattern, God is driving the Israelites to trust in Him. I'll give you what you need each day. And on Friday, I'm going to give you enough for two days. [00:28:13] Trust in me. [00:28:16] Do as I say. And saved the Sabbath day for worshiping me. Very, very simple. The whole pattern is given to drive us, the Israelites, to trust. Now, I know I say all this is simple. [00:28:32] It was. [00:28:34] But imagine actually doing this. [00:28:40] What if I put it to you this way? [00:28:43] In your pantry, you have three full meals for you and for your husband and for however many children you have. Three children, five children, eight children, your whole family, your three full meals. You can feed each of your children, your husband, everyone in the family can eat to be satisfied three times. [00:29:06] But guess what? That's all the more food you have. [00:29:11] You have no job, no income, no garden. There aren't any grocery stores where you can go buy food. No other source of food or sustenance, nothing. [00:29:24] But you have three meals in the pantry. What would you do? [00:29:29] You would take that food and I would take that food and we would ration it out, and we would feed our children one, maybe two meals, and they would be small, and we would ration that food out as long as we could. [00:29:44] But God says, no, you've got to clean your pantry out, eat all of it. And trust that I'll put three more meals in the pantry tomorrow. Now, some of you have been through hard times, I'm sure. And you know about tightening your belt and putting a little more water in the soup and making things last, right? Making things go a little further. [00:30:07] God says, no, you can't do that. You got to eat all of it. And trust that every day I'm going to fill your pantry. [00:30:16] That's hard for us, isn't it? And it was hard for the Israelites. This is not easy stuff. [00:30:24] But God promised, I will provide. [00:30:29] Now God does the same thing for us today. [00:30:33] He does the exact same thing. Now he does it in a different way. As he provides through ordinary means, as we work, through jobs and so forth. But he gives specific instructions for our souls, doesn't he? [00:30:47] And he promises that what he gives us is enough. [00:30:52] He gives us instructions that we call the gospel, doesn't He? The good news of salvation. How it is that your souls can be saved from sins and eternal damnation and have eternal life in Christ Jesus. And he says, this is all you need. All you need to do is repent of your sin and trust in Jesus Christ and I will save you. He gives instructions on how we're to worship Him. And he says, those are enough. Trust me. Follow them and I will receive your worship instructions in our daily walk with the Lord on how to do battle with sin, on how to deal with bitterness, anger, and so forth. [00:31:34] Do we trust that God's instructions in the Bible are enough? [00:31:40] Do we trust as God teaches us to pray for our daily bread each day, that God really will give us what we need? [00:31:50] It's hard. [00:31:51] It's easy for us to look elsewhere. [00:31:55] But before you just think I'm beating you over the head, consider this. This lesson that God called Israel to learn, that he calls us to learn. It's a lesson that Jesus came and learned himself. [00:32:12] Jesus came and learned this lesson. He was tested 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. His body was pressed to the uttermost extreme that the human body can go. He fasted, no food for 40 days and 40 nights when his body was at its absolute limit. [00:32:35] Then the devil came and tempted him. Imagine the torment there. [00:32:42] Spiritual temptation when your body is at its weakest possible. [00:32:48] But you see Jesus there at the end of those 40 days. He's learned the lesson that Israel didn't learn in the wilderness, the lesson God is calling us to learn. Man doesn't live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. [00:33:07] God's word is enough. We can trust it. We can trust Him. [00:33:13] Well, there's the testing and the lesson God calls us to learn in the wilderness. But thirdly, and lastly, there is the wilderness provision. God doesn't just test us, he provides. There's three aspects to his provision. In this chapter we'll look at the first two. The glory is the first aspect of his provision. Second, there's the bread and the quails. And thirdly, the Sabbath, which we won't get into tonight. Firstly, the glory. God provides the people with his glory. This is the first thing God does in response to the people's grumbling and complaining about not having food. [00:33:51] He says in verse six and seven, at evening you will know that the Lord has brought you out of the land of Egypt. And in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, for he hears your grumblings against the Lord. [00:34:08] When Aaron was speaking to the people in verse 10 about their grumbling, God showed His glory to the people. [00:34:18] He showed them his own glory. [00:34:21] That is, he showed them a visible manifestation, Himself, something that they could see shining in the sky that pictured him and his majesty and his being. [00:34:38] It may have caught your ear or made you wonder when we read it. If it didn't, it ought to. [00:34:46] God's response to their complaints about their hungry bellies and the fact that their children was starving was to show them his glory. [00:34:57] They thought, you and I think in the midst of our problems, we're hungry, we're going to lose our job. We're having problems. That's our problem. [00:35:09] We're wrong. They were wrong. [00:35:13] The problem is that we need God. [00:35:16] That's our biggest problem. That's our greatest need. And if we have him, he takes care of everything else. [00:35:26] Do you realize this, that that's what you really need? God and his glory? [00:35:34] More than food, more than clothing. When Jesus talks about worrying in Matthew 6, that's the root of the thing. You have God. You don't need to worry about these things. He'll provide. He'll take care of you. [00:35:49] More than anything, you need God. [00:35:53] And he shows you his glory so that you know that you have him now. No doubt that glory that they saw was magnificent. No doubt it was majestic beyond anything that you can see in this creation. I have no doubt about it. [00:36:12] The beautiful sunrises, the majesty of the mountains that you see in the horizon here. What they saw was far greater than anything our two eyes have seen. [00:36:23] And yet you have beheld something greater. [00:36:28] John 1:14, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory. Glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. The apostle John says that when they saw Jesus, they saw the fullness of God's glory there in the flesh, right in front of them. [00:36:53] The glory that Israel saw in the wilderness, that shone in the sky, that was a little glimmer of the glory of Jesus Christ. [00:37:04] But what you have received, Jesus himself, greater than the glory cloud, you have the fullness of what God promised the Israelites. [00:37:17] The apostle Paul says in 2nd Corinthians 4 of that glory of God in Christ. He says this, that in the preaching of the gospel, that as the gospel is preached to you and as the Holy Spirit indwells, your heart opens your heart to receive the gospel. This is what Paul says happens, that the glory of God has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. In the preaching of the gospel by faith, through the power of the Spirit, you behold God's glory in Jesus face. [00:38:01] This is what God is telling you. You need me. That is to say, you need my son Jesus. And in him you receive me. Do you know Jesus then? Without a veil on his face. Moses had a veil over his face. Without a veil on his face. You have beheld God's glory in Jesus Christ. [00:38:24] He is yours. And he says to you, you are mine. [00:38:30] Isn't that wonderful? [00:38:35] It is far more than just glory, though. That's everything. His glory is everything. But he cares for the earthly physical needs of his people, doesn't he? He rains bread from heaven on them. [00:38:49] That's what God tells them. I'm going to rain bread from heaven for you. And isn't it interesting? For 40 years, the Israelites walked around that desert. For 40 days every day. They sent their little children out to gather the manna. [00:39:04] They gathered that bread from the ground, they put it in their buckets or baskets or whatever and they brought it home to Mommy. And she cooked it up. And that was what they ate. Three meals a day for 40 years. [00:39:18] There was a generation that grew up in the wilderness. [00:39:23] And guess what? [00:39:26] That's where food came from for them. [00:39:29] Have you ever thought about that? The only place they received food for 40 years of their lives. [00:39:37] It falls from the sky, from heaven. God sends it to us every day. We only gather what we need. [00:39:44] And you see, that's the generation. What did they do? [00:39:49] They inherited the promised land. [00:39:52] By faith. By faith they received the promised Land. And the manna was what instructed them in that faith. [00:40:03] Now, as wonderful as that provision of the manna was, the manna is gone. [00:40:10] And the manna that was in the jar before the testimony, that's gone. [00:40:17] Or is it? Turn to John, chapter six. [00:40:29] Turn to John six. [00:40:31] John, is Jesus here is talking to the Jews, the Pharisees, and they don't trust God's words that Jesus is bringing to them. [00:40:44] Look at verse 31. They say to Jesus, our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. [00:40:55] How does Jesus respond? [00:40:58] The Pharisees didn't understand the lesson of the manna. Get this. They didn't get it. [00:41:07] They didn't understand what that manna was teaching them, what it was pointing them to, that it pointed them to Christ. [00:41:18] Paul says it in a different place. He says of the fathers who wandered in the wilderness. First Corinthians 10, verse 3. Those fathers, they all ate the same spiritual fruit and they drank the same spiritual drink. For they were all drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them. And the rock was Christ. [00:41:41] The rock that gave them water and the bread that came down from heaven were but pictures for them of Christ. [00:41:51] They were to trust Christ. [00:41:55] The Pharisees say, moses gave us manna. What do you give us? Jesus says, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. [00:42:11] For the bread of God that comes down from heaven is that which comes down out of heaven and gives life to the world. And then verse 35 of John 6, Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger. He who believes in me shall never thirst. [00:42:33] Yes, God feeds our bellies. He gives us our daily bread. [00:42:38] But all of that, whether it's the food on our table each day or the food that we're to feed on each day in the Word of God, all of it is a lesson to teach us about Christ, that He is the provision we need in this life. You have bread from heaven, the true bread, Jesus Christ. [00:43:01] Feed on him daily. [00:43:03] Daily. Pray to him. Give us this day our daily bread. Daily. Learn to rely on Him. He gives Himself to you freely. He's placed you in this world so that you would learn to trust in him, to feed on him in faith. Now, your wilderness wanderings in this life are not quite over yet. Some of you have been wandering for a very long time. And perhaps you only have a few days or months or years left to wander. Some of you have just gotten started in your wilderness wanderings, and you have many years to come. [00:43:39] However far along you are, God has placed you here for a purpose. To learn to trust in Him. Let's pray. [00:43:54] O Lord our God, we thank you that in our weakness you supply all that we need. [00:44:04] We look to you indeed, to feed us not in some generic sense, but with exactly what we need. We know that our Savior, Jesus and his work upon the cross is given to us for every area of our lives. [00:44:21] So we look to you not only for forgiveness of sins, but the comfort and healing that we need. Having turned from those sins, we look to you also to strengthen our faith. For we know that it is by faith that we can obey you, serve you and do all that you call us to. O Lord, our God, evermore increase our faith in Jesus, your Son, and help us, little by little, more and more each day to grow in the vision of his glory and in him of your glory, that coming to him we might be drawn to you, our triune God. Hear us, we ask, for Jesus sake. Amen.