BREAD FROM HEAVEN … GATHER A CERTAIN RATE EVERY DAY

Now some four weeks out of Egypt and safe from their captors, the redeemed nation is in trouble again. A certain failure to trust God will characterise them all through their wilderness journey and this distrust will gender repeated murmuring against Moses and Aaron their leaders.

The problem now is that they are hungry. Perhaps they had carried with them a certain supply of food from Egypt, and they may also have gathered wild olives and wild honey in the wil­derness as they journeyed. But now provision had failed and the remembrance of food in Egypt seemed to increase the pangs of their hunger, as well as their discontent. So, they murmured against Moses and Aaron. But, as Moses told them, ‘your mur- murings are not against us, but against the Lord’, v. 8.

In divine patience with them, Jehovah promised bread from heaven. For six days He would rain it down for them to prove them, whether they would walk in His ways and trust Him to meet their every need. They must gather a certain rate every day, sufficient for the day, and on the sixth day there would be a double supply so as to allow them to rest on the Sabbath.

This was all a foreshadowing of a greater provision planned in the purpose of Jehovah. All men are spiritually hungry. There is nothing in the world’s wilderness to satisfy the human heart so heaven must provide. In the words of J. N. Darby,

This world is a wilderness wide;

I have nothing to seek or to choose;

I’ve no thought in the waste to abide;

I have naught to regret or to lose.

The manna was a type of Christ, the Bread of God coming down from heaven to give life to the world, John 6. 33.

There was, in God’s provision for His people, sufficient for every man. ‘He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack’, and as it was with the manna, so it is with Christ. Men have different capacities of understanding and different measures of appreciation, but the varying needs of men are all met in Him who is the Bread of Life.