The habit of giving up
This week's verses are a forty year trek through the desert starting in Exodus 14:29-31 and then bouncing over to Exodus 16:1-3:
Prepare yourselves for one of those lengthy messages filled with the drudgery of flipping through your bible to one verse after another, robbed of their context, all to be footnotes for whatever idea the speaker had before he started reading. Actually, it's only two sets of verses in the same story, so it'll still be fun.
In the first bit, the Israelites have finally made their move to get out of slavery in Egypt. The elite troops of one of the best armies in the world face them down, and the Israelites start complaining. God then delivers them with a cloud of doom and then in these verses the famous splitting of the sea. The Israelites put their trust in God and Moses again, and things get all Bollywood with a song about their recent escape from doom.
A few days later, it would seem, they run out of water and the Israelites freak out again. They're preparing to kill Moses when God tells them how to turn bad water into good drinking water. But later on, they run out of food, which is where the second set of verses came in. "If only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt!" Seriously?
It fascinates me how quickly the Israelites returned to faithlessness and grumbling after the kind of miracles they saw. As if the almighty God was a kind of one-trick pony and was going to abandon them in the middle of a desert without food and water. "Hey, I did my part! I got you out of Egypt just like you asked. You're welcome, by the way! How did I become the food delivery boy?" They're so discouraged that they're ready to kill. They long for the torment they escaped.
A lot of people read these verses, and others, down their nose as if the Israelites were some ignorant crazy people who were somehow a lower class than us modern folk. People are people, though, and if you don't read the Bible under the assumption that all of the people are ordinary folks just like us, you won't get anything out of it. The Israelites' fears were both completely reasonable and completely wrong.
I've heard that three days is about as long as the human body can go without water. (Never tried it.) Any obvious signs that they were going to get out of this predicament alive were long overdue. Any one of us would probably be agitated and panicky at that point. It doesn't say how long they were in the desert of Sin before they had enough of starving, but my guess is that it was long enough. A lot of people I know get cranky after just one skipped meal. Imagine weeks of that, in a scrubby desert environment, constantly on the move. Again, the Israelites had a valid point, but it was the wrong answer.
We do the same things nowadays. Maybe you've moved to a new town to find work, or left an unhealthy work environment, or an unhealthy relationship, or an unhealthy church. When things get rough, we find ourselves angry at God, and longing for the slavery and injustice we left. "Yeah, he beat me every day, but at least I wasn't alone." "Yeah, they made me work thirteen hours a day, without weekends, but at least I had health care." The brain does weird things.
Between leaving the safe place and ending up where they were headed, the Israelites spent forty years in what amounts to a moving refugee camp. That's a long time to be patient, and if they only lost hope enough times to fill a book the size of Exodus, they were doing pretty well. The point of passing that book along to us is not for us to point our fingers at the Israelites for being a bunch of whiny crybabies. It's for us to learn from their struggles and see that their tantrums gained them nothing. God had things covered all along.
Slavery is not cool, no matter what the fringe benefits are. If you're longing for slavery, your heart is in the wrong place. It's time to step back and look at where you are now. God brings freedom. You're on a journey to someplace he picked out for you. If you're complaining that airplane food doesn't taste like mom's home cooking, you're missing the point.
If you're looking back on your troubled past with rosy glasses, stop it! It didn't help the Israelites and it won't help you. All that time they spent condemning God and each other was wasted. Seek freedom, seek joy, and seek faith. God has a plan, and he's leading you through it. Sometimes it takes a long time to get where you're going.
But the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left. That day the Lord saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore. And when the Israelites saw the great power the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.
[...]
The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”
Prepare yourselves for one of those lengthy messages filled with the drudgery of flipping through your bible to one verse after another, robbed of their context, all to be footnotes for whatever idea the speaker had before he started reading. Actually, it's only two sets of verses in the same story, so it'll still be fun.
In the first bit, the Israelites have finally made their move to get out of slavery in Egypt. The elite troops of one of the best armies in the world face them down, and the Israelites start complaining. God then delivers them with a cloud of doom and then in these verses the famous splitting of the sea. The Israelites put their trust in God and Moses again, and things get all Bollywood with a song about their recent escape from doom.
A few days later, it would seem, they run out of water and the Israelites freak out again. They're preparing to kill Moses when God tells them how to turn bad water into good drinking water. But later on, they run out of food, which is where the second set of verses came in. "If only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt!" Seriously?
It fascinates me how quickly the Israelites returned to faithlessness and grumbling after the kind of miracles they saw. As if the almighty God was a kind of one-trick pony and was going to abandon them in the middle of a desert without food and water. "Hey, I did my part! I got you out of Egypt just like you asked. You're welcome, by the way! How did I become the food delivery boy?" They're so discouraged that they're ready to kill. They long for the torment they escaped.
A lot of people read these verses, and others, down their nose as if the Israelites were some ignorant crazy people who were somehow a lower class than us modern folk. People are people, though, and if you don't read the Bible under the assumption that all of the people are ordinary folks just like us, you won't get anything out of it. The Israelites' fears were both completely reasonable and completely wrong.
I've heard that three days is about as long as the human body can go without water. (Never tried it.) Any obvious signs that they were going to get out of this predicament alive were long overdue. Any one of us would probably be agitated and panicky at that point. It doesn't say how long they were in the desert of Sin before they had enough of starving, but my guess is that it was long enough. A lot of people I know get cranky after just one skipped meal. Imagine weeks of that, in a scrubby desert environment, constantly on the move. Again, the Israelites had a valid point, but it was the wrong answer.
We do the same things nowadays. Maybe you've moved to a new town to find work, or left an unhealthy work environment, or an unhealthy relationship, or an unhealthy church. When things get rough, we find ourselves angry at God, and longing for the slavery and injustice we left. "Yeah, he beat me every day, but at least I wasn't alone." "Yeah, they made me work thirteen hours a day, without weekends, but at least I had health care." The brain does weird things.
Between leaving the safe place and ending up where they were headed, the Israelites spent forty years in what amounts to a moving refugee camp. That's a long time to be patient, and if they only lost hope enough times to fill a book the size of Exodus, they were doing pretty well. The point of passing that book along to us is not for us to point our fingers at the Israelites for being a bunch of whiny crybabies. It's for us to learn from their struggles and see that their tantrums gained them nothing. God had things covered all along.
Slavery is not cool, no matter what the fringe benefits are. If you're longing for slavery, your heart is in the wrong place. It's time to step back and look at where you are now. God brings freedom. You're on a journey to someplace he picked out for you. If you're complaining that airplane food doesn't taste like mom's home cooking, you're missing the point.
If you're looking back on your troubled past with rosy glasses, stop it! It didn't help the Israelites and it won't help you. All that time they spent condemning God and each other was wasted. Seek freedom, seek joy, and seek faith. God has a plan, and he's leading you through it. Sometimes it takes a long time to get where you're going.
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