You’ve been walking for two weeks. The horizon in front of you looks just as desolate as the one behind. Your family is road weary. Your small daughter is crying because she’s hungry. “When can we go home?” asks your son. You haven’t fully explained to your children that they’re never going back home. The thought of having to watch your children die is just a little more than you can bear. It seemed like God himself was asking you to leave the only home you and your family have known. What’s worse is you didn’t even hear God’s voice for yourself, you took a man’s word for it—a self-proclaimed prophet. He said lives were at stake and we needed to follow all of his instructions carefully. Now in the face of starvation, the doubts and anger come rushing to the surface.
“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.” Exodus 16:3, NIV
Why didn’t those silly Hebrews see God’s provision ahead of time? Of course God wouldn’t suddenly abandon them. Of course Moses was God’s chosen man—it’s Moses for goodness sakes. In our shortsightedness we might not stop to think that any of us would be in a state of panic in that circumstance.
The Lord’s Prayer has the sentence “give us this day our daily bread.” As I’ve said that prayer, I’ve believed that I trust God for my daily bread, but getting bread daily isn’t really an issue for me. I’ve always had good jobs that allow me not only to get my daily bread, but to have it stocked up for a whole month in advance. How would I know if I was trusting God for my needs or not? I’m meeting them just fine on my own.
Am I Trusting God?
I assume I’m trusting God because I acknowledge his provision when I have more than enough. Would my trust level change if my cabinets were empty? I think that the degree of panic I experience in times of need shows me how much I was trusting myself in times of plenty. When the Hebrews started to experience that panic, God answered them.
“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, NIV
I think that one reason God would ask them to collect only one day’s worth of food is that he wanted them to trust him as their only source of provision.
Our Daily Needs
Many of us in this country already have our daily bread in our cabinets. Some will say that “our daily bread” means whatever we need today that we don’t have. If we start to think of “our daily bread” as pure metaphor, when our need is literally daily bread we will think something has gone very wrong. It’s not a bad thing to have resources for the future, but our security is in God, not the resources.
In this economy, some of these thoughts are becoming realities for more people. As we relate to God and talk to him about our needs, we should also remember that he’s still the same God that caused bread to fall from heaven in the desert.
Photo credit: Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash