The Bread from Heaven

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I tease my wife periodically about overpacking if we’re going on a trip. Until I need something that she’s packed that I didn’t pack and I can’t really tease her for it. But I also shouldn’t tease her because I overpack just for driving around town.

I want to be real well prepared. I don’t like leaving the house without one of my trouble bags is what I call them. And they each have a tire iron.

They have this contraption that’ll jumpstart a battery or air up a tire. Toolkit, code scanner in case you get a check engine light because all of our vehicles are 20 years old. They get check engine lights all the time.

And usually I’ll have a drink with me, tea, Coke Zero, something like that. I don’t like to leave the house without provisions if I’m just driving around town. If we’re going on a road trip too much further, again, I don’t overpack with the clothes, but we have to have snacks.

I got a name in there. We have to have snacks. There are places you don’t want to be stuck without being well supplied.

The one that comes to mind as you’re headed through New Mexico towards Santa Fe, There’s a stretch of road where there are no gas stations. There’s no place to stop and get anything to eat. There’s no water.

There’s no cell service. You’re kind of on your own until somebody comes by. And I haven’t been stuck on that road, but I’ve been stuck on another road near there when my alternator went out and, thank the Lord, I had an extra car battery in the back of the vehicle.

Otherwise, you’re stuck in the desert. The desert is not a place you want to be without being properly supplied and provisioned. And this morning in Exodus 16, we’re going to look at what happened to the Israelites when they went into the desert without adequate provisions.

Now, as you’re turning there, I’ll tell you, it wasn’t entirely their fault. You know, I’m not criticizing the Israelites for that. They were told to get out of Egypt in a hurry and take with them everything they could, take all this food, take everything with them that they could, and head out into the desert.

So they were, in that sense, they were being obedient to what God had told them to do. But even with that preparation, their journey was so long and so arduous that they did not have enough to get to where they were headed. And so they got out into the wilderness and they realized the provisions were running low.

They were almost out of supplies and food. And they began doing what I do when the snacks run out on a road trip, began to complain. And that’s where we pick up in Exodus 16.

If you haven’t already turned there with me, please do so. Once you find it, if you’ll stand as we read together from God’s Word. And if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Exodus 16, that’s all right.

It’ll be on the screen for you as well. Let’s read along together. Exodus 16.

1 says, Then they set out from Elam, and all the congregation of the sons of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elam and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departure from the land of Egypt. The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The sons of Israel said to them, Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.

Then the Lord said to Moses, Behold, I will 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 or not they walk in my instruction on the sixth day when they prepare as what they bring in it will be twice as much as they gather daily so Moses and Aaron said to all the sons of Israel 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 and what are we that you grumble against us. Now, even after the Lord provides this manna for them, they begin to complain about that as well. I guess they get tired of the manna, and so God sends them quails to catch and eat.

But we’re going to skip over that part and go down to verse 21, I’m sorry, verse 14, as He continues to talk about them gathering the manna. And it says, when the layer of dew evaporated, this is in the morning, when the layer of dew evaporated, Behold, on the surface of the wilderness there was a fine flake-like thing, fine as the frost on the ground. And the sons of Israel saw it.

When the sons 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 which the Lord has given you to eat.

This is what the Lord has commanded. Gather of it every man as much as he should eat. You shall take an omer apiece according to the number of persons each of you has in his tent.

And the sons of Israel did so, and some gathered much and some little. When they measured it with an omer, he who gathered much had no excess, and he who gathered little had no lack. Every man gathered as much as he should eat.

And Moses said to them, let no man leave any of it until the morning. But they did not listen to Moses, and some left part of it until the morning, and it bred worms and became foul, and Moses was angry with them. So they gathered it morning by morning, every man as much as he should eat, but when the sun grew hot, it would melt.

and you may be seated. So as we continue this series of studies on pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament, we can’t ignore this story about the manna because in John chapter 6, Jesus compares Himself to it. This is not something that I went and dug for and made up.

This is something Jesus Himself said, I am represented by this manna in the Old Testament. And so we’ve got this story that they’re wandering in the wilderness. They’re hungry because their provisions have begun to run out.

They’ve been in the. . .

From the way it’s phrased, I don’t know if it’s the 15th day of the second month after, so two and a half months after they’ve left Egypt, or it’s saying they left Egypt. We know they left the middle of the first month of the year. Is it the second month?

I don’t know. This could be one month based on that. It could be two and a half months.

We just know they’ve been in the wilderness a while. All right. So the provisions began to run out.

They began to complain, and God prepares this manna for them. And with the manna, God gave his people life in the desert. Let me ask you, what was going to happen if they wandered around the wilderness without something to eat?

They were going to die. Yes. Good.

If we don’t eat for long enough, especially something strenuous like that, we’re wandering around in the desert, we’re going to die. And so for them, it really was a matter of life and death, much like last week when we looked at the Passover lamb and them being hidden behind the blood, behind the door. It was a matter of life and death for God to provide this for them.

And so God, in a very real, very tangible way, gave them life in the desert. They wined and God provided for them. Now, I don’t think that’s always the way it works that we go complaining to God and he just gives us what we want.

I’ve not found that to be the case. But in this case, they were whining and God gave them what they needed. And we know it was what they needed and not what they wanted because after a while, you know, the story of the quails that I mentioned, after a while they began to complain about what they were getting to eat.

This manna, we are still not a hundred percent sure what it was. It’s not like anything we have available to us today. You read on through Exodus and you read the descriptions of the manna and it gives the color of it and it’s colored like bedelium, which is a mineral. In appearance, it’s like coriander seed, but apparently smaller because it’s as fine as the frost on the ground.

We’re going to start seeing that in the next few weeks. And when you see that frost on the ground, if you pay attention, I know if you’re anything like us, you’re just trying to herd everybody out the door. You don’t have time to stop and look at the ground in the morning, but early in the morning when you go out, if you have the opportunity, stop and look at that frost that’s developed on the leaves and on the grass, and look at how delicate it is.

And the Bible says that’s what the manna was like, and they would go and they would gather it up, and some of it we know they would boil some of it, they would bake, they would make a porridge out of it by boiling it, they would bake it into bread, but this is what they ate. And somehow or another, the Bible says it tasted like wafers mixed with honey. I don’t know what kind of wafers, but that sounds delicious.

And I would love to at least get to try this, but evidently it’s not something we have readily available to us here on earth. It’s something that God sent down from heaven. But He did this to keep them alive.

Now, not only did God do this and give them life in this moment where they’re saying, we’re about to die. And they were complaining about it. You just brought us out here to kill us.

They were facing death by starvation. God not only gave them that manna in that moment to keep them alive, but God continued to provide that manna for 40 years while they wandered in the wilderness. And God is the one who told them, you’re going to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, but it was in response to their disobedience.

It was their fault that they were out there, and yet God continued to take care of them and continued to provide them. God continued to give life to his people despite the fact that they really hadn’t acted right. They really hadn’t done anything to deserve his provision, which we’ll see in just a moment.

we’ll talk about a little bit more, but God continued to care for them and continued to do things that were going to keep them alive for 40 years. Now, the reason I’ve brought this to your attention today is that this manna represents Jesus, and this manna represents Jesus because he is the bread of life. As I said, in John chapter 6, he calls himself that and tells the the Pharisees, tells those who are listening the story of Moses, the story of in Moses’ day, how God provided that manna to the Israelites and said that God gave our fathers physical bread, and now with my coming, God has given us spiritual bread.

Jesus used the manna story to point them to his purpose in coming. Not only that, I believe that was part of God’s purpose in the way he did the manna. Just like providing the sacrifice in Abraham’s day.

Just like in all the things Joseph went through. Just like with the Passover lamb. God was leaving us this trail of breadcrumbs through the Old Testament so that we could find our way to Jesus when he showed up.

And those who were paying attention when Jesus showed up were able to find him. But this manna represents Jesus because he is the bread of life. I want to outline a few similarities, a few parallels between Jesus and the manna, so we can get an idea of what God was doing here.

Now, this is just like every previous week. I’ve told you that I’ve looked through the Old Testament story and said, you know what, I think that looks like a parallel of Jesus, and gathered all of those I could, and then I’ve gone and looked to see what other people have written about it. And in some cases, there have been points that I thought, I did not see that.

And there have been other points where I’ve said, I did not see that because I don’t think that’s actually there. I think you’re grasping at straws. So I’ve tried to avoid the grasping at straws thing and just give you a short account of what I think are some of the parallels here between the manna and Jesus.

First of all, the manna was given to them by God. It wasn’t something they planted and grew. It wasn’t something that Moses came about.

They couldn’t run down to Atwoods and buy manna seeds every year. This was something that God provided for them on a daily basis. It was something that was entirely in God’s hand to provide.

Only God could have provided it. You realize the New Testament says the same thing about Jesus. It tells us in Romans 8.

32 that the Father did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, and says, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? The manna was given by God, just like Jesus was given by God the Father. Now, you might think, okay, that’s a stretch, and it might be if that was the only parallel.

But again, as I’ve told you week after week, when there’s one or two similarities, you think, okay, you’re drawing patterns where there aren’t any. But when you start to see three, four, five, it gets a little harder to call it a coincidence. The next thing is that this manna came from heaven.

It’s what it says in verse 4, the Lord said to Moses, behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. Now, we might use that terminology in a metaphorical sense. We might say that something was given to us by heaven.

But they’re talking in a literal sense. It’s not just, oh, somebody gave me something and it was a blessing. There is no naturalistic explanation.

The only explanation for how this arrived here is supernatural, and we know that because it’s been 3,500 years and scientists still don’t know what the manna was. Theologians still don’t know what the manna was. There’s no natural explanation for this.

The manna came from heaven. Jesus said the same thing about himself in John. I’ve got written down here 1651.

It may be 651. But Jesus said, I am the living bread that came down out of heaven. And that was his whole story.

You read the first chapter of John. That was the whole message of Jesus, that He was sent by the Father to earth, sent from heaven. The Apostle Paul talks about how Jesus emptied Himself.

What He’s talking about in context was He deserved to be enthroned in heaven. He deserved to be in glory and be worshipped by the angels. That’s what He deserved, and yet He stepped away from that to come down here and be with us.

He came from heaven to man for our salvation. We see in verse 15 that the manna was not understood by the people it was sent to. Look at what it says.

When the sons of Israel saw it, they said to one another, what is it? Has your kid ever said that to you when you set something down on the dinner table? What is it?

I think I heard that this morning when I made breakfast. One of the little girls said, what is it? It’s toast and cream cheese, just like you begged me for last week. I don’t want that.

I’m not eating that. Okay. It was served to them and they said, what is it?

They’d never seen anything like it before. They weren’t sure what to do with it. And as we read the story, we realize it took them a little while to figure out how this worked, even though God told them the rules.

Gather just enough for the day. Don’t hang on to it until tomorrow. They tried to do that anyway, and it went bad as an understatement.

When he’s talking about worms, it was not something you would want to eat the next day. It took them a while to figure it out and figure out how to collect it and figure out what to do with it. They were puzzled by this stuff.

And the New Testament tells us the same thing about Jesus, that he was not understood by those he was sent to. John 1. 11 says he came to his own and those who were his own did not receive him.

When it says his own, it meant he was sent to the people of Israel. And if anybody should have understood who the Messiah was when he came, it was Israel because they did have the Old Testament scriptures with this trail of breadcrumbs leading to the Messiah, but so many of them missed it. There were some who were paying attention and realized who he was, but the majority in his day missed it.

It said his own did not receive him. They did not receive him as their Messiah. They didn’t even receive him as somebody they wanted alive in their midst anymore.

They rejected Him in every conceivable way. That’s why Jesus, right after the triumphal entry, as He’s looking at the city of Jerusalem and weeping over the people, in Luke 19, He says, If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace, but now they have been hidden from your eyes. And He goes on to say, You did not recognize the time of your visitation.

God sent His Son to you, and you did not recognize Him, did not understand who He was. I love this. I don’t know if it’ll do the same for you as it did for me, but it gave me goosebumps when I recognized this.

You read in verses 1 through 3, here in Exodus 16, that they’re wandering through the wilderness outside of Egypt. In verse 2, it says, the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And it says, they said, would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt.

What that means, the way we would say it, means I wish God had just killed us when we were in Egypt. Wish God had just let us die back there in Egypt because we, oh, the pots of meat, we had so much meat. And we had so much bread there.

They said, we would eat until the full. We would eat until we were stuffed with bread. Have you ever done that, gone to a buffet and filled up on the bread and thought, I shouldn’t have done that.

There’s all this other good stuff. But there’s so much meat and there’s so much bread, and we used to just have a wonderful time, and y’all have brought us out. That’s my paraphrase.

They didn’t say y’all in ancient Hebrew. But talking to Moses and Aaron, and God too, by extension, y’all brought us out here in the desert just to kill us all. This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?

I don’t know about you, but are you going to continue to feed those people if that’s their attitude? I looked at one of my kids this week and said, if that’s how you’re going to act when I make you breakfast, when I make you what you asked for for breakfast, you’re on your own. Go find a granola bar or something.

I’m not making breakfast. Apparently, God is a lot nicer than I am, okay? Because the manna was given to the people of Israel, even though it was totally undeserved. And when I saw how they, when I realized that, how they were acting and what they deserved from God, and the fact that what they deserved from God was not what they got, that’s where I say I got goosebumps.

Because the New Testament tells us that Jesus was given when we didn’t deserve Him. As a matter of fact, Romans 5. 8 says, while we were still sinners, while we were still in the act of sinning, Christ died for us.

Jesus was not sent for the salvation and the forgiveness of wonderful, lovely, deserving people. He was sent as the payment for sinners. He sacrificed Himself on behalf of and for the good of those of us who did not deserve Him.

The manna was given even though it was totally undeserved. Jesus died for us even though we didn’t deserve it. And the only role the Israelites had in all of this was to receive it.

They didn’t really have to go out and work for it. You say, well, they had to go harvest it. Yeah, God did all the work.

You’re just going out there and picking it up. And it didn’t even say you had to gather a barrel full because they just gathered and then they brought it back and they had exactly what they needed, whether they gathered a lot or a little. Their only role was to receive it, just like our only role is to receive the salvation Jesus has already provided.

And yes, once we’re saved, we are to serve God and we’re to be faithful and we’re to work hard out of our salvation. But folks, whether we work hard, whether we accomplish a lot, whether we accomplish a little, that salvation that has been provided for us is exactly what we need in order to be reconciled to the Father. And that’s why John chapter 1 says, As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.

All they had to do was receive the manna God had provided. And I’ve already pointed to this a little bit, but the manna gave the Israelites exactly what they needed. There was no stockpiling the manna.

You know, they had a few hundred years earlier, the Israelites had gone to Egypt because Egypt had stockpiles of food. And that was what kept Egypt from starving. That’s what kept the Israelites from starving.

I bet somewhere in their collective memory, there’s the idea, hey, we probably ought to prep for disaster. and have stockpiles of food on hand, but you couldn’t do that with the manna, because it would go bad. Instead, every day, God gave them exactly what they needed.

God supplied all of their needs, just as He tells us in Philippians 4, that He will supply all of our needs according to His riches and glory in Christ Jesus. When it comes to spiritual things, Jesus Christ supplies exactly what we need. Now, this one is not, the comparison between Jesus and the manna is not as obvious, I think, if He hadn’t pointed it out in John 6.

It’s not as obvious to us as, say, the blood of the Passover lamb was last week. But I think it was just one more crumb in the trail, pointing people in the right direction to understand what Jesus came to accomplish, and to understand that when he did come, Jesus would be our only source of spiritual life, and he is our only source of spiritual life. Spiritually, this world is a desert.

I know the world is full of spirituality, but none of it leads to true life. None of it leads to true connection with God. Just like the manna was the only thing in the.

. . There was lots of stuff they could have eaten in the wilderness.

I mean, technically, anything is edible. It’s just a matter of whether it’s good for you or not. They could have eaten sand.

People still do that today. I was watching a short video on YouTube where these people were making cookies out of clay, and apparently whatever country this was, pregnant women like them. People will eat anything, but out there in the wilderness, only the manna was going to actually give them life.

And folks, we can find things that may satisfy for a minute, but in this wilderness we live in, Jesus is the only thing that’s going to bring us spiritual life. There in John chapter 6, when he talks about it, he tells his listeners, truly I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life.

Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. What he means is they died eventually, not from the manna. This is the bread which comes down out of heaven so that one may eat of it and not die.

And what he’s telling them there is there’s precedent for this, God providing something that’s going to bring life. But the Old Testament manna gave them life for a day, or however many days they lived to eat it. It sustained them for a day.

And he’s comparing himself to the manna and saying that manna kept people alive for a little while. I’ll keep you alive forever. I’ll give you life that never ends.

He says, I am the living bread that came down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. So Jesus compared himself to this Old Testament manna that was given so they didn’t die in the wilderness.

And Jesus is the spiritual bread that’s been given to us so that we don’t die eternally. And just as he points out, we receive this eternal life when we believe him enough to receive him as our savior. It’s a very simple story of what the bread of life, what Jesus came to accomplish.

You and I have sinned against a holy God. I realize that in our world today, That’s unpopular to say, but it’s true. And we’re not saying the world out there are sinners.

I’m not saying you all are sinners. I’m saying we. I’m in that category.

We’re all in that category. We have all sinned against a holy God. Anything we think, say, do, or don’t do that displeases God is sin.

And if we’re honest with ourselves, we realize that we all fall in that category. And sin is offensive to God, not just because we broke the rules, but because the rules are based on who He is. So it’s not just saying, no, I’m going to pick something else.

It’s rejecting Him when we embrace sin instead of embracing Him. And so our sin is offensive to God. And because God is just, our sin has to be punished.

and we don’t always like to hear that but we understand again if we’re honest with ourselves we understand that that’s right because if we read a if we read in the newspaper or we see a story on the on the news about a criminal that is very clearly guilty found guilty of a heinous crime a crime against a child something like that and the judge says you’ve been found guilty, but we’re just going to let it go this time. We lose our minds over that, and rightly so. We know that sin has to be punished.

We know that justice demands it, and our sin has to be punished. Part of our punishment is that we are separated from God, not just here, but in eternity. We are separated from God here in that we don’t have the relationship with Him we were created to have, and then we’re separated from Him in eternity in hell.

But there is a way out of that, and that’s that Jesus Christ came and took responsibility for our sins and was nailed to that cross and shed His blood, taking all of the punishment we deserved. Really taking all the punishment we deserved and then some, and paying all the debt we owed so that you and I could go free. And if we believe that He is who He said He is, that He’s God’s Son and our Savior, we believe that He is who He says He is, if we believe that He died for us as He claimed, if we believe that our sins are forgiven because He died, we believe that He rose again to prove it, that’s all it takes to have that forgiveness, is just to receive it, just to ask for it.

Just believe that our sin needed to be paid for and that Jesus Christ accomplished it. And then because of Him, because of Him, we are received into God’s family. The Bible says we are adopted.

The verse I read earlier says, He gave us the right to be called the sons of God. We’re adopted into God’s family, and we have real spiritual life for the first time ever. We have that connection with God.

We have eternal life, not because of anything we’ve done to earn it or deserve it, but because God provided it when Jesus Christ paid for it.