Cursing The Gifter

Exodus 16:2-5,8,35 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.” 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”… Moses also said, “You will know that it was the LORD when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the LORD”… The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan.

This is the second complaint registered by the Israelites 15 days into their journey away from Egypt. Freedom as they expected it did not come to pass and our natural instinct to complain came to the fore.

Their latest grumbling against Moses and Aaron was about food and God certainly responded in a gracious manner. Does this mean God is at our service?

Human instinct is a far cry away from God’s own. When we consider Jesus‘ life, we see the challenging situations He was placed in and note that He lived in and through those situations for the purpose set before Him by His father, GOD!

Having come down from heaven and being born to man, His very own creation, He shot humility in the foot by His response to the lowly situation He was placed in.

He was born in a cattle shed, raised as the son of a poor carpenter, treated as an outcast by His very own and finally rejected by the one He created. Contrast His life with that of ours as we look in the mirror of history and examine the Israelites response to God.

Moses reveals what God is about to do in the lives of the Israelites and asks the question, ‘Who are we’? Is it not amazing that we are the ones God saves, secures, protects, provides for and yet we are the same ones who question the very God who did all this for us?

The Israelites ate 87,600,000,000 (or 87.6 billion) meals of manna that was provided by God without any effort on their part and this was not the end of their complaining.

You must wonder how amazingly hard-hearted they were to respond this way but take our own lives for example. God provided us air at no cost to us and it is vital to our life. We live and breathe it without a second thought and cannot do without it.

On average, we breathe between 500 ml to 3 liters a day depending on our physical activity and at any given point have about 6 liters of air in our body. That’s a lot of air that is perfectly synthesized naturally that exists around us and sustains us and is only available here on earth among the trillions of planets in the billions of galaxies that surround us!

When God has provided us so perfectly and so bountifully, how can we then question this very God who gave us life itself? Shouldn’t our response be simply a life of worship?

I pray that each of us today realize the great gift of life God has blessed us with and the greater gift of salvation that He provided us to reconnect back with Him by accepting Jesus’ shed blood as the payment for our sins and the Holy Spirit as the guide to a lifetime of serving this great God.

For those of us who are already transformed by His love, I pray that we would stop complaining and start counting our blessings to appreciate what God has done for us rather than moan about the good times when we lived in the slavery of sin.

In His Loving Service,
ServantBoy

John 6:32-33 Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

If you would like to know about Jesus, then please click here.