Eating the Manna

Long time; no write! I could make plenty of excuses, but the fact of the matter is that I just haven’t written and created teaching lessons like I should have been doing. Though, sometimes, one of the best ways to learn from me might be learning how not to do things.

So, I have a short lesson before my actual lesson for this blog post: don’t fall into the trap of requiring motivation or a burst of God-given energy to do things you know are proper in your walk with God. Following Christ is not about motivation or feelings. It’s about self-denial and doing what is right in God’s sight. For more on that, check out this blog post: https://nathanielgevans.net/blog/when-motivations-gone

Our Humanity Desires Comfort Over Goodness

In our imperfection, we don’t always desire what is genuinely best for ourselves. We have issues with following Christ to what is actually good because the path to righteousness is difficult and sometimes painful. We are incredibly shortsighted, especially compared to the vision of God’s plans for our lives, and our ability to see goodness is determined not by what is actually good, but by the circumstances that surround us at the moment.

Our definition of “good” is circumstantial, subjective, even, whereas God’s definition of “good” is objective, and His is actually correct.

As a child growing up, I often hated going to bed. Not because I was energetic and hated sleep, although I did, but because the growing pains that afflicted me at night terrified me because they hurt so much. I thought they were the epitome of evil; at times, I thought I would’ve preferred to remain in a child’s body forever if it meant not going through those pains.

But in my shortsightedness, I wasn’t ready to consider that what I needed was growth. All I could see was the pain that accompanied it. Had I remained in my body as a child, I would be completely unable to do any of the things I do today. It would not be good for me now, and it wouldn’t even be as comfortable as it was when I was a kid. Now, being in the body I have is both more comfortable and better for me.

Growing Pains in The Christian Life

Things work the same way in our second lives as born-again believers. What was comfortable for us as nonbelievers is neither genuinely comfortable nor good for us. What was comfortable for our understanding as children in the faith is not comfortable as adults in the faith. There were things we couldn’t comprehend on our biblical milk diet that become difficult and possibly painful as we transition to bread and meat.

There are thousands upon thousands of metaphorical situations I could present to supplement this lesson, but the best one comes straight from our most accurate representation in the Bible: the Israelites.

The Israelites’ Desire for “Comfortable” Slavery

In Numbers 11, only a short time before the Israelites arrived outside the Promised Land, a number of people began to complain about their metaphorical growing pains.

Verses 1, 4-9 say, “Now the people began complaining openly before the Lord about hardship. When the Lord heard, His anger burned, and fire from the Lord blazed among them and consumed the outskirts of the camp. (4) Contemptible people among them had a strong craving for other food. The Israelites cried again and said, ‘Who will feed us meat? We remember the free fish we ate in Egypt, along with the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. But now our appetite is gone; there’s nothing to look at but this manna!’ The manna resembled coriander seed, and its appearance was like that of bdellium. The people walked around and gathered it. They ground it on a pair of grinding stones or crushed it in a mortar, then boiled it in a cooking pot and shaped it into cakes. It tasted like a pastry cooked with the finest oil. When the dew fell on the camp at night, the manna would fall with it.”

Let’s put these verses in context. The Israelites had recently been rescued from slavery in Egypt where Pharaoh had issued a decree to kill all their male children right after birth. In Exodus 1, we’re told the Egyptians cruelly and ruthlessly worked the Israelites to the bone, hoping to make their lives as bitter as possible so they would become weak. Exodus 3:9 says their spirits were broken by the nature of the slavery forced upon them.

When the Israelites were brought out of their slavery, their trek to the Promised Land was through some of the harshest terrain found on Earth: the desert (The map below shows their path, but if you want to know how it really looks, check the satellite view on Google Maps. That should give you some real perspective). Numbers 1:46 says that the number of Israelites present in the wilderness just over a year after they left Egypt was over 600,000 (and that’s just those over 20 years old). If you know anything about the desert, you know that there is no way it could’ve supported that many people as they traveled through. Not without the divine intervention of God, anyway.

This map shows the area the Israelites traveled through from Egypt.

And divinely intervene, He did. God provided for every need the Israelites could’ve had as they wandered through the desert, even after they continuously rebelled against Him worshiping idols and intermarrying with other people groups. Even when they didn’t trust Him enough to take the Promised Land they were given, He provided for them in the wilderness for 40 years until they finally grew enough in their faith to enter a place overflowing with natural resources and the ability to easily sustain their numbers with excess.

The Difficulty of Current Trials Blinds Us

The Israelites had no right or reason to complain about their circumstances, but in their shortsightedness, they let the repetitive food cloud their understanding of what was good for them. Despite the fact that the food they had would’ve been some of the most delicious tasting stuff you could eat, they longed for what they thought was better in their past: the cuisine of Egypt. Their subjective understanding of “good” caused them to forget about or minimize the struggles they faced during their slavery in Egypt in favor of scratching an itch they had at that moment: the desire for different food.

In that moment of human imperfection and weakness, the desire for something as simple as different food clouded the vision of these people until they couldn’t see the goodness God had promised for their future and the atrocities He rescued them from in their past. Thankfully, God had a plan for that. Unfortunately, it hurt far more than just eating the manna and thanking God for their blessings would have.

God’s Answer to Our Misled Desires

Numbers 11:31-33 says, “A wind sent by the Lord came up and blew quail in from the sea; it dropped them at the camp all around, three feet off the ground, about a day’s journey in every direction. The people were up all that day and night and all the next day gathering the quail—the one who took the least gathered 50 bushels—and they spread them out all around the camp. While the meat was still between their teeth, before it was chewed, the Lord’s anger burned against the people, and the Lord struck them with a very severe plague.

Regardless of the Israelites’ personal feelings on their diet, the fact of the matter is that they were incredibly ungrateful. They fought against God in their craving of what was not good, what was lesser, and were corrected in their beliefs.

Regardless of what the plague was that they were afflicted with, it was certainly deadly to a number of them, and it was meant to be, undoubtedly. But it served its purpose in teaching the Israelites a lesson: the things of the past, the things they enjoyed in Egypt might have seemed good at first, but they came with a painful consequence. That consequence far outweighed the good that they enjoyed. After all, is a good-tasting quail really worth death? No.

And a lesson the Israelites should have learned upon their arrival to the Promised Land, that we can learn from now, was that God’s goodness for us is undoubtedly worth the minuscule pain we perceive when we are being delivered to it; the goodness of the Promised Land and its bountiful abundance was most certainly worth the time spent eating manna.

A Life of Joy is Worth a Little Manna

So, apply this to your life. When things seem a little annoying or painful in your walk with God, when the path God is guiding you down leads you through a desert and provides you manna to sustain you, remember the lesson the Israelites should’ve learned: a life of bountiful joy is undoubtedly worth eating a little bit of manna.

God is Goodness

I feel fairly certain in saying that the phrase “don’t beat a dead horse” came around long after Solomon lived. Perhaps, someone came up with the phrase after reading Ecclesiastes for the first time, because it sure does feel like Solomon is absolutely demolishing the dead horse that is the troubles of wealth. Thankfully, it’s only for awhile longer to lead into the second topic he discusses in chapter six: goodness.

I won’t lie to you; this chapter gets fairly dark, and I will be discussing a very heavy topic that might be difficult for some and will sound extremely harsh. Unfortunately, though, it does make sense with what we understand of life and eternity. For those affected, I understand your pain, as my family and I have been affected by similar circumstances. The good news is that there is hope.

The first two verses of chapter six are merely a transition from the last subject into Solomon’s final statements on the matter, so we’ll jump straight into verse 3, which says, “A man may father a hundred children and live many years. No matter how long he lives, if he is not satisfied by good things and does not even have a proper burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.”

I think a lot of people recoil from that because of our perspective of live on this Earth being good. How can someone who lived, was rich, and had a large family here ever have it worse off than a child who came into the world dead and never got to experience what could be had on Earth?

First, we have to understand what happens to a stillborn child, or indeed, any person who passes away without having knowledge of good and evil. This can extend to young children whose brains cannot yet comprehend such things, or those born with genetic and mental diseases that prevent them from grasping the subject.

This is an issue that becomes rather clear if you can understand even a portion of God’s character: that He is just. He gives punishment where it is deserved, and He provides salvation where it is deserved. Punishment comes because of knowingly committing evil acts. Salvation comes from having never committed an evil act in the sight of God—being washed clean by Jesus’s sacrifice is how this works for most people.

But for those who cannot knowingly commit evil, well, can they really sin against God? I argue no, and for a couple of reasons.

The first is that Adam and Eve could not commit sin until they had the knowledge of evil. Because they knew God, they already had knowledge of good, but until they knew what was evil, they could not commit evil. Really think about why the tree is called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” That name is important, and I think it’s likely for this very reason, among a few others.

The devil’s advocate argument for this belief is that we are born into a sinful world and thus must suffer the price of sin no matter how long we exist in it, but we know from Ezekiel 18:20 that no child is punished for the sins of their parents. And we know from multiple places in the NT (2 Cor 5:10, and Rev. 20:11-12, to name a few) that we will be judged by our own actions.

So, what really happens to that stillborn child? They experience no evil. Their first experience will be Jesus’s arms wide open accepting them into Heaven. The only thing they will ever experience is pure goodness and joy from being in the presence of the Father.

And that child is much better off than the man who lives a long life on Earth without knowing good because all it will know is good while the man experiences the evils of this world.

Furthermore, the real importance comes when we talk about what he is satisfied by. What is a “good thing?” From our perspective, there are a lot of things we consider “good.” Grades, jobs, cars, houses, kids, parents, restaurants, clothes, food, views…I think you get my point. But are those things actually “good?” From God’s perspective, not really. The things that are good are the things that are godly. If something is not in line with God’s character, it cannot be good. Put simply, this is because God is the only thing that is good.

So, if he is not satisfied by good, thus by God, then what happens to him to make a stillborn child better off? Verse 4-6 explain.

“For he comes in futility and he goes in darkness, and his name is shrouded in darkness. Though a stillborn child does not see the sun and is not conscious, it has more rest than he. And if he lives a thousand years twice, but does not experience happiness, do not both go to the same place?”

Now it’s time for me to test your memory of what I’ve been writing about all this time: what things can satisfy us? Nothing on this Earth can satisfy us. Nothing we do here that is spawned from here can light up the world around us. The only thing that can satisfy us is God and his goodness. Without that, there is not joy; there is no true happiness.

So, this man who lives a long time with a large family and incredible wealth is stumbling around in darkness if he does not allow God to satisfy him. Life is evil for him and there is no rest in this world for him. Everything he does has no meaning.

And from there, we can interpret verse six two different ways. The first is that the “same place” Solomon is referring to is the grave. As simple as that, he just meant they both die. On the other hand, he could be referring to a man who will go to Heaven just as that stillborn child will, but he did not enjoy life because he did not lean on Him strong enough. You can take your pick because the meaning of the comparison doesn’t change either way, but the imagery does get stronger depending on which interpretation you choose.

If the man does not get to Heaven because he did not believe in God, then the stillborn child is far better off. On top of the fact that it did not experience evil on Earth, it will never experience evil or suffering. On the other hand, the man will forever suffer on top of experiencing the evils of the world.

For the second interpretation, while both get to experience the ultimate good that is being in God’s presence, the man still had to go through the suffering and evil on Earth wile the stillborn child did not. Both ways, the stillborn child has it better.

The rest of the chapter pretty much just doubles down on this illustration, but there are a couple more verses I want to talk about in particular.

Verse 8 says, “What advantage then does the wise man have over the fool? What advantage is there for the poor person who knows how to conduct himself before others?”

I really like these illustrations Solomon uses because, to me, they indicate the great equalizer that the gift of salvation really is. The way to salvation isn’t to be wiser than someone else. You don’t get any advantage for that over someone who isn’t as intelligent. Likewise, knowing how to work social circles will not get you to the front of the line to receive salvation. No matter your lot in life on this Earth; poor, rich, wise, foolish, capable, incapable, strong, weak, whatever it may be, not one of these has a better chance at salvation than any other.

I like verses 11-12, too. “For when there are many words, they increase futility. What is the advantage for man? For who knows what is good for man in life, in the few days of his futile life that he spends like a shadow? Who can tell man what will happen under the sun?”

I read this almost as Solomon being facetious. It’s like he’s saying, “You can talk and talk and talk about what life’s purpose is and what happens after you die, but you don’t know, and you won’t figure it out by yourself.”

The only one who knows what is good and who knows what happens after we die is the one who created us. We can deliberate about it all we want, but unless we’re getting our information from God, we’ll never know anything good.

If you would like to read through a more complex argument for children going to Heaven than I included, you can check out the excerpts from an essay written on the topic at this link: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/do-all-infants-go-to-heaven/

Good is Intentional

You can’t make things good by accident. It’s not possible. No good thing that occurs happened by mere association with goodness. Goodness is not contagious. It is a choice, and it is a process. On the flip-side of that coin, bad is contagious. It occurs by accident. It occurs when one is not careful. It is the natural order of this fallen world. Bad things can and do occur from mere association with badness.

I’ll start you off with a common example and then we’ll move onto the Bible verses that prompted this article. Let’s talk about bread. Bread starts out as a bunch of inedible pieces that are put through a process to become edible. You take your yeast, flour, sugar, and salt, mix them together, cook them, and then you’ve turned a bunch of parts into something good. The baker has to do this intentionally. He can’t just put the ingredients next to each other, walk away, and come back to a good loaf of bread.

Now let’s talk about the enemy of bread—no, not carbs—mold. It’s the killer of all nice bread products left to sit for too long. I guarantee you: let that bread sit around long enough and mold will start growing on it making it bad to ingest. Making it useless for its intended purpose. It’s the inevitable result of something good being left to rot. And mold starts small, too, just a few spots here and there that got the worst exposure to air and moisture. But it spreads like a disease, and soon enough, it has taken over all the good, delectable bread, turning it bad.

That’s how good and bad works. You have to work to be good, while badness is innate in us all. By mere tangential association, you can be changed from good to bad if you don’t work quickly to catch it and remove it.

So, on to the Bible verses. Haggai 2: 12-13 says:

“‘If a man is carrying consecrated meat in the fold of his garment, and with his fold touches bread, stew, wine, oil, or any other food, does it become holy?’

The priests answered, ‘No.’

Then Haggai asked, ‘If someone defiled by contact with a corpse touches any of these, does it become defiled?’

The priests answered, ‘It becomes defiled.’”

I don’t know all the technicalities about purifying objects to make them holy, but I can assure you of this: there was certainly a process that each thing must go through to be made holy. Just like the bread before, there is a process to take something that is not good and make it good. You can’t sit touch something bad with something good and make it good, too. Just like you can’t place a loaf of bread next to flour and expect a second loaf of bread.

But as with mold, no such process exists to make something bad. You only need to touch something bad to defile yourself and anything you touch afterwards. You don’t have to do a ritual or intend to defile something. It just happens.

That’s how doing good and bad things work. Bad things happen by the laws of a sinful world. It is innate, born into our character as sinful human beings. You don’t have to try hard to do something bad to someone. You don’t have to scheme. Sometimes, you just do things that are bad because it’s all around us.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out?” It means that whatever you intake in your life, you will output into your own life and the lives of others. In our case, the garbage is all around us. It’s like the oxygen we breathe to live in that we don’t consciously choose to breathe or to touch evil. It’s just there.

But good is intentional. It’s a process. It is, literally, sanctification, which is the process of being made holy. You can’t do good by accident; you most certainly can’t do good when you’re only associating with the bad. You have to be cleansed, purged of the mold that is suffocating you all the time, and purposefully go through the process God has lined out in the Bible to strive for righteousness.

You have to choose good all day, every day, in order to do good. You have to choose to cut away the mold and be what you were intended to be: good. You have to step out and make the good things happen for others and point them to the process of sanctification, of belief in Christ, so that they, too, can become good. Merely associating with them is not enough. It will only infect you with the mold once more. You have to choose to be good.