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.