Manna and Mercy

“But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!”

Numbers 11:6, NIV

Have you ever looked at a map of the Israelites' 40-year journey through the wilderness?  Check it out really quick.

I'll wait....

It was before the days of GPS, but I'm pretty sure they knew they were taking the long way. 

By the fifteenth day of the second month of their journey, when they could have already been to their final destination if they had taken a straight path, they start complaining about their lack of food. They actually would have rather been back in Egypt eating all the food they wanted.

Exodus 16:3 says, "The Israelites said to them [Moses and Aaron] “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 brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.””

Can you imagine them acting like this?!  "I wish we had died in Egypt!  At least we had foooood!" 

So dramatic. (We’d never act like that…wink wink)

But God hears His people and tells Moses that He will rain down bread from heaven for them.

Exodus 16:14-15 says, "When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat.””

Manna literally means "What?" I think it's kind of funny. They didn't know what these thin flakes on the ground were when they woke up the next morning. They were like, "What??" "Ma-nuh?"  So, that's what it is called. Manna. 

"The manna was like coriander seed and looked like resin.  The people went around gathering it, and ground it in a handmill or crushed it in a mortar.  They cooked it in a pot or made it into cakes. And it tasted like something made with olive oil." (Numbers 11:7-8)

It was going to be enough to get them through that one day. They couldn't hoard it. This wasn't for a feast. It couldn't be stored for later use, except for the Sabbath days.

This was God's providence and mercy. 

So, they ate this manna every day for the rest of their journey. Eventually, they got sick of eating manna. (Man, this is so like us, isn’t it??) They grew tired of God’s provision, compassion, and mercy in this form. They were complaining about the lack of meat, cucumbers, melons, onions, leeks, and garlic. “But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” (Numbers 11:6)

God sends a wind out and it brings quail in from the sea. A lot of quail. They gathered plenty of quail, but God was angry and they were struck by a plague and buried the people who were craving other food.

I probably would have been buried. I would have been complaining about manna.

What mercy has God provided for us that we’ve grown tired of and/or complained about? Do we even see mercy in His provision?