Category: BIBLE/SCRIPTURE

Anyone, anywhere, or even everywhere, people who call themselves believers in God, know the story of the manna. It was a miracle way to feed the wandering Israelites.

I’ve always imagined or heard it was a bland tasting food that was not very interesting and was boring to eat.

But that is not what Scripture says. Scripture actually says, “It was like coriander seed, white, and it tasted like wafers in honey.”

God told them the protocol of the manna, which is about three point seventh of a quart, or one tenth of an ephah, or about thirty five liters.

The instructions were quote, “let one omer be kept throughout the ages, in order that they may see the bread that I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out from the land of Egypt.”

We all know they gathered manna for six days but had leftovers to eat on the seventh.

But just like today many of those believers didn’t believe. Remember, you didn’t work on the Sabbath. This was God’s orders.

The Sabbath was the Lord’s Day, set aside for only Him.

Moses of course, told them what God’s orders were, and he told them more than once! They should not and would not collect the manna on the seventh day.

But what did they do? Some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather their daily manna – but they found nothing.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Remember, it only took one month for the Israelites to disregard the fact that God had planned and accomplished their complete escape from the Egyptians.

You remember, God annihilated the entire Egyptian army for them.

Humans sure tend to have very short memories.

We certainly know that none of this took God by surprise. But for man’s sake God asked the question, “How long will you men refuse to obey My commandments”?

To this point God has given the Israelites very few commandments. They were to circumcise all males, remember and keep the Passover, and now to observe the Sabbath.

Yet, even after all God has done for them, they keep forgetting to do what God asks.

It’s interesting because, after all this time and all that God’s Word teaches us, man still does not do it God’s way. Humans tend to think they are smarter than God.

But, finally the Israelites learned their lesson on gathering food on the Sabbath. They then remained inactive on the Sabbath.

The Israelites ate manna for forty years
until they came to a settled land,
they ate the manna until they came
to the border of the land of Canaan.

Think about it, God had to be patient and teach the Israelites the lesson of His complete care of them for forty years until they came to the borders of Canaan.

But while they were still wandering they had their third crisis.

They had just left the wilderness of Sin, they encamped at Rephidem, where once again there was no water.

Those Israelites, with their short memory were mad again. They forgot that God gave them water for all their kin. And now they are as mad as a hen. Now they were mad at Moses again. He of course was the one to blame cause once again they forgot God’s name. But let’s not be proud, let us not be smug or we’ll bury ourselves in that hole we dug.

⇛ continue reading Exodus – Part 44
⇛ return to Exodus

Exodus to this point has been all about God extricating the Israelites from under the cruel hand of Pharaoh.

God performed the greatest miracle when he parted the sea for the Israelites to walk between walls of water and then destroy the entire Egyptian army.

And only three days later when the Israelites hit a glitch in the road they forgot all about God’s miraculous works.

We would love to say how dumb they were and that we certainly would have never turned our backs on God but sad to say not many of us have a good enough memory to just believe God. We get led astray just as easily as the Israelites but our turning way doesn’t normally have critical physical life or death concerns.

While weeping and moaning they said, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread.

Wow!  Their memories are enhanced, and their exaggerations are enormous.

It may overwhelm us at times but liberty does come with a price. It’s the price of self–reliance, not the free handouts that eventually enslave us.

But because they encountered a few days of discomfort they stated, You have brought us out into the wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death.

But God has an answer.  He told Moses He would rain down bread to you from the sky and the people should go out each day and gather that day’s portion. We of course know that bread is Manna.

God explained to Moses that this test was to see whether they will follow my instructions or not.

There two different thoughts as to why God chose to gift them with their sustenance.

One thought is God was testing to see if the people’s faith will trust God to provide them with enough food for every day or God may be testing them to see if they will believe in Him when they are doing well.

It’s sad to say but some people only seem to need God when their life is on the downturn and not when they are doing well.

In this age of Grace our test is whether we believe our salvation is strictly tied to our faith in Christ’s ability to save us by His death on the cross.  But there are those people who only turn to God when they are down on their luck.

The instruction for the manna were they would collect it for only six days but when they gather the days portion on the sixth day they will find they actually got double portions for that day and they will not have to collect on the seventh day, the Sabbath.

And the Moses reminds the Israelites that even though they are directing their grumbling to Moses and Aaron they are actually grumbling against the Lord.

And now, once again, the Lord is taking responsibility for all the miracles that have happened to the Israelites.

And now, once again He has heard their grumbling and He is going to take care of the Israelites so they may know His is the Lord.

The Lord told them in the morning you will have your bread and in the evening you will eat flesh.

Here we thought they were just getting bread and  we probably would quote them and say, “man cannot live by bread alone, we need jelly for that bread”.

But God did not wait for then to say they could not just eat bread. He was now supplying them with meat.

Every evening quail would appear for their evening meal.

In the morning there was a fall of dew in the camp and when the dew lifted there was a substance, a fine and flaky substance, and this was the bread which the Lord had given.

They were commanded to gather as much of it as each required to eat.

When the Israelites gathered the manna they were not consistent. Some gathered a little, some gathered a lot.

But when it was measured the person who gathered much ended up with no excess and he who gathered a little ended up with no deficiency.

Moses told them they could not save any of it until morning.

I suppose some wanted to gather a weeks worth and store it up so they didn’t have to go get it each day.

And of course, even though they heard Moses instructions, they disobeyed them.

When it was left until morning it became infested with maggots and stank.

And Moses got angry with them.

They finally got the point, and only gathered enough that they would eat.

But on the sixth day they were told to gather a double portion so they would not work on the Sabbath.

And low and behold it did not turn rancid, it did not get maggots and it did not stink.

⇛ continue reading Exodus – Part 43
⇛ return to Exodus

God parted the sea and allowed the Israelites passage on dry land to escape the Egyptian army. Only three days later, the Israelites couldn’t find water and began to doubt Moses and the Lord. They found a water source, but its waters were bitter and undrinkable. For this reason they called that place Marah. Immediately, the people began to grumble against Moses. They had just walked through walls of water, on dry land through the sea yet they doubted God. He did not provide good drinking water for them.  “Oh, woe is us!” But did they ask for God’s help? Oh no, they cried and whined and blamed Moses. Moses cried out to the Lord, and God told him to find a certain piece of wood and throw it into the water. He obeyed, and the waters of Marah became good. It’s easy for us to be critical of the Israeli’s choice to turn from God because they were disappointed.

But did you ever stop to consider how short our own attention span is. Sometimes it’s easy to complain about a situation when we’ve only had problems for three hours or less! Do we ever stop to think what could be written about us if we were in Scriptures? When we stop trusting in the goodness of God and see only our own limited resources, we can become bitter and even blame God.

We are no different than the Israelites except in our own minds.

What does God say? “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God”.  It’s pompous when we think we are better than others.

After finding the wood that made the bitter water sweet they continued their journey.

They came to Elin, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees, and there they camped beside the water.

Next they came to the wilderness of sin. This is between Elin and Sinai. This was the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt.

This means that it was only a little over a month since they sang that song of gratitude at God’s triumph over the Egyptians. And what are they doing? Well, they are loud and vocal complaining that they would rather be back in Egypt.

I guess it was easy to forget what captivity and making bricks was really like!

And it wasn’t just a few people who complained, it was the entire group!

We all like to think if we saw a miracle it would bring us closer to God.

Remember, we are just as bad as the Jews and miracles don’t necessarily convert to faith in God.

Think about it:  We live with miracles everyday. The birth of a baby, love, music, a body that heals itself! What isn’t a miracle? And yet these don’t bring people closer to God. They just call it nature and expect it! Quoting the Israelites, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread.”​

It’s obvious by these statements that the human mind can make up its own stories.

This wasn’t the situation in which the Israelites were living.

The problem is their short memories and the fact that they did not have to provide for themselves in Egypt, no matter how meager the rations.

It seems most people prefer to be taken care of – even at the price of losing their freedom.

⇛ continue reading Exodus – Part 42
⇛ return to Exodus

God’s victory over the Egyptians in the Red Sea provoked men and angels to sing a song of God’s victory in protecting His chosen people.

The verse that follows the song then talks about Moses’s sister Miriam.

It tells us Miriam took a timbrel in her hand.

But it does not just describe what she did, it describes who she was. This is the first time in Scripture that Miriam was described as a prophetess.

A prophet or a prophetess is actually a spokesperson for God.

All we knew about Miriam previously is the fact that she was the sister who watched over baby Moses when he was placed in a basket in the Nile River.

Actually, Miriam is the only woman who is described as a prophetess in the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible.

So this prophetess took that timbrel in hand to dance and then others went out to dance with her, with their timbrels.

Think about it, the Israelites were leaving Egypt to follow Moses and Aaron and they took their musical instruments, supposedly for such an occasion.

They were confident they would have a reason to celebrate victory – and they did!

If you wondered, as I did what a timbrel is, it is nothing more than a tambourine. I imagined this was what it was, but I had to check because I just could not imagine a woman older than Moses dancing with a tambourine.

But Scripture goes on to say Miriam chanted for them:

She chanted the words “Sing to the Lord, for He was triumphed gloriously”.

It was after this that Moses instructed the Israelites to leave that area. Out they went into the wilderness of Shur.

They traveled for three days and found no water.

That’s when the complaining began.

What short memories human beings have. They were given a gigantic miracle with their enemy destroyed and now they lost all faith in God’s desire to take care of them and make them His people.

This was only three days away from the most inspiring miracle they had ever seen in their lives and now they are complaining about an inconvenience.

In fact, on this short journey to Mt Sinai they complained four different times for four different situations.

Human nature is amazing, and sorry to say, we are not exempt.

They get a miracle and the next day they forget about what has been done and they cry concerning their next inconvenience.

They are, and we do, basically forget what God had done and say, “none of that is impressive, what are you going to do for me now.”

Their next stop was at Marah, where there was water, but they couldn’t drink it.

Marah is actually the word for bitter and that word described that oasis to a ’T’.

Because of all the complaining and frustration Moses cried out to the Lord and once again the Lord provided a miracle.

The Lord showed Moses a piece of wood and when Moses threw it into the water, the water became sweet.

This is miracle number two during the freeing of the Israelites from slavery.

It was at this site where Moses built a statute and a law.

It was there that God told the people, “If you will heed the Lord your God diligently, doing what is upright in His sight, Giving ear to His commandments, and keeping, all  His laws, then I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians, for I the Lord are your healer.”

It is important to take note here. God did not say the Jews would have no diseases. He said He would not bring upon them any of the diseases He brought upon the Israelites.

And as much as people want to read what they would like into that verse, We cannot hold God to what he did not say.

⇛ continue reading Exodus – Part 41
⇛ return to Exodus

If we could read and understand  the Hebrew language we would read and understand and probably really enjoy the first 19 verses in Chapter 15 of Genesis. These verses were written in beautiful Hebrew language.

In fact, this is one section from the Bible sung in Hebrew. This, according to verse one states, “Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord.”

In the Talmud, there is a passage that says, “The angels too, broke out in song when the Egyptians were drowning in the sea.

But then the Talmud says God rebuked them for singing songs while the Egyptians died.

Do we or should we rejoice in the destruction of our enemy? The Jews check the Talmud to know the answer to that question.

God does not rebuke Moses and the Israelites for singing, He only rebukes the angels for singing. God evidently does not hold people to the same high standards the angels are to possess.

But the Talmud is not direct revelation from God  as our Scriptures are.

The Talmud is a collection of writings that covers the full gamut of  Jewish law and tradition.  It was not compiled and edited until between the third and sixth centuries.

The main text of the Talmud is the Mishnah, a collection of terse teachings written in Hebrew, redacted by Rabbi Yehudah the Prince, in the years following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Over the next several hundred years, the rabbis continued to teach and expound on these teachings. 

Many of those teachings were collected into the Jerusalem Talmud, which contained the teachings of the rabbis in the Land of Israel.

The Talmud was therefore, not direct revelation from God as the Holy Scriptures are. It is a compiled list of what is appropriate for the general population of the Jews.

The Jews believe there is the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old  Testament, and also the Oral Torah that helps us understand the Torah.

They believe that just before the giving of the Torah God tells Moses that He will give him “the stone tablets, the Torah and the commandments.”

This leads us to wonder, what is the difference between them?

On Mount Sinai, Moses received both the law of God and a precise set of instructions for the sacrificial system. These were to form the basis of the religious ceremonies of the Israelites.

Both sets of instructions were called the law, but they were different in that the law of Ten Commandments defined what sin was, whereas the ceremonial law contained the solution to the sin problem. God wrote the Ten Commandments, and Moses wrote the ceremonial law, or book of the law.

Exodus 31:18 says, “And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”

Then Exodus 32:16 says,“And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.”

Then in Deuteronomy 10:1-2 we read: When Moses returned from meeting with God on Sinai he found that the Israelites had made for themselves a golden calf to worship. Moses was so angry that he broke the tablets of stone. Then God said to him, “Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and come up unto me into the mount, and make thee an ark of wood. And I will write on the tables the words that were in the first tables which thou brakest, and thou shalt put them in the ark.”

Moses commanded the Levites to take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee

The Ceremonial Law of types and ceremonies was written by Moses in the book of the law, and was placed beside the table of stone in the Ark.

These two sets of laws, the one moral and the other ceremonial, were thus entirely different and served different purposes.

And then there is The Oral Torah. It is like an owner’s manual and or a companion guide to the Torah.

With it we can understand what the Torah mean, and determine the details of the various commandments.

They are convinced that just before the giving of the Torah on Mt Sinai, God tells Moses that He will give him “the stone tablets and the Torah”.

By adding the word “commandments” in addition to the Torah, God implies that there are commandments not included in the Torah.

These are the oral commandments that were passed down from generation to generation, from Moses to Joshua and then down to the leaders and sages of each generation until eventually, after the destruction of the Second Temple, they were written down in what is known  as the Mishnah.

How much easier life is in this “age of Grace”. We have Paul’s writing telling us what God will do for us and what we are encouraged to do for Him.

For by Grace are we saved…
We don’t have to study all the books telling us what to read or how to live.

Praise to God for accepting our simple faith.

⇛ continue reading Exodus – Part 40
⇛ return to Exodus