The Bread of Heaven

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The Bread of Heaven Exodus 15:22-17:7 Justin Deeter — July 5, 2015

Introduction It was a dumb idea. I was in college and all my friends were doing it. I group of my friends decided together that we needed to start getting healthier in our lifestyle. The freshmen 15 grew into the sophomore 30. My roommates and I decided that we were going to get serious about dieting, and we decided that the best option is to calorie count. We pulled out our iPhones and downloaded the first calorie tracker that we could find. We put in our age, gender, current weight, goal weight, and then the goal date. Then the app calculates how many calories you are allowed to eat a day. As a college student who lived off of junk food and the taco bell drive through, 2,000 calories a day sounded like some sort of cruel joke. The first few days we were all doing well, logging in every item we ate and carefully making sure we did not exceed our goals. However, one of our friends was having a big celebration coming up at Outback Steak House. We had to attend, so we jumped on the website and starting seeing what we could order that would fit in with our calorie allowance for that day. We decided that we were simply going to fast the rest of the day and save all of our calories for a juicy ribeye, mashed potatoes, and green beans (I still remember this meal to this day). We all went the rest of the day with our stomachs growling, knowing that at the end of the day we would get to cut off a bite of juicy steak and plop it into our mouths. The evening finally came. As soon as we walked into the restaurant the aroma was intoxicating. After ordering and waiting for what felt like eternity, I finally was able to take a bite. It was glorious.

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The sad part is, that for those of us who live in America skipping a meal or two is probably the closest to true hunger we’ve ever experienced. All around the world are people who are starving because they don’t have food. Food is necessary for life, and when we don’t get it, our bodies eat themselves and we die. We need food to survive. An image the Bible uses to describe our need for satisfaction is that of hunger. We need to eat food, yet there is a much deeper need we have. Not only do we get physically hungry, but we are spiritually hungry as well. When it comes to our own souls we are famished and we need our hunger to be satisfied. Today we are going to see how the grumbling Israelites doubt God’s provision for their physical needs. In addition we are going to see that we have a deeper spiritual hunger that can only be satisfied by the greater bread who comes down from heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Israel’s Grumbling and God’s Provision So the people have come out of the land of Egypt. They just celebrated the power and victory of God as the Egyptian army was hurled to their destruction in the red sea. However, the victory party is short lived. As soon as the people begin to depart from the red sea, three days in and there was no water. Thus begins the incredible grumbling against God and Moses’ leadership that will dominate the second half of Exodus. The main focus of their grumbling in Exodus 15-17 is over food and water.

Bitter Water Made Sweet (Ex 15:22-27) So as the people come to Marah, they are thirsty. They see a water source. I’m sure excited they run to it only to find that the water isn’t fit for drinking. It is bitter. So the people go to Moses grumbling, “What shall we drink?”. Then God tells Moses to throw in a log, and as he threw the log into the water source, it became sweet. God’s people grumble, God provides. That will be the recurring pattern. God’s people are rescued to worship. God has called them to be his people so that they might listen to his voice. In

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15:26 God tells them that they will be tested for their obedience to his word. God says, “If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer.” (Exodus 15:26, ESV) So God is going to test his people’s obedience and trust in his provision. We will find out that the people are not up for the test. They are going to fail miserably. Yet, God is going to be gracious.

Bread From Heaven (Ex 16:1-36) So the people continue on their journey and as they are wandering in the wilderness, the people begin to grumble again. Their stomachs are rumbling with the pains of hunger. They take their complaints to Moses and Aaron and said, “would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Wow, the people long for Egypt. They wish the Lord would have killed them like the Egyptians. At least in Egypt that had meat and bread. So, God being patient and merciful gives his people careful instructions on what is about to take place. God is going to provide for the people by providing bread from heaven. The instructions are intentional, remember God is going to test the obedience of his people. Each day as they wake up and they are to go out and collect a days portion of the bread that God will provide. In the evening, God would bring quail so that the people could eat meat. On the sixth day, they will collect enough for two days so they can honor the sabbath day.

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Moses and Aaron tell the people that this is so that the people might see the glory of the Lord. Their grumbling is not against Moses and Aaron, but against God himself. Yet, we are told that some of the people could not follow instructions very well. Some tried to keep some for the next day, and it bred worms and stank. Others, did not keep the Sabbath. Some people got up on the 7th day to go look for food. Here we see God’s gracious care for his grumbling people. God provides for this stiff-necked people. It is easy for us to look at the Israelites and throw stones, but we are just the same are we not? How many times have you doubted God’s ability to provide? While we were in Ukraine, one of the men we were able to meet was Pastor Sasha. He was great man of God and he was speaking to us one day about his own call to ministry. He was wrestling over whether to leave his job and become a church planter. He was talking to a friend and he asked him, “When have you ever gone to bed hungry?” Pastor Sasha began to think, and even on the worst days he always went to bed with something in his stomach. Then his friend turned to ask him a following question, “What makes you think God will stop providing when you follow His will?” Christian, we are faced with the same question. When has any of us in this room ever gone to bed without something in our stomachs? We have been blessed with wealth and food. God provides for us our daily bread, and yet we have the audacity to grumble that he does not give us the lifestyle we demand. Just like the Israelites we complain about the size of our paycheck. We lament over being passed over for a promotion. We are paralyzed with fear when the conversation around the water cooler is the rumor of new layoffs at the company. Do we not too grumble and complain against God? Yet, he continually to provides us with our daily breed. He gives us our necessities, yet we are so sinful to demand from God our wants.

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Water From the Rock (Ex 17:1-7) The final episode is another instance of grumbling. The people are continuing their travels and they begin to get thirsty again. They quarrel with Moses saying, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” Moses chastises them for testing the Lord. Notice the irony, the Lord is supposed to be testing Israel, not the other way around. They continue to doubt the power and provision of God. “Is the Lord among us or not?”, they ask. Yet, God continues to patiently listen to the grumbling of his people. Moses goes to the Lord and tells him, “What am I to do with this people, they are getting ready to stone me!” Moses is then given instructions to strike the rock with his staff and water would shoot out for drinking. Moses does what the Lord said, and the people are given water. So we see this pattern occur. People complain, grumble, and disobey God. God is gracious to provides for his people. This pattern occurs just as much today as it does to the wilderness generation. In fact, the same thing happens to Jesus.

The Bread of Life Jesus had amassed quite a following. As he is traveling the countryside a large crowd began to follow him. That had seen Jesus do some healings on the sick and decided to follow him around to see what else he could do. Seeing the large crowd Jesus turns to Phillip, one of his disciples and asks him what are they going to do to feed these people? There are far to many people here and there is no food nearby. Yet, Jesus said this to test Phillip. Phillip responds that even though if we had 200 denennari (which was about one days wage) they could not feed all of these people. So Andrew comes up to Jesus and says he has a boy who had five barley loaves and two fish. This is barley enough to count as a lunchable, let alone feed over 5,000 people. Jesus has the people sit down and as the food is distributed it keeps going and going. In fact every one there had plenty to eat. There was so much food there was even some leftover! The people watching what was happening

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were amazed at this sign. Now this was the show they had been waiting for from Jesus. A miraculous sign, plus they get free food! The disciples went on ahead and Jesus ends up meeting them by taking a stroll on the water! Amazing, but not the focus for now. So the crowd wakes up the next day and sees that Jesus is gone, but his boat is still there. What gives? So the crowd gets some boats and chases after Jesus. Ok, so maybe that “if you feed them they will come” thing is a little too true. This crowd is like a stray cat. You feed them one time and they never leave you alone. The people end up finally catching up with Jesus and they ask them how he got there. Jesus isn’t interested in answering their question and he cuts straight to their motives. He tells the crowd that they are not seeking him for his sake. They just want another meal. They were so impressed by the feeding of the 5000 thing that they want to see him do it again. Jesus, always seeing a teaching opportunity tells them not to seek after bread that perishes, but to seek food that endures to eternal life. You see that juicy steak was eventually digested over night and the next morning I woke up hungry for breakfast. Even though we may eat most exquisite dishes in the world we still get hungry. Even the greatest culinary expert can’t cook up a meal that permanently satisfies. Just like food we spend our lives searching and looking for temporary things that just don’t satisfy us. We are chasing after the wind. The crowd is getting a little frustrated with Jesus starting to get to “preachy”, so they ask him, “ok, what do we have to do to get the magic show started up again”. Jesus tells them, “Your missing the point. The point is not the sign, but the one to whom the sign points. The purpose of that meal I gave you is so that you might believe in me.” This crowd must have been made up of teenage boys with one thing on their mind — food. They turn to Jesus and say again, “What sign will you

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perform. You know God fed our people in the wilderness with mana. Can you pull that off again, it is starting to get lunch time again.” Does this sound so familiar? Isn’t this the Israelites in the wilderness all over again? Grumbling and complaining to the son of God, demanding more food. Jesus, who is trying to get the crowd to think about something else behind their stomach, attempts to help them see the purpose of his coming. The true bread that we need isn’t mana from heaven, but the son of God come down from heaven to give life to the world. The crowd can’t get beyond their growing stomachs and ask Jesus for this bread always. Just like this crowd many of us follow after Jesus for no other reason than to get stuff from Jesus. If I show up to church, my dysfunctional family will be fixed. If I give my money to Jesus, then I will get a brand new ipad. If I read my Bible that I’ll find a spouse. We think that Jesus is just some cosmic vending machine to give us exactly what we want, all the while never having any love for Jesus, just the stuff he gives us. Some of us follow Jesus for the show. We show up at church, and like this crowd we demand to be entertained. I want to rock to an awesome band with wailing guitar solos, a funny speaker that talks about how great I am, great videos with some sort of hollywood movie reference, and maybe a skit shamelessly stollen and spiritualized from Saturday Night Live. So many of us, just like this crowd miss the point completely. Jesus isn’t a means to our ends, but he is the end in and of itself. If we are not following Jesus out of love than we are not really following him. If we don’t see him as what we truly need and if we don’t believe he is the true bread that satisfied our spiritual hunger then we are just as lost as this crowd. Jesus wanted this crowd to understand, and for us too to know that only he can satisfy us. He is the bread of life.

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“Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger..Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”” (John 6:35–51, ESV) Jesus then begins to teach the crowd the real purpose that the comes. Jesus doesn’t come to give us stuff or to fill our stomachs. He comes to give us a lasting, permanent, and eternal satisfaction. He is the greater mana. He is the one who has come down from heaven. Those in the wilderness years the the mana and they died. The things of this world cannot provide the nourishment we need for eternal sustenance. Jesus is the living bread that gives life. Jesus states boldly that if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And this bread that he gives to us is the bread of his own flesh. For most of us though, we are starving. The human body can go a long time without food, but it can’t go on forever. If you stop feeding your body, the body begins changing is metabolic processes. After six hours without eating our body starts to tap into some of our glucose reserves to keep our body fueled. When those glucose reserves start to be eliminated after 24-48 hours, not only do we begin to get hangry, but our body has to look for some energy to keep us fueled. After 3 days without food your body begins to enter into Ketosis, a process in which your body produces energy from fatty acids. On day three your hungry body begins to survive from these ketone bodies. After 72 hours of no eating your body begins to turn to autophagy. Literally, your body starts to eat itself. Your body begins to break down the proteins in your muscle tissue in order to survives. Your body begins to slow down and tries to conserve energy as much as possible. People can survive for up to three weeks or even seventy days without food. Yet, when the body gets to the stage of autophagy the immune system begins to get so weak you become incredibly susceptible to infection and disease.1

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If we don’t eat, we die. The same goes for spiritual nourishment. We can live a long time without consuming any spiritual food and perhaps we could live for as long as 100 years. Yet, death is coming for us and not just physical, but a spiritual death. Not only do our bodies need food, but our souls need lasting nutrition. We need the bread that comes down from heaven, Jesus Christ. Even though we have a great need for physical bread, our most pressing need is for the bread of life. This is the point Jesus is stressing to the crowd and it is the point we must understand as well. The crowd is confused by Jesus’ teaching and they ask him, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” The crowd thinks Jesus is asking them to partake in cannibalism in the literal eating of his flesh. Jesus, seeing their confusion and intentionally makes them more confused by taking the cannibalism idea and running with it. Here his language starts to get really strange. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”” (John 6:53–58, ESV) Now is the point in the sermon where Jesus gives the alter call to this very confused crowd and its a bizarre call. Jesus charges the crowd that unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood you will have no life in you. Those who eat of the flesh eat true food and abides in Jesus. Whoever eats of Jesus, this bread that came down from heaven, they will live forever. I’ve witnessed many invitations and alter calls by pastors in my life time, but this is the strangest one by far. I doubt Jesus is going to get many decision cards filled

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out. In fact, many of Jesus’ disciples were offended by him and turned away from him after this difficult word and teaching (Jn 6:66). The crowd is more confused and offended than ever and say, “who can listen to it?” The crowds cry is one heard all across the American church. Jesus your going to deep and your becoming too polarizing. The crowd tells Jesus, “Go back to doing the magic tricks and putting on a show for our entertainment. We didn’t come to you for deep teaching we came to you to get a free loaf of bread.” As we look at the shallowness of western evangelicalism is it any wonder why so many people leave our churches spiritually hungry. Many of our churches structure themselves to give people their felt needs and refuse to offer the polarizing command, “come and eat his flesh and drink his blood”. Jesus isn’t content with remaining shallow and he isn’t content with just drawing a crowd for the crowds sake. He doesn’t care how large the crowd may be. If they are not taking of the bread of life, they are missing the point. This stubborn, grumbling crowd just wants bread. Yet, Jesus loves them to much to be content with mana from heaven. He offends their sensibilities and shatters their taboos by his shocking language. He does so to wake them up and to help them see their spiritual need. They need to eat his flesh and drink his blood. There is no other way we can truly live.

Final Thoughts You see, God is not content to just give you bread and water. He isn’t just concerned with providing you mana, but he is longs to give you the mana that comes from heaven. Do not be like the grumbling Israelites in the wilderness or the grumbling crowd following Jesus demanding from God things that do not eternally satisfy. Rather, come to Christ and eat of this bread who has come down from the heaven. Eat of His flesh and drink of his blood. Take for yourself by faith and receive the Gospel promises of God. Then and only then will you find your sins forgiven and your life satisfied. Though you are a grumbling, disobedient complainer — God gives you the flesh of His only begotten son for you.

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Today, if you do not know Christ, do not turn away from him as so many of that crowd did in John 6. Do not continue in your grumbling and complaining as Israel would. Turn from your sin and trust in Christ. Trust in the provision of God as he gives you his son. Today, Eat His flesh and drink his blood. © 2015 Forest Hills Baptist Church

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