Bible Reading for September 14 – Exodus 16:31-36

“If I could just see a miracle, then I’d believe in God.” Maybe you’ve heard that, or even said something like that yourself. Maybe you think that if you could just have seen Jesus multiply the loaves and fishes or walk on water or heal the sick or cast out demons or raise Lazarus from the dead that faith would be easy for you.

Except that many of the people who saw those things didn’t come to faith in Christ, at least not right away. Some of the Pharisees saw Jesus heal a man with a withered hand, but their reaction was to try to kill Jesus. And the disciples who handed out the loaves and fishes He multiplied, well, they all ran off and left Him when He was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. Where it comes to faith in God, seeing is not necessarily believing.

The same thing is true of the way God provided miraculous food for His people in the desert. Oh, we can look up “coriander seed” and get a general idea of what it must have looked like. We can discover that an omer amounts to about half a gallon, and that the Hebrew word translated as “jar” can mean any sort of vessel. In other words, we can form a mental picture of a small basket of white seeds, and we can understand that God told Moses to keep it.

But none of that really explains what the manna was – in fact, its very name in Hebrew means, “What is it?” The fact is that the people who saw it and tasted it every day for 40 years didn’t know what they were eating. And as we’ve seen in this chapter, just seeing the manna didn’t make the people trust in God. Some tried to save it until the next day, and others tried to gather it on the Sabbath, even though God had specifically told them not to do either of those things.

And of course the people wouldn’t experience the miracle of manna forever. After their wandering in the wilderness was over, after they entered into the Promised Land, God stopped giving the manna to them. After that, they would have to do the same thing we do where it comes to all the Biblical miracles – they would have to remember what God had done for them in the past. And that’s why God told Moses to keep a half-gallon of it – not so that the people could analyze it or come to understand it, but just so the people would remember.

And their memories of God’s miraculous provision did the same thing for them that reading about these miracles does for us: such memories give us fuel for our faith in God. For the mighty acts of God on behalf of His people witness to His power and His love, His might and His mercy, His justice and His grace. And as we remember all the ways God has corrected us and protected us in our own lives, we too can learn to trust Him more, even if we don’t understand very much of what He is doing.

Exodus 16:31-36 (ESV)

31 Now the house of Israel called its name manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.
32 Moses said, “This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations, so that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.'”
33 And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar, and put an omer of manna in it, and place it before the LORD to be kept throughout your generations.”
34 As the LORD commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the testimony to be kept.
35 The people of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land. They ate the manna till they came to the border of the land of Canaan.
36 (An omer is the tenth part of an ephah.)