BACK TO COMPLAINING
VI.
Time columnist Joe Klein reported in the most recent issue of the magazine that Oxford Encyclopedias put us in the post truth era. This was based on a lot of things, largely the leanings of people toward believing anything that gets posted on the internet especially the most sensational mentality fed on untruths.
Today, Dec 16, in his last news conference, President Obama pointed out that Russian Hackers did not physically effect the election, but warned that "when a domestic source" keeps preaching that everyone in power is evil, it creates a divided country where hating Democrats led to people who previously opposed Putin to ignore the President Elect's openly admiring stance. In my words, that the notion of post truth is that people can be led to betray their principles by the steady application of hate and lies and complaint even during an economic upturn.
What seems to underpin this mentality is constant complaining about flaws in whatever "the other side" believes. Guns kill people but they are okay so long as the right people get killed, but when the innocent die it is because they didn't have guns. And the right to use guns supersedes the right to object to the right to use guns. Or the idea of banning them supersedes the judicious passage of restraining laws. It doesn't matter if there are statistics to prove one side or the other so long as someone can make up their own stats or twist them to fit their idea of the truth. And add some sort of scandalous idea to the mix. Just complain and complain and people will believe something is actually wrong. Or true.
Here, we continue to get a close up of God's feelings about constant complaining.
We paused on the water and now we get to the food,
#4 – The people complained about being hungry; God gave them Manna – Exodus 16:1-4 This is when your spiritual growth produces greater hunger. However, its the not the earthly food we are used to; God begins to feed you with heavenly food.
Ex 16:1 And they went on their way from Elim, and all the children of Israel came into the waste land of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they went out of the land of Egypt.
2 And all the children of Israel were crying out against Moses and Aaron in the waste land:
3 And the children of Israel said to them, It would have been better for the Lord to have put us to death in the land of Egypt, where we were seated by the flesh-pots and had bread enough for our needs; for you have taken us out to this waste of sand, to put all this people to death through need of food.
4 Then the Lord said to Moses, See, I will send down bread from heaven for you; and the people will go out every day and get enough for the day's needs; so that I may put them to the test to see if they will keep my laws or not.
5 And on the sixth day they are to make ready what they get in, and it will be twice as much as they get on the other days.
6 And Moses and Aaron said to all the children of Israel, This evening it will be clear to you that it is the Lord who has taken you out of the land of Egypt:
7 And in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord; for your angry words against the Lord have come to his ears: and what are we that you are crying out against us?
8 And Moses said, The Lord will give you meat for your food at evening, and in the morning bread in full measure; for your outcry against the Lord has come to his ears: for what are we? your outcry is not against us but against the Lord.
9 And Moses said to Aaron, Say to all the people of Israel, Come near before the Lord for he has given ear to your outcry.
10 And while Aaron was talking to the children of Israel, their eyes were turned in the direction of the waste land, and they saw the glory of the Lord shining in the cloud.
11 And the Lord said to Moses,
12 The outcry of the children of Israel has come to my ears: say to them now, At nightfall you will have meat for your food, and in the morning bread in full measure; and you will see that I am the Lord your God.
13 And it came about that in the evening little birds came up and the place was covered with them: and in the morning there was dew all round about the tents.
14 And when the dew was gone, on the face of the earth was a small round thing, like small drops of ice on the earth.
15 And when the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, What is it? for they had no idea what it was. And Moses said to them, It is the bread which the Lord has given you for your food.
16 This is what the Lord has said, Let every man take up as much as he has need of; at the rate of one omer for every person, let every man take as much as is needed for his family.
17 And the children of Israel did so, and some took more and some less.
18 And when it was measured, he who had taken up much had nothing over, and he who had little had enough; every man had taken what he was able to make use of.
19 And Moses said to them, Let nothing be kept till the morning.
20 But they gave no attention to Moses, and some of them kept it till the morning and there were worms in it and it had an evil smell: and Moses was angry with them.
21 And they took it up morning by morning, every man as he had need: and when the sun was high it was gone.
22 And on the sixth day they took up twice as much of the bread, two omers for every person: and all the rulers of the people gave Moses word of it.
23 And he said, This is what the Lord has said, Tomorrow is a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord: what has to be cooked may be cooked; and what is over, put on one side to be kept till the morning.
24 And they kept it till the morning as Moses had said: and no smell came from it, and it had no worms.
25 And Moses said, Make your meal today of what you have, for this day is a Sabbath to the Lord: today you will not get any in the fields.
26 For six days you will get it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.
27 But still on the seventh day some of the people went out to get it, and there was not any.
28 And the Lord said to Moses, How long will you go against my orders and my laws?
29 See, because the Lord has given you the Sabbath, he gives you on the sixth day bread enough for two days; let every man keep where he is; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.
30 So the people took their rest on the seventh day.
(BBE)
The wasteland. Sin creates the wasteland. We talked earlier how man refusing to keep a nomadic life as God said he should led to the Sahara, a vast grassland, a fertile plain, turned to a desert. Sin which seems to always involve a life lived for a false god, be it external or the god of self, is a wasteland for the soul.
In the wasteland, in the depth of sin, the water of the of life is missing. The bread of life is missing. God must sweeten the water that does flow there to allow it to bring life giving moisture. And, in the sin wasteland, He must provide food to eat, the bread of life, and the meat of nature that still survives, the wild birds of the land. Afterall, thousands walk together in desolation and the only way to feed them all lies in His hands. They won't be able to grow food in time to save the suddenly freed people. If they begin to hunt, all the food in the wasteland will be foraged out in short time. They see this: we must understand it, too. There really isn't enough food for normal human effort to feed them.
Human vision sees a terrible difficulty or even a slight problem, and complain about the terrible thing going on.
"The milk is sour how could the fridge not keep it for a week?"
"The economy collapsed but we recovered, but now I don't have millions, just a job and no real good retirement anymore, what will I do?"
Spiritual vision sees that this is temporary. I recall the story of a young Christian in the Russian military during the Communist administration who expressed his love for Christ and was sent out into the biter cold without a coat and gloves and told he would be let back inside when he denied Christ. He miraculously survived the first time but eventually died from the cold rather than deny Jesus.
They have seen God peel back the Red Sea like it was a banana skin and yet they still don't understand He can do anything and His power will always save them. They can't see with spiritual vision only with human vision.
32-36. Fill an omer of it to be kept for your generations--The mere fact of such a multitude being fed for forty years in the wilderness, where no food of any kind is to be obtained, will show the utter impossibility of their subsisting on a natural production of the kind and quantity as this tarfa-gum [see on JFB for Ex 16:13]; and, as if for the purpose of removing all such groundless speculations, Aaron was commanded to put a sample of it in a pot--a golden pot (Heb 9:4) --
Heb 9:1 Now the first agreement had its rules of worship, and a holy order.
2 For the first Tent was made ready, having in it the vessels for the lights and the table and the ordering of the bread; and this is named the holy place.
3 And inside the second veil was the place which is named the Holy of holies;
4 Having a vessel of gold in it for burning perfumes, and the ark of the agreement, which was covered with gold and which had in it a pot made of gold for the manna, and Aaron's rod which put out buds, and the stones with the writing of the agreement;
(BBE)
(Everything that showed God's person to those without the indwelling Spirit was located in that "holy of holies.")
to be laid before the Testimony, to be kept for future generations, that they might see the bread on which the Lord fed their fathers in the wilderness. But we have the bread of which that was merely typical (1Co 10:3; Joh 6:32).
And they conclude with a verse we touched on before but we expand the Bible quotes to cover our comments here:
Joh 6:28 Then they said to him, How may we do the works of God?
29 Jesus, answering, said to them, This is to do the work of God: to have faith in him whom God has sent.
30 So they said, What sign do you give us, so that we may see and have faith in you? What do you do?
31 Our fathers had the manna in the waste land, as the Writings say, He gave them bread from heaven.
32 Jesus then said to them, Truly I say to you, What Moses gave you was not the bread from heaven; it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.
33 The bread of God is the bread which comes down out of heaven and gives life to the world.
34 Ah, Lord, they said, give us that bread for ever!
35 And this was the answer of Jesus: I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be in need of food, and he who has faith in me will never be in need of drink.
36 But it is as I said to you: you have seen me, and still you have no faith.
37 Whatever the Father gives to me will come to me; and I will not send away anyone who comes to me.
38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my pleasure, but the pleasure of him who sent me.
39 And this is the pleasure of him who sent me, that I am not to let out of my hands anything which he has given me, but I am to give it new life on the last day.
(BBE)
We have asserted that we are in the last days, that a great Tribulation far beyond what has been faced by humanity before now looms. We are in a pause as we watch the Soviet alliance begin to form in the Mid East and as a new American President awaits who will likely give Russia anything it wants in the oil fields. We Await an eventual attack , the rise of a world leader who allies himself with the Israel who has faced the Soviets, Three witnesses. An Armageddon and final glorious appearing.
A time when the Fallen Flesh will have it's last gasp. Doomed to die as it always has been. Crying for food and water in the wasteland it's hands have created.
VI.
Time columnist Joe Klein reported in the most recent issue of the magazine that Oxford Encyclopedias put us in the post truth era. This was based on a lot of things, largely the leanings of people toward believing anything that gets posted on the internet especially the most sensational mentality fed on untruths.
Today, Dec 16, in his last news conference, President Obama pointed out that Russian Hackers did not physically effect the election, but warned that "when a domestic source" keeps preaching that everyone in power is evil, it creates a divided country where hating Democrats led to people who previously opposed Putin to ignore the President Elect's openly admiring stance. In my words, that the notion of post truth is that people can be led to betray their principles by the steady application of hate and lies and complaint even during an economic upturn.
What seems to underpin this mentality is constant complaining about flaws in whatever "the other side" believes. Guns kill people but they are okay so long as the right people get killed, but when the innocent die it is because they didn't have guns. And the right to use guns supersedes the right to object to the right to use guns. Or the idea of banning them supersedes the judicious passage of restraining laws. It doesn't matter if there are statistics to prove one side or the other so long as someone can make up their own stats or twist them to fit their idea of the truth. And add some sort of scandalous idea to the mix. Just complain and complain and people will believe something is actually wrong. Or true.
Here, we continue to get a close up of God's feelings about constant complaining.
We paused on the water and now we get to the food,
#4 – The people complained about being hungry; God gave them Manna – Exodus 16:1-4 This is when your spiritual growth produces greater hunger. However, its the not the earthly food we are used to; God begins to feed you with heavenly food.
Ex 16:1 And they went on their way from Elim, and all the children of Israel came into the waste land of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they went out of the land of Egypt.
2 And all the children of Israel were crying out against Moses and Aaron in the waste land:
3 And the children of Israel said to them, It would have been better for the Lord to have put us to death in the land of Egypt, where we were seated by the flesh-pots and had bread enough for our needs; for you have taken us out to this waste of sand, to put all this people to death through need of food.
4 Then the Lord said to Moses, See, I will send down bread from heaven for you; and the people will go out every day and get enough for the day's needs; so that I may put them to the test to see if they will keep my laws or not.
5 And on the sixth day they are to make ready what they get in, and it will be twice as much as they get on the other days.
6 And Moses and Aaron said to all the children of Israel, This evening it will be clear to you that it is the Lord who has taken you out of the land of Egypt:
7 And in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord; for your angry words against the Lord have come to his ears: and what are we that you are crying out against us?
8 And Moses said, The Lord will give you meat for your food at evening, and in the morning bread in full measure; for your outcry against the Lord has come to his ears: for what are we? your outcry is not against us but against the Lord.
9 And Moses said to Aaron, Say to all the people of Israel, Come near before the Lord for he has given ear to your outcry.
10 And while Aaron was talking to the children of Israel, their eyes were turned in the direction of the waste land, and they saw the glory of the Lord shining in the cloud.
11 And the Lord said to Moses,
12 The outcry of the children of Israel has come to my ears: say to them now, At nightfall you will have meat for your food, and in the morning bread in full measure; and you will see that I am the Lord your God.
13 And it came about that in the evening little birds came up and the place was covered with them: and in the morning there was dew all round about the tents.
14 And when the dew was gone, on the face of the earth was a small round thing, like small drops of ice on the earth.
15 And when the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, What is it? for they had no idea what it was. And Moses said to them, It is the bread which the Lord has given you for your food.
16 This is what the Lord has said, Let every man take up as much as he has need of; at the rate of one omer for every person, let every man take as much as is needed for his family.
17 And the children of Israel did so, and some took more and some less.
18 And when it was measured, he who had taken up much had nothing over, and he who had little had enough; every man had taken what he was able to make use of.
19 And Moses said to them, Let nothing be kept till the morning.
20 But they gave no attention to Moses, and some of them kept it till the morning and there were worms in it and it had an evil smell: and Moses was angry with them.
21 And they took it up morning by morning, every man as he had need: and when the sun was high it was gone.
22 And on the sixth day they took up twice as much of the bread, two omers for every person: and all the rulers of the people gave Moses word of it.
23 And he said, This is what the Lord has said, Tomorrow is a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord: what has to be cooked may be cooked; and what is over, put on one side to be kept till the morning.
24 And they kept it till the morning as Moses had said: and no smell came from it, and it had no worms.
25 And Moses said, Make your meal today of what you have, for this day is a Sabbath to the Lord: today you will not get any in the fields.
26 For six days you will get it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.
27 But still on the seventh day some of the people went out to get it, and there was not any.
28 And the Lord said to Moses, How long will you go against my orders and my laws?
29 See, because the Lord has given you the Sabbath, he gives you on the sixth day bread enough for two days; let every man keep where he is; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.
30 So the people took their rest on the seventh day.
(BBE)
Notice after their baptism in the Red Sea, they enter into the Wasteland as Christ would after His baptism. Not just any wasteland but the one of Sin. We mentioned earlier Sin as a name of a moon god. But sin is of course the name we have for actions that are not of God, behaviors which lead to his disapproval.
The wasteland. Sin creates the wasteland. We talked earlier how man refusing to keep a nomadic life as God said he should led to the Sahara, a vast grassland, a fertile plain, turned to a desert. Sin which seems to always involve a life lived for a false god, be it external or the god of self, is a wasteland for the soul.
In the wasteland, in the depth of sin, the water of the of life is missing. The bread of life is missing. God must sweeten the water that does flow there to allow it to bring life giving moisture. And, in the sin wasteland, He must provide food to eat, the bread of life, and the meat of nature that still survives, the wild birds of the land. Afterall, thousands walk together in desolation and the only way to feed them all lies in His hands. They won't be able to grow food in time to save the suddenly freed people. If they begin to hunt, all the food in the wasteland will be foraged out in short time. They see this: we must understand it, too. There really isn't enough food for normal human effort to feed them.
Human vision sees a terrible difficulty or even a slight problem, and complain about the terrible thing going on.
"The milk is sour how could the fridge not keep it for a week?"
"The economy collapsed but we recovered, but now I don't have millions, just a job and no real good retirement anymore, what will I do?"
Spiritual vision sees that this is temporary. I recall the story of a young Christian in the Russian military during the Communist administration who expressed his love for Christ and was sent out into the biter cold without a coat and gloves and told he would be let back inside when he denied Christ. He miraculously survived the first time but eventually died from the cold rather than deny Jesus.
They have seen God peel back the Red Sea like it was a banana skin and yet they still don't understand He can do anything and His power will always save them. They can't see with spiritual vision only with human vision.
Yet, in the USA, we can be led to deny Him and lie to get a raise or turn on the available porn network or hate our neighbors and demand their deportation. And all it costs us is our relationship with God, the most important relationship for eternity, until we admit our error and turn from our sin. We don't feel that "frostbite" of separation in a physical sense. if we have enough hate circulating around us, it becomes easy to forget we are to love our neighbors and our enemies. So some rise to kill abortion doctors instead of preaching Jesus to them. And some proceed to ignore hunger and the lost for the completion of their business or political career.
Their soul, like the wandering nation of Israel calls for food, and jumps at the first available food, not realizing it is not a sustainable source of nourishment, that the meat God gave would be decimated if they only ate that all the time. Because our Fallen Flesh harks back to Egypt. Messages of the Gospel that are filtered by the world with traces of psychology laced with Gospel verses or New Age theology appeal to both our natures. We have tasted God's food, we have had a steady diet, Gospel, hymns, friendship.
The Spirit is being fed.
We have turned our eyes to the sky of the wasteland and seen the glory of the Lord. We have been imbued with a Spiritual vision and we see the truth. but our Egyptian experience keeps calling.
The Lord knows and requires us to daily eagt his food, drink his sweetened water, every day being nourished by the Gospel, by the Word, filling our spirit with the food of the Spirit. Daily doing something for Him, In prayer, and reading and in actions with those around us,
But he hasn't yet required the US citizens in every walk of life to stand up to the outside oppression which has somehow driven the growth of the churches in China and Russia and in other places of attack, like India. But the subversion of truth, the rise of lies that so many have not opposed means demonic forces are already incredibly powerful in the country. Hate your enemy was rejected by Christ 2000 years ago and we have repressed that teaching under flags of patriotism and ideologies like libertarianism and evolution which claim only the strong are fit enough to survive. Forgetting god is always taking the slaves, the beaten, the lost, all of which we Christians were before our salvation and used them for his purpose.
When we don't pray, study the Word, go to Christian gatherings, we begin the starve the Spirit.
Something summed up by Jamieson-Fausset-Brown concerning the last verses here:
When we don't pray, study the Word, go to Christian gatherings, we begin the starve the Spirit.
Something summed up by Jamieson-Fausset-Brown concerning the last verses here:
32-36. Fill an omer of it to be kept for your generations--The mere fact of such a multitude being fed for forty years in the wilderness, where no food of any kind is to be obtained, will show the utter impossibility of their subsisting on a natural production of the kind and quantity as this tarfa-gum [see on JFB for Ex 16:13]; and, as if for the purpose of removing all such groundless speculations, Aaron was commanded to put a sample of it in a pot--a golden pot (Heb 9:4) --
Heb 9:1 Now the first agreement had its rules of worship, and a holy order.
2 For the first Tent was made ready, having in it the vessels for the lights and the table and the ordering of the bread; and this is named the holy place.
3 And inside the second veil was the place which is named the Holy of holies;
4 Having a vessel of gold in it for burning perfumes, and the ark of the agreement, which was covered with gold and which had in it a pot made of gold for the manna, and Aaron's rod which put out buds, and the stones with the writing of the agreement;
(BBE)
(Everything that showed God's person to those without the indwelling Spirit was located in that "holy of holies.")
to be laid before the Testimony, to be kept for future generations, that they might see the bread on which the Lord fed their fathers in the wilderness. But we have the bread of which that was merely typical (1Co 10:3; Joh 6:32).
And they conclude with a verse we touched on before but we expand the Bible quotes to cover our comments here:
1Co 10:1 For it is my desire, my brothers, that you may keep in mind how all our fathers were under the cloud, and they all went through the sea;
2 And they all had baptism from Moses in the cloud and in the sea;
3 And they all took the same holy food;
4 And the same holy drink: for they all took of the water from the holy rock which came after them: and the rock was Christ.
5 But with most of them God was not pleased: for they came to their end in the waste land.
6 Now these things were for an example to us, so that our hearts might not go after evil things, as they did.
7 Then do not go after false gods, as some of them did; as it is said in the holy Writings, After resting and feasting, the people got up to take their pleasure.
(BBE)
2 And they all had baptism from Moses in the cloud and in the sea;
3 And they all took the same holy food;
4 And the same holy drink: for they all took of the water from the holy rock which came after them: and the rock was Christ.
5 But with most of them God was not pleased: for they came to their end in the waste land.
6 Now these things were for an example to us, so that our hearts might not go after evil things, as they did.
7 Then do not go after false gods, as some of them did; as it is said in the holy Writings, After resting and feasting, the people got up to take their pleasure.
(BBE)
Joh 6:28 Then they said to him, How may we do the works of God?
29 Jesus, answering, said to them, This is to do the work of God: to have faith in him whom God has sent.
30 So they said, What sign do you give us, so that we may see and have faith in you? What do you do?
31 Our fathers had the manna in the waste land, as the Writings say, He gave them bread from heaven.
32 Jesus then said to them, Truly I say to you, What Moses gave you was not the bread from heaven; it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.
33 The bread of God is the bread which comes down out of heaven and gives life to the world.
34 Ah, Lord, they said, give us that bread for ever!
35 And this was the answer of Jesus: I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be in need of food, and he who has faith in me will never be in need of drink.
36 But it is as I said to you: you have seen me, and still you have no faith.
37 Whatever the Father gives to me will come to me; and I will not send away anyone who comes to me.
38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my pleasure, but the pleasure of him who sent me.
39 And this is the pleasure of him who sent me, that I am not to let out of my hands anything which he has given me, but I am to give it new life on the last day.
(BBE)
We have asserted that we are in the last days, that a great Tribulation far beyond what has been faced by humanity before now looms. We are in a pause as we watch the Soviet alliance begin to form in the Mid East and as a new American President awaits who will likely give Russia anything it wants in the oil fields. We Await an eventual attack , the rise of a world leader who allies himself with the Israel who has faced the Soviets, Three witnesses. An Armageddon and final glorious appearing.
A time when the Fallen Flesh will have it's last gasp. Doomed to die as it always has been. Crying for food and water in the wasteland it's hands have created.
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