Exodus 15:16

It is so delightful to witness the unity of Holy Scripture in its foreshadowings and fulfilment (Exodus 16: 4-15 cf. John 6: 27-40).  The beauty of the Book!

God reveals his purpose of human rescue in installments - the earlier phases illustrating the final revelation of his glorious and life-saving Son, Jesus Christ.  The whole span of the Scriptures testifies to the coming of the Son.  The Old Testament is a compilation of documents filled with anticipation.  The writings of the New Testament attest to his marvellous appearance and the range of his accomplishments.

The Bible is bread for the mind and as we chew it over we are feeding on Christ and nourishing ourselves to eternal life.  Food for the soul is digested by faith.  The soul of the believing reader derives life from the Son of God.  He or she partakes of the divine life, imparted by the Spirit from the word, which renews and refreshes us.  The word of God joins us to God as our perpetual sustainer and we come to share his eternity.

Spiritual bread, the staff of life, the staple diet of the soul, is what carries us through our pilgrimage to heaven.  Starvation of the soul is the hunger that afflicts mankind, which causes us to grumble, and our discontent is converted into discord with God and each other.  The hunger of the heart makes us mean, moody as a race, and ultimately murderous.  We ravage each other because our constitution is ratty.

Israel was a contentious community under Moses - ill-tempered and unruly.  The hunger pangs made them an unpleasant horde of nomads picking fault with everything and blaming their leaders unfairly.  The gist of the story concerning the manna from heaven is the patience and forbearance of God who sends miraculous food as a gift upon the undeserving.  

Moses’ words are significant: “It is the bread God has given you to eat” (v15).    

The unobtainable; it came from above, falling upon Israel through the free favour of God.  Beneath the layer of dew were the flakes that would feed the people in their desert experience.  God graciously gave good things to grumblers.  This episode of divine provision is re-enacted in a fuller revelation in the ministry of Jesus when he feeds the five thousand recorded in the beginning of our chapter (vv. 1-15).  This is a sign for the thoughtful, the spiritually hungry to read.

Jesus is the Bread from heaven, the source of satisfying life in God - the Bread God has given you to eat.

The miraculous feeding of the people notches spiritual meaning up to its maximum import.  Manna came from God.  It was sent by him.  The Messiah in their midst was God - the great I AM of the patriarchs of Israel.  The forefathers of Israel fed upon Christ in the nutriment of the promise.  Accordingly the Lord Jesus averred, “I am the bread of life”.

When the manna appeared Israel was bidden to go out to where it was and collect it.  It was free for the taking.  Stoop and receive it!   Jesus arrives as the true Bread of heaven, of which the manna was a type or sign, and he generously cries, “Come to me!”.   To see and believe is sufficient to partake of him and the life he offers.  “For it is my Father’s will that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.” (John 6: 40).  The life-giving and soul-nourishing food, that Jesus is to the spiritually hungry, is there for the taking with the guarantee that not a single comer will be turned away.  “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away” (the saying is principally a guarantee of final preservation).                                                                                                                               

This verse is the warrant for all who hear in the depth of their heart the welcome words of Jesus.  They may freely come without hesitation.  They need hunger nor linger anymore.  The manna of the Lord is not fenced off or difficult to obtain.  It is there for all who will stoop, in humble penitence and trust, to gather up into their famished, fearful hearts and be filled.  The needy need only to fall to their knees before Jesus.

And then Jesus issues an assurance, his pledge for the future.  The unknown future can be frightening as we consider life’s “what ifs”.

Jesus banishes that anxiety concerning circumstances and self.  “He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty” (v.35).  How can Jesus declare this certainty?  It is because those to whom he has given himself have been given to him by the Father:  “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away” (v.37).  As we have noticed, comers to Jesus are never cast out, not at the outset or ever.

Jesus’ life feeds the life of believers, ever preserving them, and giving them strength to persevere in the faith he has wrought in them through divine enabling.  They will never hunger to the point of spiritual death.  Furthermore, the Son is strictly charged by the Father to see that the given ones are kept in absolute security and wellbeing.  “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day (v.40).

O, “the wills and shalls of God!”, as Spurgeon exclaimed.  We often fail to note their impact.  They need to be taken most seriously; not superficially as mere hopeful expressions, but as solemn undertakings on divine oath.

We observe the certain and combined will of the Father and the Son - wills that cannot be frustrated or broken (John 10:25 -30 & 17: 1-3, 24 -26).  The divine keeping of the given ones is determined by God at the top of his agenda, and made definite in the cross of the crucified, the purchase of the predestined.  He died that believing ones should never die.  This promise is the gospel fare, the spiritual food the church spreads out before the world.

Looking around much of the table is bare in our day.

People are fed on the scraps of human baking.  The Bread of heaven is set aside.  Souls are empty.  Folk are famished.  God in his displeasure sends his worst judgment on an arrogant western civilization that defies him and increasingly deserts him.  The themes of our culture are dark or depraved.

Our manner towards God needs to be changed.  But we must pray that even yet the manna of heaven will fall softly on grumblers, and that the dew of heaven will soften hard hearts of western leaders and peoples before our collective starvation results in rigor mortis and the grave death of the soul, the second death to be avoided at all costs - and can be through Christ.

RJS

1 Corinthians 3: 18 - 23

A reputation for wisdom is something much sought after. It brings admiration and importance, and for some, a satisfying sense of superiority. It is scandalous that this pursuit was so prevalent among the believers at Corinth.

The church was in conflict as to which authority in the faith they adhered to and followed. The people had become partisan. There was the party of Paul and the party of Apollos. Paul and Apollos were set at odds with each other in their personalities and teaching, and the participants, thereby, were narrowing their appreciation of the faith as a whole, which both leaders together represented in its completeness. Such is the vastness and variety of divine revelation that it requires many kinds and minds to convey its inexhaustible wealth to human understanding. Our mental activity and emotional response to Holy Scripture cannot be limited to limited stimuli. A huge mine requires a large workforce and ministers are miners together in the task of exposing the nuggets of gold in the Word of God.

Prejudice, such as was seen in Corinth, is the application of blinkers that prevent well-rounded, mature comprehension of Scripture.

Members of the Christian community at Corinth had become childishly competitive with the catchphrases “I follow Paul” or “I prefer Apollos”. It was a matter of gaining prestige - a considerable preoccupation in some churches. Mere men were wrestling over allegiance to mere men. Paul deplores the situation: What after all is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe - as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labour. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building (vv5-9). Both leaders have the same faith with the same goal by different methods of ministry necessary for building up and nurturing the saints.

Christian wisdom does not foster strife but symbiosis - the association of compatible approaches to the truth of God in all its aspects. Wisdom is not divisive along the lines of human judgment but takes its cue from the revealed wisdom of God which is comprehensive and balanced and only disclosed to minds that are humble. Folk may take pleasure in factions so that they can display their cleverness. It is an underlying temptation and tendency in theology and Christian teaching. It is not pastoral but self-promoting. People aspire to be sages before men and not servants before God and his gospel.

Paul detects the disease of pride in Corinth. When pride becomes prominent divine guidance withdraws. Formerly faithful teachers of God’s word go off at a tangent and tangle others in their craftiness. Men begin to rely on their own insights and become the creators of novelty, abandoning the plain sense of Scripture. They parade so-called originality.

Paul issues a warning. Speculation arising from lack of dependence on God and closeness to him forms an alliance with passing fashions of thought borrowed from the world. The church becomes inundated with imported ideas from the contemporary culture. Experts, as they deem themselves to be, come to rely on human intelligence and tenuous theory and not the truth of divine inspiration and the illumination of the Holy Spirit described by Paul at some length (1 Corinthians 2:6ff).  The mind of man, left to itself, meanders through a maze of mystery and confusion, and Paul’s verdict on the worldly comprehension of God happens to be: For the wisdom of the world is foolishness in God’s sight (v9).    

Paul is not denying, or decrying, human knowledge and skill evident in so many legitimate ways. These can be, and are, great in many extraordinary manifestations of expertise, competence, and invention.  He is lamenting man’s lack of judgment in the use of the knowledge he has gained and its ultimate meaning in the divine purpose, which should only bring him to humility and reverence before God. Every discovery is an insight into the unfathomable genius of God, and every accomplishment is meant to glorify him. Paul is puncturing the proud philosophies of men in their attempt to grasp ultimate truth through their own unregenerate acumen and observation that distort reality and misinterpret it. Subjectively, man’s perception is skewed by sin and self-deception.

Paul says the knowledge puffs up, whereas it should place us in lowly subjection and dependence upon God in admiration of his power and wisdom.

The thoughts of the wise of this world are futile (read the thoughts and autobiographies of the great, and in spite of their worthy ideals, objectives, and accomplishments their memoirs and conclusions peter out to anti-climax in the face of old age and death with either a sense of failure or the haunting doubt “what’s it all about”. Their lives are a puff of smoke and their grand ideas waft away on the invincible eddy of our mortality). Without the true knowledge of God and reliance upon him life is reduced to instant gratification, endless disappointments, and a grim demise. The lack of true and eternal hope sours the minds of the best of men so that Solon, the statesman of 6th century Athens, was known to have opined, “Call no man happy until he is dead”. 

The arrogance of the wise of this world misleads them. They forget their limitations and that their ignorance of reality (embodied in and expressed accurately by Christ, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”) outweighs their knowledge of creation, human nature and destiny. There are so many factors concealed from us. If we are ignorant of the purpose of our Maker we misread all that he has produced.

There have been so many misreadings of the facts, so many discarded theories and philosophies, so many disastrous experiments and experiences, and hosts of dire errors in human existence that Paul is correct to brand them as “standards of this age”. They have no eternal validity or virtue. Human thought and life is so often guided by fads, grandiose and trivial. Our all too prevalent and ever present media inflicts worldly wisdom of both sorts upon us from so many sources that are suspect and so many silly talking heads of dubious credentials.  We are over exposed to the foolishness of this world and less and less grounded in the solid wisdom of God that from time to time has benefited our civilization. And social media, so called, has facilitated the instant, ill-founded, even demented thoughts and ideas of the shallow and undiscerning.  

How could you compare the authors of our great Reformed Catholic tradition with a Joel Osteen, or the sublime truths of the gospel with the syncretistic views of a Deepak Chopra? The former (our Reformed faith) lodges all hope in in the grace of God, the latter examples look to resources deemed to be deep within our true selves - which the word of God declares to be barren and bereft of any true good.

The wisdom of God is found in and derived from the Lord Jesus Christ - no mere man, but the God-man who connects man to God. We do not find our wisdom in man - there is no satisfaction there. The thinkers who are used by God direct us to him and him alone. They are mere humble and needy persons themselves. They do not wish us to be divided by disputes and divergent loyalties. They want us to possess all that God proffers in Christ (vv21-23).

RJS