On the fifteenth day of the second month, Israel reached the Wilderness of Sin (or the Thorn-bush) (Ex. 16:1), and began a fresh round of time after their departure from Rameses. At this place and time their first great uprising against their leader and their God occurred “the whole congregation... murmured” (vs. 2). Their stores of food brought out of Egypt had come to an end, and they complained bitterly, “We sat by the flesh-pots and... did eat bread to the full;” and as they looked upon the barren place around them, they declared “Ye have brought us forth into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (vs. 3).
The chronicling of such dates and localities may not be on the lines adopted by the historian, but it is according to the plan of divine inspiration. Let us search for the key. While the glory-cloud of Jehovah’s presence shaded and illumined the camp, the hearts of Israel were upon Egypt. Their faces were turned thitherward, and it needed Aaron’s eloquence to change their attitude, but after a while “they looked toward the wilderness” (Ex. 16:10). In these words, “they looked toward the wilderness,” lies the key we seek. God had displayed His glory in judgment, both in Egypt and in the Red Sea; He would now display His glory in the wilderness. And as the people faced that way, “behold the glory of Jehovah appeared in the cloud,” and He declared that all should know “I am Jehovah your God” (Ex. 16:12).
We take up our stand with the hungry people at the end of the anxious day, and lo, “at even the quails came up and covered the camp”; here was the flesh desired. Israel were not appointed to perish by Jehovah, their salvation! It was He who had brought them out from the land of Egypt, and this the quails demonstrated to Israel. But more – in the morning they were to see the glory of Jehovah. And “in the morning the dew lay round about the host. And when the dew that lay was gone up,” a new thing occurred, one which had never been before on earth; “behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar-frost on the ground” (Ex. 16:14). “Manna?” – “What is this?” – the people exclaimed. It was God’s glory in the wilderness – it was the gift of God.
The story of the manna occupies the first week of the fourteen days that remained to Israel before reaching the Mount of God, and together with the story of the gift of the manna, is combined the restoration upon the earth of sabbath-keeping to Jehovah. At the beginning, the Creator Himself kept sabbath, and placed man in the sabbath rest; the newly-fashioned earth was fully blest and abundantly beautiful, and in the garden of God, man’s joyful occupation was set out. From the fall of man, and the ensuing death and toil of a suffering world, until the bestowal of the manna from heaven in the wilderness, the revelations of God makes no mention of sabbath. Regarded as a division of time, the seven days were sacred in Chaldea – in Egypt the month was divided into three sections of ten days – but a holy sabbath to Jehovah was a new thing on the earth.
The manna is a figure of Christ (John 6:48-51); the sabbath is both commemorative and anticipative of God’s rest (Heb.4:1; “His rest”); and only through Christ is that rest assured. God’s rest shall yet be established, and once more He shall survey all and say, “It is very good” (Gen. 1:31). The former things shall have passed away, and His original purpose in relation to man shall be fulfilled (Rev. 21:3- 4), but in a way of richer and greater glory than was the case in paradise.
With such interest attaching to the manna, we may well linger over the nature of the gift. It was sent from heaven to earth – it was heaven’s pure bounty upon the barren waste! And thus was gift communicated – a layer of dew lay round about the camp, and as the dew exhaled the manna appeared. It was covered with and was bestowed in the dew. The dew is a type of the Holy Spirit by whom Christ was conceived, and through whom He is spiritually communicated. The figure of the dew in its purity, as the medium for the bestowal of the gift of the manna, seems to indicate the sacred nature of the thing given, and to point to God’s Holy One as “undefiled, separate from sinners” (Heb. 7:26). As the manna was sent from heaven, so was Christ the “Sent” One (John 6:38-39) of the Father; as it was like the hoar-frost upon the ground – crumbled and small, insignificant in appearance – so Christ “made Himself of no reputation” (Phil. 2:7), and appeared in the world as “no man” (Psa. 22:6); as it was “white,” so was He pure; as it was transparent, so was He ever what He said, His words expressed Himself. Sent from heaven; communicated through the dew; insignificant in appearance; like the light, white, transparent; and, to such as had an appetite for it, sweet! “This,” said Moses to the wondering people as they gazed upon it, “This is the bread which Jehovah hath given you to eat” (Ex. 16:15).
But the manna had to be gathered. Human responsibility was associated with divine goodness. Although the heaven-sent provision lay around Israel’s camp, still each Israelite had to use diligence in order that the provision should become his own portion. It fell early in the morning, and when the sun was hot it melted, it vanished; the opportunity was, therefore, to be seized early, and it was necessary to go out from the camp with diligence to gather it. The supply was so divinely apportioned, that “he that gathered much had nothing over, and that gathered little has no lack” (vs. 18); there was enough for all, all were equally cared for and there was no respect for persons. It was for every man, whoever he might be, and “they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating” (vs. 21). The zeal necessary to healthy spiritual life, the appetite for Christ, that seeks Him first, and that feeds upon Him, the Bread of Life, are here most admirably symbolized. In gathering the manna, man had to stoop, for it fell upon the ground; and, without contradiction, the lowliest find for themselves the most of Christ.
In the way of appropriation of the heaven-sent food, God established a test. Each day the people were to learn anew their dependence upon God, who gives us day by day our bread. They were not to store up for the morrow, as if a heavenly supply, like that of earth, would come to an end. Such as hoarded it up found but worms and that which stank for their disobedience. In the hoarding up, there was not only a misappropriation of the food, there was also a misapprehension of its character. It was not only freshly sent daily from heaven, but it reached man daily in its heavenly freshness. Christ is “the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8), never to be leveled down to the standard of the mere common supplies of earth; so to do is corruption.
Where Christ Himself in His moral perfections is the spiritual food of the soul, there ensues true spirituality. If we imagine a disciple of the Lord resembling the heavenly One, acting in the Holy Spirit, hiding himself, holy as in the light of heaven, transparent obscuring nothing in words and ways, we have before us the ideal of Christian perfection.
The suggestion that the manna which fell from heaven is the same as the ordinary exusion from the tamarisk tree, which has a medicinal quality, and is at times used as a corrective, is as unworthy as impossible. The daily bread, which God sent morning by morning to Israel’s camp, was a new thing which Israel’s fathers had not known (Deut. 8:3).
“The children of Israel did eat manna forty years” (Ex. 16:35), it was their food for the whole period of their wilderness life, and never once did the supply fail them, neither did God ever give them another food. They had their flocks and their herds, which they had brought out of Egypt; probably they were able to sow and reap, at least at times on their journey; but one food, and only one, was rained upon them from above. God’s food for the spiritual life of man is Christ, and Christ alone, during the “forty” years, the term of human probation on earth!
The manna occupies one of the most prominent places in the story of Israel’s wilderness way, perhaps the most prominent after the cloud, and its importance is so great that, even before the tabernacle was erected, the storing up of a given quantity of it for a testimony to future generations is mentioned (Ex. 16:33). The golden pot, with its contents of an omer, was laid up in the tent devoted to sacred use prior to the erection of the tabernacle, and when the tabernacle was set up, the golden pot of manna found its place there, in the holiest of all (Heb. 9:4).
The quantity of manna apportioned to each person for the day was an omen. This measure of man’s need, Jehovah required should be placed before Him – “Take a pot, and put an omer full of manna therein, and lay it up before Jehovah, to be kept for your generations;”... “that they may see the bread wherewith I have fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you forth from the land of Egypt.” God would have the way in which lie had met the measure of their need in the wilderness never pass away from the remembrance of His people. An omer was the measure common in the tents of Israel for ordinary use, and contained the ordinary portion of a man’s daily food, and it thus individualized the gift of the manna to the requirement of every single person in the host. The application is plain never in eternity shall the remembrance of the bread wherewith God has fed each of His redeemed people on earth pass from their memories.
On various occasions in His ways with Israel in the wilderness, when instituting a matter of special importance, God opened His instructions on that institution by introducing the sabbath. We thus see the working of the Divine Mind in the inspired writings. Thousands of years may pass by, and human generations succeed human generations, but in His own time the original purposes of God will be fulfilled. God gives us hints of what shall be; He leaves us to take them!