I remember one holiday years ago, about two days before Christmas I was at a seafood restaurant and had a great combination platter with flounder, shrimp, scallops, and oysters. It was wonderful, however, the next day I came down with a nasty case of food poisoning. I honestly don’t know if I have ever been that violently sick from anything else in my life. It lasted for about a week and during that time, I went through times when I felt like I would rather die than continue feeling that way. I hope I never have to experience that again. Food poisoning is not a pleasant experience.
We heard a lot of speculation from the media, after the September 1, 2001 attacks, and the following Anthrax cases, about the possibility of bioterrorists attacks, which could possibly include the poisoning of food supplies. However, I believe our society has already been feeding on a diet of poisoned bread for a long time, which explains many of the social ills that we face today. I will explain what I mean by that after looking at some Scripture reading from the book of Exodus.
Scripture reading: Exodus, chapter 16: (Please take a few minutes to read this now:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+16&version=NIV
Let’s take a moment to review the circumstances leading up to what we read here. Up to this time, the Israelites had witnessed God perform many miracles on their behalf, as He used Moses to lead them out of slavery, and into the land of freedom and blessing that He had promised them. In spite of all this, they continued to be fearful, and unbelieving, which caused them to be unsatisfied and quarrelsome.
Verses 1-2:
“The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, (sin is always a desert!) which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.”
God humors the complaining Israelites. Aren’t you glad God is so patient with us, and puts up with much of our foolishness? Aren’t you glad that God does not give us what we really deserve?
Verses 3-5:
“The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”
The Israelites sound very spoiled. All they were concerned about at this point was the fact that they were hungry and thirsty. They had no eye for what God was doing, or why He was bringing them out of Egypt. His purposes for them were great and far reaching, but they were blinded to that, and they were just worried about their next meal. Jesus encountered the same mindset in the people of His day, and addressed the problem in these words:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”
Just as Israelites were very short sighted, and so quickly fell into the habit of worrying and complaining, so we also struggle with learning to trust God with every aspect of our lives…but back to Exodus for now;
Then the LORD said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”
God wanted to prove to the Israelites, as He wants to prove to us, that all of our efforts at doing anything worthwhile and lasting are useless without Him. If we are not obedient to Him, all we ever do and try will ultimately serve no purpose. We may all, at times experience a measure of success in man’s system of things. As the old saying goes, “Every dog has his day.” But any success we experience in this life that is outside of God’s plans and purposes is ultimately meaningless and the only purpose it serves is a momentary stroking of our own ego.
Jesus warns us many times not to do things for the purpose of being seen by others, so that others will think well of us. When we do things for show, we may fool many people, and we may receive a measure of recognition within man’s system of things, but this kind of recognition is very shallow and short lived. Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. Do you think that the person who won an award, say, the Grammy Award for best motion picture for 1980 received a great deal of applause when he/she won the award? Although I have no specific recollection of the 1980 Grammy Awards, I would venture to say that the winner did receive a great deal of applause, and probably had a number of magazine and newspaper articles written about them. Today, do any of us, apart from someone who may be retaining this type of information for a chance at winning some money on Jeopardy or some other trivia game, remember who won the Grammy Award in 1980? Probably not.
If someone were to ask you to name the person who has had the most influence on you in your life, who would you name? Would it be a movie star, or a rock star? Maybe, but for most people, more than likely not. It would be someone special to you, but probably not well known or recognized by society as a whole. The reason is that most of the people who make a profound impression on us are people who are genuine, people who do what is right and good simply because it is right and good, and not for the purpose of making other people think something about them.
Matthew 6
“Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
God is seeking to teach the Israelites the lesson of depending on Him in faith to meet their needs. This seems to be one of the hardest lessons for us to learn, because, for most of us, worrying just seems to be the default mode that we go into when things start to look a little unsure. The reason that we worry is that, most of us have been taught the wrong set of values and priorities all our lives. We are taught, from the time we are old enough to think for ourselves, that we must learn to take care of ourselves. To a certain extent, this can be a good thing. A parent wants his or her children to learn to feed themselves, change their own clothes, clean up their own rooms, etc. They eventually want them to learn to work, manage their own checkbooks, pay their own bills, etc. If they never mastered these basic skills, they would be dependent on their parents all their lives.
However, as strange as this seems, after we have been taught to take care of ourselves and be independent, when we come to the Lord, we have to learn to abandon our independence, and rely on Him totally. This whole concept is demonstrated for us remarkably in the whole idea of “manna” as this passage from Exodus shows us, or as Jesus refers to “daily bread” in the New Testament:
“Give us this day our daily bread…”
We notice in the chapter from Exodus that God instructs the Israelites to only take enough of the manna to meet their need for that particular day, except on the day before the Sabbath, on which they were to gather enough for both days, so they would not have to work on the Sabbath day to gather their food.
(Skip to verses 19-21):
“Then Moses said to them, “No one is to keep any of it until morning.” However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them. Each morning everyone gathered as much as he needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away.”
Notice that when they gathered too much, it became useless. The next day it was full of maggots and stunk. If any of the Israelite’s had been foolish enough to eat any of the manna in that condition, I am certain that they would have become very ill, probably even sicker than I was when I had my bout with food poisoning, and it may have even killed them.
Regarding the matter of learning to trust God, Jesus also had this to say:
“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, What shall we eat?’ or What shall we drink?’ or What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
I come from a long line of worriers. My family has taken the practice of worrying and turned it into an art form. Worrying has always came easy for me. I have had to work very hard at overcoming this destructive behavior pattern since I became a new creature in Christ. I don’t claim to have mastered this totally, but I have gotten a lot better. Trust is freeing!
I believe that there is one central reason that most people worry, and it gets back to something I touched on a few minutes ago. First, we live in a very independent minded society. We are taught our whole lives to be independent. In our attempts at independence, we must rely on either our wits, or physical strength, our personality, etc., or a combination of these. But the harder we try, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we fall incredibly short, and even if we do achieve a measure of success, we soon realize that we are still very vulnerable to many chance factors that we have no control over. Because we recognize our own vulnerability, we see that we are not truly independent at all. This realization contradicts what we have been taught to believe is obtainable, and this realization creates worry.
Suppose you are a person who finds your security in your health. You have read all the books. You understand nutrition, and the benefits of physical exercise. You do all the right things, you eat all the right foods, you do all the right exercises, and you abstain from all the things that the professionals tell you are bad for you. Then you find out you have an inoperable brain tumor. You did nothing to cause it to happen, and there is nothing you can do to make it go away. You have lost control.
Or suppose you are a person who’s security is in wealth. You are market savvy and you know how to invest your money in stocks to reap great profits. Then unexpected and unpredictable events occur, like the September 11th attacks, and the Stock Market goes sour. The investment strategies you used to depend on don’t work anymore. People’s spending patterns are altered because of widespread panic. The thing you used for your security becomes like an elaborate sand castle on the beach as the tide comes in. Once it was glorious, but as the unstoppable tide rolls in, the castle crumbles and washes away into the void of nothingness.
Our foundation has to be on something more solid than what we have the ability to control, (or better, try to control.)
What does all this have to do with poison bread, or food poisoning? First, because of our misguided ideas about what makes us secure or happy, we desire ‘things”. Since we live in a society that is based on “consumerism” we fall prey to the idea that we need more things to make us happy. We try to buy the satisfaction and security that we crave. However, because most of us cannot afford to buy all the things that we crave “right now” we steal tomorrow’s bread from ourselves. We use credit. However, there is a problem with this; tomorrow’s bread is poisoned if we try to consume it today.
Think about this for a minute; what is credit? Credit is borrowing from tomorrow to get what you want today. When you use credit, you are stealing from your own future. Like the Israelite’s we have read about in Exodus, we have taken tomorrow’s manna today, and when we do that, it goes sour and becomes poisoned.
We are at a time in the life of this society when the number of people who have filed for bankruptcy is at an all-time high. The amount of debt that many families have is astronomical, and yet the credit card offers, and equity loan offers continue to flood the mailboxes, offering undisciplined people enough rope to hang themselves. We are digging ourselves into a pit that we will never get out of, short of a miracle. That is the reason that the lottery is such an appealing idea to a lot of people, and why so many states that do not already have a lottery are working so hard to get the lottery established. It offers people the chance to buy a fantasy that they will win a huge sum of money and solve the out of control debt problem. Isn’t it interesting that the so-called “Education” lottery hasn’t accomplished anything regarding ending our school system’s financial woes? Teachers are still buying their own supplies, and charitable organizations, such as churches, are still having school supply drives at the beginning of every school year because supplies are so low.
The national debt is at such an enormous amount now that all political attempts to try to explain the fiscal status of the United States are fraught with contradictions and figures that don’t even make sense. Politicians tell us one year that the national debt is into the trillions of dollars, then, turn right around the next year and speak of a surplus. Just recently, we were reading in the newspapers about what a surplus of money that the state of North Carolina had. One article that I read discussed the many possible ways that we could use all this “excess money.” Then after the latest gubernatorial election, the first thing out of the new governor’s mouth is that North Carolina is flat broke and that drastic measures must be taken to balance the budget.
The truth of the matter is that no one really has any idea what the fiscal status of the United States is. Politicians just manipulate the data to suit their own agenda at any given time. You can’t have a surplus and a deficit at the same time. That is not even logical. That makes as much sense as the accountant of a large firm approaching the CEO and informing him that the company boasts a proud surplus of negative one hundred thousand dollars for the year!
What is the answer to this dilemma that we find ourselves in? Well, individually we must become totally reoriented in our thinking process and our perception of reality. In First John 2: 15-16 we read these words:
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.For everything in the world–the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does–comes not from the Father but from the world.
These words may seem strange to us at first if we take them out of context. When John says that we should not love the world or anything in the world, he is not espousing some form of gnosticism that separates us from the real world around us. When this form of the words “the world” is used, it refers not to the created order of nature, or planet earth, it refers to “man’s system of things” apart from God’s sovereign rule. It is man’s attempts to divorce himself from God’s rule and establish his own order, based on a corrupted value system. Love of the world in this sense is essentially idolatry. Really, the heart of idolatry is putting our security in anything or anyone above God. James, in his New Testament letter has this to say:
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
In the society that we live in, we may not go about things in exactly this manner, which seems rather barbaric. If I decide I want a new gas grill for my patio, and I do not have the money to buy it, I am not going to kill my next-door neighbor and take his gas grill. However, there is another temptation before me, that may seem to be a more socially acceptable way for me to get the gas grill that I do not have the money to buy: USE THE CREDIT CARD! The problem is that this way is also wrong. I am stealing from my own tomorrow.
To be victorious in this matter, we must put God first. We must totally trust Him to provide us with what we need, and realize that we cannot always have what we want. The problem is that we get our wants and needs confused, because we compare ourselves to each other. If my friend at work can get a new car, don’t I need one also? Why should he have one and not me? Do you see the fallacy of this way of thinking, and the trap that it puts us in? But if most of us are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we have been guilty of thinking this way at times.
Have you been feeding on poison manna in your own life? Has your use of credit gotten out of hand? I am sorry to say that I do not have a magical formula that will solve your money problems. I have not mastered any Internet multilevel marketing scheme to make you wealthy. Once you get your priorities in order and learn to see the value of things from God’s perspective, and learn to TRUST HIM totally, even when the direction your life is going may not make sense at the time, then you have taken the first steps to stopping the madness. It may take a lot of hard work and discipline to set your own house in order, but it is not something that you can afford to not do.
The Bible ends with many prophecies about the end times. One picture that we see painted in graphic detail is the society of man engulfed in an orgy of greed and materialism: Please take the time to read Revelation Chapter 18 right now. It is too lengthy to put here. In this chapter, we see a picture of man’s system of commerce, materialism and greed, and the final outcome of this system of things. Above and beyond all this we hear the voice of the Lord calling out to His people:
“Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues;…”
Take the time right now and pray and ask God to help you put your priorities in order. Ask Him to forgive you for the way in which you have allowed yourself to become enslaved to the world’s system of things, and ask Him to help you to sort through your spiritual and financial affairs and put your house in order. You don’t really have any other good choice!
Danny's Stump 