Exodus 16:9-15 “Then Moses told Aaron, ‘Say to the entire Israelite community, Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.’ While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.’ That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat.”

You might miss the first evidence of God’s grace in the story. As he promised, God’s glory appeared to the nation from the cloud that led the people through the desert. This “glory of the Lord” was a very visible sign God gave to let the people know that he was with them and on their side. When it appears in the Bible, it is always an indication that good things are about to happen for the people of God. It appeared to seal the covenant of grace with Abraham, was involved in the burning bush to send Moses as the nation’s deliverer, kept the people safe at the Red Sea in the pillar of fire before they crossed to safety on dry ground. It would descend on their worship tent and live in the Holy of holies when they set it up later on, and in the Most Holy Place of Solomon’s temple after that. It was the glory of the Lord that lighted up the fields outside of Bethlehem just before the angel told them a Savior had been born to them, who is Christ the Lord.

So here the glory of the Lord appears as a promise of God’s presence and intention to take care of his people’s every need. Perhaps more than it spoke to them of the food that was about to miraculously drop from heaven, it was a sign of God’s forgiveness. He was not holding their grumbling against them. He was going to return their complaints and accusations with kindness.

For us God’s glory doesn’t appear in a bright flash of light or otherworldly glow. Paul wrote the Corinthians that God has given us “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” God’s glory appears to us in Jesus, the Light of the World. As often as we sin, Jesus reminds us that the Lord has not abandoned us. He clothed himself in human flesh, joined us in our world, and lived and died as our substitute to fully satisfy the demands of justice for our sin. Jesus showed up, and that meant good things, the greatest things, happened for the people of God. He is the ultimate demonstration of God’s grace.

After this show of God’s grace with the appearance of God’s glory, his grace is clear to see the generosity that followed: the quail and the manna.

Have you ever gone hunting? I don’t hunt much anymore, but when I did I missed my target more often than I hit it. With my current skill set, if I had to hunt to eat, my family and I would be hungry.

The Lord didn’t leave his gift of meat to chance. Quail covered the camp. You basically just had to go outside and grab one. The Lord did everything but deliver the birds cooked and boxed like Colonel Sanders.

Have you ever raised a vegetable garden? You have to till, and plant, and weed, and water, and cultivate, and pick to cook and eat. The process takes months. Maybe you get a crop. Maybe the rabbits or insects get it before you do.

The Lord didn’t expect his people to figure out desert gardening. Six days a week the thin, white flakes of manna appeared on the ground, ready to eat. This happened over 12,000 times for the next forty years. It was always there, always fresh, always just outside their doors. The only way you could go hungry would be if you were too lazy to bend over and pick some up.

Our food may not come so easy. But it comes in greater variety and abundance. In our country we throw away 150,000 tons of food every day, enough to feed one meal to every American every day. You can buy fresh corn on the cob or just picked strawberries in the dead of winter. Maybe it isn’t raining down from heaven. But our bounty is still a demonstration of God’s grace, a generous answer to our prayer for daily bread.

            Let’s remember to be grateful for the riches we have received.

Exodus 16:4-5 “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.’”

The Lord didn’t fire the nation of Israel as his chosen people after grumbled about a lack of food. In spite of their less than grateful attitude, he promised to feed them better. Their bread would literally rain down from heaven in the form of the manna they ate for the next forty years.

But their complaint had exposed a problem. They didn’t trust him properly. They didn’t politely ask for help. They accused him of trying to kill them. So he wove a test of their trust into the gift of bread from heaven. Five days a week they had to gather just enough food for that day: no hoarding, no bulk storage, just as much as you need. He wanted them to trust he was sending them food tomorrow.

One day a week they were to gather enough for two days, so that they could take a day off on the Sabbath. Though the food appeared for six days, they had to trust him when he said there would be nothing to pick up on the seventh. He was teaching them to depend on him, and trust his word, and recognize his generosity, instead of complaining when they didn’t get their way.

We don’t live under the same system exactly. The Lord doesn’t rain supernatural food down from heaven on us. He just provides us a standard of living those people in the desert couldn’t even dream was possible. The wealthiest Pharaoh of Egypt never lived in a house as comfortable as mine or rode in a chariot as fast as mine.

But our abundance also comes with a test, doesn’t it? God asks us to share. He asks us to live at a lower standard of living than we might afford voluntarily, so that we can help send missionaries around the world, send aid and relief to people who have suffered some natural catastrophe, and make sure people are clothed and fed who aren’t able to get these things themselves for some reason.

He asks us to trust we won’t miss what we give away, and that he will keep giving us what we need, and even more. Then we might even learn to appreciate how much we have compared to so many, because we can see how God has rained our bread and every other good thing down from heaven on people who complain too much about what they have.

He asks us to trust his promise, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all–how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). He has rained down on us the Bread of Life in the person of Jesus Christ. We can trust our daily bread will follow.

Exodus 16:1-3 “In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 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.”

Are you familiar with the difference between absolute poverty and relative poverty? Absolute poverty is a standard used by such organizations as the United Nations and the World Bank. It measures the inability of people to obtain such basic needs for survival as food, shelter, safe drinking water, sanitation, and education. It is difficult to measure and can change from country to country. Currently it averages about $1.90 a day, or $700 per year. In 2011 14% of the world’s population lived in this kind of poverty. In 1981 43% of the population suffered absolute poverty. In 1820 almost 95% of all people lived in this condition. Very few Americans qualify to be categorized this way.

Relative poverty is something quite different. It is not about having the things you need to survive. It is about how you compare to others in your community or country. One measure says that if you earn less than 60% of the median household income where you live, you are in relative poverty. A person in relative poverty may feel poor even though they may be in no immediate danger of lacking life’s barest necessities.

After Israel left Egypt, the entire nation of Israel was struggling with a kind of relative poverty. They had experienced a profound change in their standard of living, and they weren’t very happy about it. The people complained about the lack of food in the desert, but it was largely an exaggeration. This was a nation of sheep-herders. There was milk, and cheese, and lamb-chops if they wanted. Relative to their life in Egypt, their diet had to change. The variety of meats must have suffered. You couldn’t go fishing in the Nile river. There were no stores selling flour for making bread out in the wilderness. You or I might have complained about the menu, too. But they weren’t going to starve to death soon. Theirs was a “relative” poverty, relative to the way they had eaten in Egypt. It wasn’t absolute.

That’s not to say this wasn’t a legitimate problem that needed to be addressed. A nation of two million people consumes a lot of food. Eventually they might deplete their flocks and herds. A number of years ago the Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army estimated that two freight trains, each a mile long, would be needed each day to transport enough food to feed a community this large in the desert. No doubt they needed someone to work on logistics.

The bigger problem was the defeatist attitude, the criticism, the sense of entitlement, and the accusation contained in their complaint. This wasn’t an existence worse than death, and the Lord was not trying to kill them, no matter how unhappy they were with their desert rations. They sound child-like, don’t they–like the kid in the check-out line accusing mom or dad of not loving them because they won’t buy the brat a Snickers bar?

They look a little like us when we can’t appreciate the car we drive because a newer model came out that looks a little sexier or can parallel park itself. Then you see a video-clip of an entire family of six desperately clinging to one motor scooter to get somewhere in Pakistan. We feel bad that our TV isn’t 85 diagonal inches and Ultra HD while over a billion people worldwide still live without electricity.

Our own sense of envy, entitlement, and discontent can turn us against the Lord who hasn’t done anything for us except to give us our very lives, save us from sin and hell, provide everything we have, and promise us eternal joys in heaven. Why worry about whether we can afford a house when we already own a piece of heavenly paradise? Don’t forget the riches of salvation. Don’t let lean times turn us against the Giver of all.

Mark 6:32-34 “So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.”

Sometimes it seems like a vacation isn’t complete until something spoils it. Twenty-five years ago our family took a 17 day trek across the southwestern United States. We went through three rented trailers, scorching heat, lost children, fevers and parasites along the way. We saw a lot of things. We did a lot of things. We did not get a lot of rest.

Jesus did not announce his getaway with the disciples as a “working vacation.” But when he saw the large crowds, he wasted little time letting it turn into one. His reasons for doing so were clear: “…he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” It wasn’t so much their physical injuries and diseases. It was their spiritually lost condition that motivated his sense of urgency.

I have never shepherded literal sheep. But I have worked on a farm with livestock. When cows or pigs broke through a fence and got out, we dropped everything else we were doing. Getting them back in suddenly became the only project anyone was working on. Every hand was needed to get them corralled and safely back inside their pens.

Several times each week neighbors on our subdivision’s social media page report dogs or cats that have gotten loose and are wandering the neighborhood. This becomes that family’s focus of attention until Fido or Fluffy are safely home. There is an urgency when our four-legged friends are in sudden need of attention from their caretakers.

So Jesus was moved by the plight of these people who were wandering spiritually. They had no leaders to confront their sin-sickness. They weren’t being fed a regular diet of God’s forgiving love. They got nothing but do-it-yourself religion, endless lists of advice about how to live your life. That drove them further and further away from the safety of God’s arms and into the wilderness of confusion and despair. Jesus wasted no time turning his vacation with the disciples into a working vacation, because souls were at stake, and the work of caring for them is important no matter how much rest you need.

His compassion for us is no less. His desire for us to know our sins and their all-sufficient solution at the cross is no less urgent to him. His method for addressing our need remains the same as it was for the crowds that met him as he got out of the boat: “So he began teaching them many things.” In his word he teaches us the grace and love that calls our souls home and keeps them safe in his care.

Doesn’t he also teach us something about loving and caring for souls ourselves? Doing God’s work doesn’t wait until it is convenient. Often it will be inconvenient. It will intrude on our time. It will upset our priorities. It will spoil our plans. But the people for whom Christ bled and died are worth it. These are matters of heaven or hell for the people we serve. The work is important, no matter how much we may also need some rest.

We may feel a tension between our need for spiritual rest and our need to do God’s work. Perhaps we wonder how to resolve the temptation. Don’t do it. Both things are true. Both are God’s word. Both of them need to stand. Don’t find the balance. Just live the life. Trust Jesus to give you all the work you can handle and all the rest that you need.

Mark 6:31 “Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’”

We might think, “People, give these men a break! Let them get a bite and catch their breath.” But if it was your child dying of some dread disease, if it was your friend being driven mad by the devils inside of him, you might not be so patient. You might not be inclined to say, “Oh, it’s supper time? Go ahead and get something to eat, then. We will just sit here and wait while my child writhes in agony and his pulse slowly fades to zero. We will just try to keep our possessed friend from hurting someone until you are done with dessert.” The task was huge, and urgent, and never ending.

So Jesus proposed getting away to get some rest. Some rest? You have got to be kidding, Jesus! Why, we need to work double shifts and bring in another twelve disciples to work through the backlog. But that was not the Savior’s response. He knew the work would never be done. He wanted his disciples fresh and strong for the task. He invited them to come away and get some rest.

There is a subtle lesson he was teaching them about the way things work in his kingdom. We tend to think that Jesus saved us. After that it is up to us to carry out our mission, to build the church, and make it work. Jesus did that and we do this. If our mission doesn’t seem to be working so well, then we need to work harder, and smarter, and figure out the problem, and get it right. It all depends on us.

To be sure, Jesus favors hard work and dedication. But we are not the co-saviors. We are the weak, the bedraggled, fellow patients in his hospital, fellow strugglers with our world. We are the people he had to save. We need to repent of believing, like that vintage WWII poster of the female factory worker suggests, “We can do it.” At least the idea that we can do it by ourselves. That thought may stroke our egos, but it serves neither God’s kingdom, nor our souls. We need a power outside of us, a strength from someone else, for the work.

So Jesus proposes rest, because rest is important no matter how much work you have. This wasn’t a sight-seeing tour in some foreign country. It wasn’t time to fulfill bucket list experiences like zip-lining through the forest, white-water rafting, or climbing some peak. “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place.” This was time with the Savior. This was time to renew their relationship with Jesus. Real rest is more than the absence of activity. It comes when souls can put down the heavy burden of guilt and sin. Confidence that we are forgiven gives us peace.

Jeff and Lori told me with tears in their eyes about the peace they had found when they first grasped that Jesus had really done it all. By his death and resurrection, he had accomplished everything to save them. This was because for twenty weeks they had been with Jesus–not directly like the twelve disciples, but in word and spirit at a Bible basics class. After class they would go home at night and discuss what they had heard. Was it really true? Was it really possible that Jesus did everything, that forgiveness and eternal life were all by grace, that there was nothing more for them to do? They didn’t have to travel to a spa or some secluded cabin. They found it in a cluttered classroom in the middle of the city. There they could come away with Jesus and get their souls some rest.

Don’t forget your own need for rest. Jesus still invites us to come away with him in his word.

Ezekiel 2:6-7 “And you, son of man, do not be afraid of them or their words. Do not be afraid, though briers and thorns are all around you and you live among scorpions. Do not be afraid of what they say or terrified by them, though they are a rebellious house. You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or fail to listen, for they are rebellious.”

            Few things scare people as much as public speaking. That gets even harder when you know people don’t like what you have to say. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” people say. Don’t blame the person speaking when he is simply delivering a message from someone else. But there is a reason for the saying. There is a tendency for people to want to shoot the messenger. When the message makes them mad, they don’t care where it comes from. They just want to attack the person who had the gall to bring it.

            God knew that Ezekiel would face people who didn’t like what he had to say. Well over a thousand years of previous history pretty much guaranteed it. Their reaction was going to cut, and poke, and sting. Many of them would simply reject the truth. They would plug their ears and refuse to listen. Ezekiel’s work was often lonely. At times it even became dangerous.

            It is not as though people love God’s laws more today. They don’t even like his grace very much. Being forgiven means having to admit you did something bad. A faith built around forgiveness means having to admit that people are in general bad. They don’t want to hear it.

            But the prophet’s task is still to deliver God’s message of sin and grace without fear. The people who hear the word may be frowning. But the God who sends his word stands behind us smiling when we speak his words to them faithfully. His word will always be the final word. His side will always be the right side. We don’t have to be afraid when the words we speak are his.

            If the time comes that your pastor has to have a little heart to heart with you, understand the prophet’s task. He hasn’t been sent to make you happy. He has been sent to save your soul. God doesn’t send him to be popular or well-liked. He sends him to be honest and love you enough to tell you what you need to hear. In every case, remember that his task is to seek the people the Lord has redeemed for himself.

Ezekiel 2:3-5 “I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their fathers have been in revolt against me to this very day. The people to whom I am sending you are obstinate and stubborn. Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says.’ And whether they listen or fail to listen–for they are a rebellious house– they will know that a prophet has been among them.”

Did you get what God was trying to say about the nation of Israel, the people to whom he was sending the prophet Ezekiel? A rebellious nation, in revolt, obstinate, stubborn, a rebellious house–the terms are even stronger and more colorful in the Hebrew. From the day Israel left Egypt 850 years before Ezekiel, from the time of the forefathers of this nation five hundred years before that, they were a people that defied God at every turn. The story of their lives reads like a soap opera, or a tragedy. Greed, lust, betrayal, murder, and ultimately, abandonment of their faith had brought even God to his wits end. These were key to his decision to send the prophet Ezekiel on this task to call them to repentance.

Thank God we aren’t like that, right? Maybe 20 years ago Danny was sitting in the 7^th and 8^th grade Sunday school class studying the history of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness. After all God had done to help them, after all the power he had shown, Danny was simply incredulous that these people could be so thick, and complain so much, and rebel so often. They accused God of trying to starve them to death, worshiped the golden calf, refused to go into the promised land, rebelled against Moses’ leadership, and on and on. What was wrong with those people? “Now Danny,” his teacher would remind him. “Maybe they aren’t so different than us.” I don’t know what examples he gave, or what might have happened in Danny’s life to confirm the observation. But after about six weeks of these stories, Danny was the one who offered, “Maybe they aren’t so different than us.”

Maybe. If we were so good, and had our lives all together, and our faith was so secure, why would God have to send us a prophet to preach his word? Understand that the prophet’s task is to deliver God’s message to rebels. We need to own that about ourselves. We need to be corrected. We should expect Christianity to confront us. We need it to make us feel uncomfortable. We don’t need to go looking for a message that never challenges us and fits our current thinking in every way. Otherwise, how can any change for the better ever happen?

Isn’t it a matter of grace that God sends his prophets to rebels such as you and me? He doesn’t reject us and annihilate us for turning against him. He seeks us to turn us and make us his children. He offers forgiveness for the sins we commit. He sacrificed his own Son on a cross to redeem us and free us and make us his own. Don’t misunderstand. He is not content to leave us rebels. He will not be finished with us until he has transformed us entirely into obedient sons and daughters. But the prophet’s task is to deliver his message to rebels until we are changed into allies by his love.

Ezekiel 2:1-2 “He said to me, ‘Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.’ As he spoke the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.”

When the judge enters the courtroom, what does the bailiff say? “All rise.” When the bride appears at the back of the church and begins her march down the aisle, what do the guests do? They stand. When a superior officer enters a room where soldiers are gathered, what do they do in the officer’s presence? They stand up and salute. “Stand up in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly,” Moses commanded in the book of Leviticus (19:32). Standing is not the only way, but it is one way that we show respect.

So the Lord was about to speak to Ezekiel, and he commands the prophet to stand up. Back up a little in this vision, and you find Ezekiel showing deep respect in another way with body language: He bowed down with his face to the ground. Now the Lord not only commanded the prophet to stand. He sent his Spirit into the man and made it happen.

We have a similar moment in our worship each week. In churches that use the historic Christian liturgy, a lesson from one of the four gospels is read each Sunday. This is the part of God’s word that speaks specifically about Jesus, the very heart and soul of Christian faith. To hear those words, we don’t sit back and relax in our seats. It is not a casual moment. We do something that may feel a little stiff and formal. But it wants to deliver a subtle message about respect for God and his word. We stand up to hear the gospel. It’s a way that we recognize something significant is happening in these words. We stand in respect for the story they tell.

The point isn’t the outward ceremony. The point is, this is God’s word, and we take it with the utmost seriousness. This must be especially true for the man God sends to preach it. The prophet, the preacher, the pastor, must be convinced that he has been given the very words of God. These are not his plaything, so much Play-Doh or Silly Putty he has been given to bend and shape and twist until they look and sound the way he wants. They are not a collection of sanctified opinions, more or less human speculations about what God might demand, or how he might operate, that he can safely set aside because the times have changed, and we know better now, and that way doesn’t work anymore.

People have called me a “fundamentalist” because I try to understand the words of the Bible the way they read on the page, the way they read in their context, and approach them as the very revelation of God speaking to us. They called Ezekiel and the prophets, Jesus and his disciples, far worse for respecting the words on the page and taking them this way. Understand that the prophet’s task is to respect what God says and deliver it to you clear and unvarnished, not try to make it more palatable or sensible for modern ears.

What might this mean for us? There is a scene in the Disney movie Aladdin in which the hero has just let the genie out of the bottle. After a little song and dance about all the possibilities this offers Aladdin, the genie tells him, “There are a few provisos, a couple of quid pro quos. Rule number one, I can’t kill anybody. So don’t ask. Rule number two, I can’t make anyone fall in love with anybody else…Rule number three, I can’t bring people back from the dead. It’s not a pretty picture. I don’t like doing it.”

In a similar way, the faithful preacher of God’s word wants to serve you and give you even greater gifts than the genie in Aladdin. God does like bringing people back from the dead. It is the whole point of giving us his Son, forgiving our sins, and bringing us faith. So the preacher has to respect what God says. Don’t ask him to modify the rules or play fast and loose with the words because we want something God forbids. To paraphrase the genie, “It’s not a pretty picture. I don’t like doing it.” Give the message, the one who gives it, and the one who delivers it, respect.

Mark 5:40-42 “After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha koum!’ (which means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, get up!’). Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished.”

Jesus wasn’t a First Century version of David Copperfield, Criss Angel, Penn and Teller, or your personal favorite stage magician. His power allowed him to control the weather and quiet storms. We would be happy if we could just predict it. He made paralyzed people walk, without surgeries, stem cell treatments, or physical therapy. He made blind people, who had never been able to see their whole lives, not only see, but know what to do with all these images that suddenly came flooding into their minds, as if they had been seeing their entire lives. And at least three times, including here, he made people with no pulse, no breath, no brain activity live again.

That’s not to say that when someone we love dies, we should expect Jesus to wake them back up to more of what this sad, broken world has to offer. The cases when that serves a good purpose are rare.

But still today he is speaking a word of power and life that wakes the spiritually dead to a new life of faith. “I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:25-26).

And he promises a day is coming when he will speak a similar word of power and life. “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out,” he promises. “Those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.” Jesus’ powerful word will give us life from the dead. So his promise confirms our faith, and we are no longer afraid.

Jesus speaks, dead hearts beat with faith, and dead bodies come to life. Hear that word, and you will live.