How to Get Through the Wilderness, Part 2

David Michael Jeremiah: When we're in the wilderness of life, it's easy to take for granted the small, simple ways in which God sustains us. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah encourages us not to let that happen. Listen as he returns to the book of Exodus and the story of God's provision for His people as they wandered in the desert. Here's David with the conclusion of his message, "How to Get Through the Wilderness."
Dr. David Jeremiah: It is an interesting thing as you study the Bible. It appears as if the people of God were closer to God in the wilderness than they were after they got out. As soon as they got relief, as soon as they got free, it wasn't long before they went back to the condition that caused them to be in the wilderness in the first place. It's often true that when we go through tough times, that's when we're the closest to the Lord. We realize how desperately we need Him. We look around for other resources that can help and there's nothing, nothing in comparison to what the Lord can do. So don't always curse the darkness. Sometimes in the midst of the darkness, you learn some great truths. I am a living testimony to that fact. Today we'll finish up what we started yesterday as we talk about how to get through the wilderness. The wilderness is a pretty good illustration of what life is like sometimes. If you've ever been in the desert—I haven't been there often, I've been there some—there's a desolate thing about the desert. You look around, there's no water, no trees, no vegetation. There's nothing but emptiness and sameness. Life can become like that. We need to know that God is with us when that happens. On Friday, we're going to talk about a passage of Scripture that I often write in Bibles when I sign Bibles. The text is Psalm 37: trusting God in times of trouble. That's on Friday. But today, Exodus chapter 16 and part two of how to get through the wilderness. So they're in the wilderness, and they don't know what to do. What we're going to learn by way of a parable is that what God did for them is what God wants to do for us. When you're in a wilderness experience like we are as a country and like some of you are personally, there are certain things that God does. There are certain ways that God functions. It's good to know how to make it through the wilderness. How many of you here can give a witness today to say that in my life, both before and after as a Christian, I've had a few little wilderness experiences? What do you do when you're in the wilderness? I want to give you some principles right from this portion of God's Word. Number one: The help you need in the wilderness is not available from man. Isn't that true? What in the world could these people do who were in the wilderness? They didn't have anything to eat. Not too much food grows in the wilderness. Not any stores out there. There was no way for them to find the answer apart from an intervention from God. The Scripture says this is what happened in verse four: "The Lord said to Moses, 'Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain quota every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not. And it shall be on the sixth day that they shall prepare what they bring in, and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily.'" And Moses and Aaron said to all the children of Israel, "At evening you shall know that the Lord has brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord; for He hears your complaints against the Lord. But what are we, that you should complain against us?" Also Moses said, "This shall be seen when the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening, and in the morning bread to the full; for the Lord hears your complaints which you make against Him. And what are we? Your complaints are not against us but against the Lord." And Moses spoke to Aaron and said, "Say to all the congregation of the children of Israel, 'Come near before the Lord, for He has heard your complaints.'" Now, this is the story. There wasn't food available from any other source. Their problem was unanswerable as far as man goes. It took a divine intervention. It took God doing something that only God could do, for which only God could get the credit, for them to survive. Could I just stop for a moment before we go on and interpret this passage to tell you that's really where we are right now as a people, isn't it? I hear all of the stories about what we need to do to right the course of our nation. But every time I hear the supposed formulas, I see the emptiness in all of them. There is really no hope that this country can ever avoid disaster in the direction we're headed unless there is a divine intervention. Unless God's people begin to turn back to Him as the only source of help, unless there is what we used to call a revival in America, we are in trouble. The only potential answer for our problem lies in some kind of a spiritual movement throughout this land that would turn us back to God—not in a superficial way, but in a very deep and abiding and life-changing manner. Everyone's got their ideas how to get through the wilderness. But I want to tell you something: the answer that we need for getting through the wilderness is not available from man. It's got to be something that comes from God. What did God do? He did a miracle. There were two million people wandering around out there. 600,000 men were told in Numbers 1:45 and 46. God, according to the Scripture, made sure that every one of them had what they needed every day. I read a commentary that says the manna came from above, but it didn't really come from God. It grew on trees and then fell on the ground. Yes, in the winter and in the summer, in every single part of the wilderness, there was a tree by everybody, and it fed two million souls for 40 years, and there never was a bad year. You know what? It takes more faith to believe the liberal interpretation than it does just to believe God's Word. Amen? It wasn't growing on trees. The Bible says it came from God. He rained it down. After the dew was gone, the manna was on the ground. Let me see if I can make this real for you. Two million people. The Scripture says that an omer was to be gathered for every one of those two million people every day. An omer of that bread is equal to about six pints, I am told. So two million times six pints equals 12 million pints per day. How much is 12 million pints of manna? Most of us don't have any way to measure that in our finite minds. Let me give you an illustration. It would take 10 trains having 30 cars, and each car carrying 15 tons for one single day's supply to make sure everybody got what they needed to eat. It grew on trees? Over one million tons of manna were gathered annually by the Israelites during that 40-year sojourn. Where'd it come from? God did it. That's how it happened. The answer wasn't available from man. The second thing you learn about how to negotiate your way through the wilderness is that the help you need in the wilderness is not attainable without your cooperation. Now, it is true that God did it. And it is true that what we need from God is a divine intervention in our wilderness experience. But it is also true that God wants us to be involved in the process. God delivered the manna to the ground, but the people who were in the family of God had to make a choice either to stoop down and pick it up and eat it or walk on it. You couldn't get nourishment from manna on the ground. You had to take it and eat it so that its worth could value your soul, your body. And so it is with what God wants to do in the life of this people and in our life. God is wanting to do a miracle in your life, but He does not come uninvited. He will not force His way upon you. There was not one single Israelite who was forced to eat the manna. They voluntarily, willingly went out and collected it, and they made the application of God's miracle to their own life. I cannot help but wonder if God did intervene in our culture, if we are so totally insensitive to God, if we would really even see what was going on. Would we see God at work if He were at work? Would we understand that He had intervened, that a miracle was happening so we could do the part we need to do? I can tell you for sure that when you walk through the wilderness, the help you need is not available from man, but it is not attainable without your cooperation. In fact, they had to cooperate in a very specific way, didn't they? Verse four says that every day they had to go out and gather their food. An interesting thing is some of them didn't listen carefully when Moses explained this. Moses said you have to go get what you need for the day, then you have to use what you have for that day, and it can't be carried over into the next day. If you look down at verse 19, you'll see what happened. And Moses said, "Let no one leave any of this manna until morning." Notwithstanding, they did not heed Moses, and some of them left part of it until the morning, and it bred worms and it stank. The Bible is specific, isn't it? And Moses was angry with them. So they gathered it every morning, every man according to his need, and when the sun became hot, it melted. The interesting thing is—now watch this, you want to know how miraculous was God's intervention—the Old Testament Sabbath laws were still in place. So every Friday, they would go out and they would collect enough manna for Friday and enough manna for Saturday. And though every other day any manna that was kept over for 24 hours went sour, on that particular day, the extra manna that was gathered for Saturday for the Sabbath was kept intact in all of its nourishment value. And then on Sunday, they started the day-by-day gathering again. God did it. I need to stop just long enough to tell you that whatever you think the meaning of the manna is—and I'm going to tell you what it means in just a minute—one of the applications is certainly to our own spiritual life, isn't it? I think maybe what God would have me to say to you here right now is that if you think you can come to church on Sunday and get all the manna you need for the week and live off of it from Sunday to Sunday, which some of you do, you're going to have some stinking manna about Wednesday. I'm not being facetious when I say that. What happens to people who just gorge themselves with information and fill up their notebooks and get all the stuff they need to know about who God is and what He does, but then they don't use any of it? You see, the interesting thing about this story is everything they gathered in the morning they had to eat during the day. Whatever they took, they had to take in. In essence, what the principle is, is this: we're not only to gather from God in the morning, but we're to apply it throughout the day and come back the next day for fresh manna to keep us going. God doesn't operate reservoirs; God's into relationships. And He wants this to be a daily thing where we walk with Him. And that leads me to the third principle, which is that the help you need in the wilderness doesn't come in large doses. It only comes in bite sizes, daily accomplishments. That's true in your relationship with the Lord. You can't live in your relationship with the Lord month to month. You can't live in your relationship with the Lord week to week. It's hour by hour, it's moment by moment, it's daily. We have to understand that when we are walking through the wilderness, we gather in the morning and we eat throughout the day, and we're back at the same place the next morning to gather again. Ralph Cushman wrote a poem that someone gave me the first year I was in the ministry, and it's in one of my first old preaching Bibles attached to the inside cover. It says this: "I met God in the morning when my day was at its best, and His presence came like sunshine with a glory in my breast. All day long His presence lingered, all day long He stayed with me, and we sailed in perfect calmness of a very troubled sea." "Other ships were blown and battered, other ships were sore distressed, but the winds that seemed to drive them brought both peace and rest. Then I thought of other mornings when keen remorse of mind, when I too had loosed the moorings with the presence left behind. So I think I know the secret learned from many a troubled way: you must seek Him in the morning if you want Him through the day." You've got to gather your manna every morning. There's a fourth principle that I think is important that's not necessarily here in the 16th chapter of Exodus, but it is in the 11th chapter of Numbers. So take your Bibles and hold your place in Exodus 16 and turn over to Numbers chapter 11. When you want to get through the wilderness, what do you need to know? We have learned that when you're on your way through the wilderness, the help you need is not available from man. Number two, the help you need is not attainable without your cooperation. Number three, the help you need in the wilderness is not accessible in large doses. And number four, the help you need in the wilderness is not appreciated by the average person, by other people. There's an interesting story in Numbers chapter 11 that illustrates this. Do you know who the mixed multitude were? Well, they were the mixed multitude. They were people who should never have been incorporated into the Commonwealth of Israel. They were folks who got associated with the people of God along their way. But they were not purely God's people. Many of them were pagan. And through intermarriage and through kind of hanging on to the outskirts of the Jewish people, they joined in with God's people. But they were with them but not of them. Do you understand what I mean? They were from other parts of the world, and they had kind of attached themselves to this traveling band of Israelites. And wherever you read about the mixed multitude, you read about trouble. And in the 11th chapter of the book of Numbers, there's a very interesting sidelight to all of this beginning at verse four. Now watch this: "Now the mixed multitude who were among the children of Israel yielded to intense craving; so the children of Israel also wept again and said: 'Who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our whole being is dried up; there is nothing at all except this manna before our eyes!'" "Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its color like the color of bdellium. And the people went about and gathered it, ground it on millstones or beat it in the mortar, and cooked it in pans, and made cakes of it; and its taste was like the taste of pastry prepared with oil." Now, I don't know a lot about this manna, but I do know this and let me explain this to you. Do you know what the word manna means? The word manna is the Hebrew word—this is true—it's the Hebrew word for "what is it?" That is the truth. How many of you have had any manna lately? Let me see your hands. No, you'd better not raise your hand, mister, she's watching you. But I just thought of this. When you don't know what it is and you're not really sure you want to know, you can give God gratitude for the manna that you have that day because it's "what is it?" right? But this "what is it" that God gave them to eat every morning, according to Exodus chapter 16 and verse 31, when it was taken as God gave it, it tasted like honey in the mouth. But the mixed multitude weren't willing to take God at His word. And so they took what God gave in all of its purity and its simplicity, and the Scripture says they beat it and they cooked it and they fried it, and they made cakes out of it. And when they got done messing around with what God had given them, it tasted like a piece of crust with oil poured on top of it. Doesn't take long to figure out what that's all about, does it? Can you grieve with me over what religion has done to the simplicity of Christ? It's no wonder people don't want religion. They've taken the Christ who is given to us in the beautiful, simple, honey-to-the-taste form, and they have so mutilated who Christ is that no wonder He doesn't taste good to the average churchgoer. But I want to tell you something: when you get back to who He really is and you do what God tells you to do and you follow His plan, oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. You know, today the media has painted all of us into the fundamentalist, crazy corner. And let one of us stand up and speak about who God is and how we're committed to Him and how we want to follow Him, and all they want to do is paint us over here in this corner. They don't understand. When we had Oliver North here, I may have told some of you that we were afraid that we might have news people here who would interrupt our service. And we really prayed that God wouldn't let that happen. And I'm here to tell you there was no news person that got in this building. But there were three reporters that came that Sunday, and they were on campus, and some of the guys that work for us out in the parking lot told me this. They had heard that there were going to be three demonstrators on our campus that day because of what Oliver North had said a few days before that in one of his news conferences. They came on this campus that Sunday—we had 5,000 people here—and they were looking all over this campus trying to find those three demonstrators. And one of our men went up to them and said, "There are 5,000 good people in that building or around that building over there. Why don't you go talk to some of them?" They said, "That's not what our assignment is. They sent us out here to find those three agitators and report on it and get it on the news." That's where it is today. The people that want to do right, the people that want to follow God and follow Christ, the average person doesn't understand. And the media does everything it can to paint us into some extreme corner. And let's just not forget the simplicity of Jesus Christ. I told you I was going to tell you what the manna means, and I want you to turn in your Bibles to John chapter six. On one occasion, this very story was brought up in the presence of Jesus, and Jesus tells us what it means. Verse 28: "Then they said to Him, 'What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?' Jesus answered and said to them, 'This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.'" "Therefore they said to Him, 'What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You? What work will You do? Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, "He gave them bread from heaven to eat."' Then Jesus said to them, 'Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.'" "Then they said to Him, 'Lord, give us this bread always.' And Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.'" All right, class, who is our manna? Jesus is. How do you get through the wilderness? You get through the wilderness with Jesus, don't you? And I want to tell you something. There's not a day that I read the paper that I don't thank God I know Jesus. I wouldn't know what to do. I wouldn't know how to lead my family. I surely wouldn't have a clue what to do in this church, in this crazy mess we're in right now, if I didn't know my manna from heaven was Jesus Christ. And He is sufficient. And He will always be sufficient. And no matter what happens in the ups and downs of our culture, everybody will have their own pet formula of what we have to do. But I just want to be simple enough to take Jesus as He is—not to change it, not to try to dress it up, but just say: Folks, what you need in this wilderness, what you need is you need Jesus. He is the manna come down from God. Have you tried Him? Have you tasted? Have you trusted? Amen. You see, we can know all of these things. We can read the stories of the Bible, the illustrations, and believe them. But until we appropriate them to our own lives, they're not going to help us. You can't get better in the wilderness by just learning that you can get better in the wilderness. You have to trust God. You have to do what He says. You have to follow His instruction. And when you do that, you find out He is always enough. He's enough for every situation if we'll just trust Him. And that's the message of Exodus chapter 16.
David Michael Jeremiah: We still have several more messages of encouragement from the series called Making Sense of It All. And I just want to remind you again, there's a study guide for this series, and there's a CD package for this series. You can get both of these through davidjeremiah.org. That's our website. Go there; you'll find all the information that you need. And don't forget to join us tomorrow as we continue and conclude this week together. Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and senior pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note and let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, Post Office Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163. Visit our website at davidjeremiah.org/radio or call 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of Robert J. Morgan's book, "100 Bible Verses That Made America." It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app to instantly access our content. Search the App Store for the keywords Turning Point Ministries. Visit davidjeremiah.org/radio for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series "Making Sense of It All" on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.