It Would Not Keep Until Tomorrow

The strangest thing about the manna is not that it appeared.

It is that it rotted.

Exodus 16 sets it up carefully. They are six weeks out of Egypt, in the wilderness of Sin, and the food has run out, and the whole congregation says out loud that they would rather have died in Egypt by the flesh pots where they at least ate bread to the full. And God answers by raining bread from heaven, and He attaches one instruction to it: gather of it every man according to his eating. Today's amount. Nothing extra.

And of course some of them do not listen, because who would. Verse twenty: they left of it until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank.

That is a deliberate design. God could have made a bread that kept. He makes one that does not. Every single morning, six mornings a week, for forty years, the entire nation of Israel woke up with nothing in the cupboard.

And it is worth sitting with the scale of that. This is not one family improvising. It is a whole people, hundreds of thousands of them by the account's own reckoning, with children and elderly and sick among them, waking every day for four decades with no reserve of any kind. There was no household in that camp with a store. Nobody was better prepared than anybody else, because preparation had been made structurally impossible.

And they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating: and when the sun waxed hot, it melted.Exodus 16:21, King James Version

And it never once failed to be there.

That is the arrangement. No reserves, and no failures. Forty years of both at the same time.

You cannot gather Thursday's on Monday

Now I want to talk to the person who is trying to store it up, because I know you are reading this.

You are not lazy and you are not faithless. Exodus 16:4 has God raining bread on people who had just complained bitterly, with no lecture attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that from being read as a rebuke. You are the opposite of careless. You are the one who thinks ahead. You are the one who has already worked out what happens if the appointment goes badly, and what you will do about the money if the other thing lands in the same month, and how you will cope in December. You are running scenarios at eleven at night that have not happened and may never happen, and you call it being prepared, and some of it is.

But here is what you are actually attempting. You are trying to gather Thursday's portion on Monday, and it will not keep. It has never kept for anybody. That is not a flaw in your character, it is the design of the bread, and God built it this way on purpose.

You have today's portion, and today's portion is enough for today. Exodus 16:21 says they gathered every morning and it melted when the sun waxed hot, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding tomorrow's grace, He is holding it until tomorrow, which is where it works.

There is a mercy in the rotting that people miss because they read it as a punishment. If the manna had kept, they would have hoarded, and within a month there would have been rich families and poor families in the wilderness, and people with a cupboard and people without one, and the whole nation would have learned to look at the store instead of the sky. God did not want a people who could stop noticing Him by Wednesday.

And notice what He does not do. He does not scold them for being hungry. The complaint in verse three is bitter and unfair and frankly rude, and God's reply in verse four is: Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. No lecture. No conditions. He feeds them first and teaches them second, and He has never once required a person to have the right attitude before He fed them.

Then there is the sixth day, and this is the detail that keeps it from being a slogan. On the sixth day they gathered twice as much, and it kept. The same bread that bred worms on any other night sat overnight and stayed sweet, because God had said it would.

So the rule was never a law of physics. It was a relationship. There is provision for the days you cannot work, and it comes when He says, and it is not gathered by anxiety and it is not gathered ahead of time.

You are inside an arrangement rather than under a rule, and the sixth day is the proof of it. Exodus 16:5 has the same bread behaving differently because God had said it would, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that from being a mechanism a person has to operate correctly.

You are held tomorrow too. Exodus 16:5 has the sixth day portion keeping overnight because God said it would, and the same Spirit who arranged that is the reason a day you are dreading is already provided for. That is the thing the planning has been trying to secure and cannot. God is not going to be absent on the day you are dreading. He will be there in the ordinary way He has been every morning for forty years, and His Spirit is what lets a person put down a scenario they have run four hundred times.