Blog Post 49// What is it?

For 40 years, God’s people, the children of Israel, were in a holding pattern waiting to go into their promised land. They were indeed stuck, not in a 2-star hotel, waiting to be upgraded to a 5-star—they were stuck wandering in a wilderness, and

what makes you scratch your head is that it was God who led them there.

The wilderness. The desert. Hot in the morning. Cold at night. No source for food, no natural water. So God fed them supernaturally every day with something they called manna.

They’d never seen or heard of it before. It just appeared. They didn’t have a name for it, so they named it what they said when they first saw it:

What is it?

Manna is Hebrew for what in the world?

Probably the equivalent of us saying: whatchamacallit, a whosey what’s it, or us Italians, a come si chiama.

Quite literally a whatness.

They described it as white like coriander seed that tasted like wafers made with honey. A few thousand years later a company named Post would market it and call it Honey Bunches of Oats.

That’s my manna.

Exodus 16:14 adds like round flakes, fine as the frost…they ate it and said They’re great! No, they really just said

What is it?

Everyday it appeared on the ground for them after the dew evaporated and they were to collect it with strict instructions:

“Gather only as much as you need for the day. Gather more, then it will rot, stink, and attract bugs.”

Lovely.

So they gathered it. I imagine them cooking and eating and probably exchanging manna recipes. This person made a killer Bamanna Bread. You’ve gotta try Uncle Menachem’s Bamanna Pudding. For protein put a bamanna in that smoothie. On special occasions, a good bamanna's foster was used to celebrate.

God provided. Every morning.

And every afternoon what wasn’t collected would melt away. God designed it so that the Israelites would be without food every night when they went to bed. If He didn’t come through the next morning, they would begin to starve.

Think of it like this:

God continually put them in a position to prove that He could be trusted to supply everything they needed to survive.

All other sources were cut off for 40 years, yet not one of them ever went to bed hungry. Their shoes never wore out. Water flowed from rocks, quail dropped from the sky for meat.

Each day saw the perfectly timed provision of God.

If you’ve ever been in a moment where you were out of options, with nothing you could do, thinking there was no way through or out, perhaps it’s a setup for a manna kind of moment.