Here's How to Handle Any Fear or Need
Our Father created all people in His class, so to speak, and the plural before His name is proper since He has many children and they belong to one another. But remember, the Bible says unhappily -- not everyone is His child ( ).
Even His children are vulnerable to complaining unhappily. Put the whole creation together and youve got a lot of complaining; just ask George Bush, or Tommy Thompson, or Tom Reed. Get used to it, fellas, cause its been going on for thousands of years. You can ask Moses when and if you get to heaven.
Bush and his gangs situation is worse than Moses, though. The guy leading the Israelites out of Egypt didnt have the press to worry about. Todays press is worse than ol Pharaoh and his guys. They can set off the complaining and lead it to a rampage, especially if one of or two of them is hurt (or maybe threatened) in some way. That may have happened in the anthrax scare, which followed the Sept. 11tragedies. But I think the general population, children of God and all, have seen the light and settled down. At least I pray so.
Americans are supposed to be tough, and they got a little ashamed at their bandwagon reaction. They sent their boys off to war in crazy Afghanistan and then got scared by some powder in the mail, thanks to the same guys who reported the facts so vividly and accurately as humanly possible at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and other affected places. Strange, isnt it?
But check bashful ol Moses and hell tell you that the Israelites, who sort of represented us all, didnt need the press to get worked up at him and even God Himself.
The Lord, their Father, dealt with the principles of complaining by His special creation out in the desert (talk about crazy). It was hot in the daytime and cold at night, and walking was impossible in that stupid sand. Who was it who talked about love for your brother? Less than two months after escaping, they were complaining about the scarcity of food. They blamed Moses, the leader, saying theyd rather have stayed in bondage than to die from hunger. (Thats the way it is, Dubyuh; you were stepping along smartly, a hero after Sept. 11, and we hit a bump; suddenly youre practically a bum; cest la guerre, mon ami).
Then the Lord said to Moses, "Beholde, I will
rain bread from heaven for you; and the people
shall go out and gather a days portion every
day, that I may prove them, whether they will
walk in my law or not . . ." ( , RSV)
So, there they were, in no-mans land, and God (one of His names is Provider) said to Moses there He goes again; it wasnt Moses, the leaders, fault but He said, "I have heard the murmurings [ugh] of the people of Israel; say to them, At twilight you shall eat flesh, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread; then YOU SHALL KNOW THAT I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD" ( ). You cant prove it linguistically, but one of mans names is Murmurer, Steam comes out the ears but all the mouth says is "Mumble, mumble, mumble."
Through the fact that the manna -- which means "what is it?", deriving from the Hebrew man hu, thus "manna" was filled with worms if left overnight and they couldnt stockpile it but had to work that day for it, God taught His people that they were constantly dependent on Him. He took them right to the edge of hunger every day. They were learning to say, "Give us this day our daily bread." You could hear the Jewish mothers telling the kids every day that God always provides one day at a time. He never fails. And "daily," a virtually unknown Greek word that was used in the Lords Prayer, means far more than "bread." It means a "category" items that had to be purchased every day. God, according to the lesson taught in the wilderness, provides what we need every day if we trust Him in full faith.
We also see evidence of Gods provision when needed in an account from Rephidim in the wilderness. When the Israelites camped, they found they had no water and they saw none available. Once again, they were fearful and began to turn against their leader (and pastors wonder why their flocks always blame them when the slightest thing goes wrong). Then the Provider showed up, as always where there is real faith. He told Moses to take his rod with which he had struck the Nile and to go to the rock at Horeb, which he was to strike with the rod. God stood before him on the rock and when Moses struck, out came good, refreshing water.
God called the name of that place Massa (proof) and Meribah (contention), because of the fault-finding of Israel and because they had put Him to the proof, saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?" ( ).
The Israelites, like us, had begun to doubt the Lords Presence when they found themselves in need. They thought, as we do centuries later, that if God is with you, you cant have any needs, which obviously is not true. God allows us to have needs, even to be afraid, so we might learn of His infinite supply. And He never leaves us ( b).
Its as though the children of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai -- and we, too, in the 21st century in super-modern and wealthy America, if were willing -- could move and the Lord was with them. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who knew something about the wilderness, talks about the Israelites experience: "They drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ" ( ). We Christians today need to grasp this.
