THROUGH THE BIBLE - Exodus 1..

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com. That's cornerstonerbc.com. They set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the people of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the 15th day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.

And the people of Israel said to them, With that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for ye have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Then the Lord said to Moses, Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day that I might test them whether they will walk in My law or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily. So Moses and Aaron said to all the people of Israel, At evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt. And in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because He has heard your grumbling against the Lord.

But what are we that you grumble against us?" And Moses said, when the Lord gives you in the evening meat to eat and in the morning bread to the full because the Lord has heard your grumbling that you grumble against Him, what are we? Your grumbling is not against us, but against the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, Say to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, Come near before the Lord, for He has heard your grumbling. And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked to where the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.

And the Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them, at twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God. In the evening a quail came up and covered the camp, and in the morning dew lay around the camp. And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground.

When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, What is it? For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. This is what the Lord has commanded. Gather of it, each one of you as much as he can eat.

You shall each take an owner according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent. And the people of Israel did so. They gather some more, some less. But when they measure it with an owner, whoever gather much had nothing left over and whoever gather little had no lack. Each of them gathered as much as he could eat.

And Moses said to them, Let no one leave any of it over till the morning. But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank, and Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning they gathered each as much as he could eat, but when the sun grew hot, it melted. On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers each.

And when all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, he said to them, This is what the Lord has commanded. Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake, and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning. So they laid it aside till the morning as Moses commanded them, and it did not stink, as there were no worms in it. Moses said, Eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord.

Today you will not find it in the field. Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is a Sabbath, there will be none. On the seventh day, some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. And the Lord said to Moses, How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my laws? See, the Lord has given you the Sabbath.

Therefore, on the sixth day, he gives you bread for two days. Remain each of you in his place. Let no one go out of his place on the seventh day. So the people rested on the seventh day." Verse 31.

Now the house of Israel called its name Manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. Moses said, this is what the Lord has commanded. Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations so that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt. And Moses said to Aaron, take a jar and put an omer of manna in it and place it before the Lord to be kept throughout your generations.

As the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the testimony to be kept The people of Israel ate the manna 40 years till they came to a habitable land. They ate the manna till they came to the border of the land of Canaan. Anomer is the 10th part of an Ifad. Amen. This is the Word of the Lord, Exodus chapter 16, brothers and sisters.

If I was going to summarize the teaching of this chapter that we have here in front of us in a simple sentence that will capture everything that we have read in this entire chapter, I would say that this chapter is about God's provision on the heart of men. It's about God providing for His people, and it's about the heart of men responding to the provision of God to His people. Those two items we can see here as we have read through Exodus chapter 16. Now, when we come to the part of God's provision, brothers and sisters, in this short overview of this chapter, I want you to focus on four things, because God is going to provide to His people four things. The first thing that God is going to provide in this chapter is His leading presence.

The people of Israel had gone through the Red Sea already, and three days after that, they had complained about the water they did not have. And now the presence of the Lord that was manifested among them as a cloud in the midst of them, was taking and leading these people towards the wilderness of sin, as it is said in verse 1. The Lord was dwelling among the people of Israel and He was leading His covenantal people towards the promised land. God was providing Himself for the people of God as the guiding principle, or as the one who was taking them to the direction that they were supposed to go. Not only He was guiding them, but He was manifesting Himself among them.

We can read that the glory of the Lord was manifested in the midst of the people of Israel. That is the provision of God for His people. He was leading them, guiding them, and His presence was manifested in the midst of them. There's a second thing that God is going to provide to His people. He is going to provide that which their bodies need.

They were complaining about food. They had already complained about the water in chapter 15. Now in chapter 16, they complain about food. And the Lord is going to provide that which His people needed, that it is meat through quails and bread through the manna. He provided for His people that which they needed in their physical bodies, they complained about meat and they complained about bread.

And that's what the Lord provided to the people of Israel. So not only his presence in guiding them, but also he provided that which they needed to eat. But it goes beyond that, because now the Lord is going to provide something that is going to define the relationship of the people of Israel and God through this Book of Exodus. He's going to provide also His law and His commandments. If you go to verse 4, It says that, Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather at this portion every day, that I might test them whether they will walk in my law or not.

Beloved brothers and sisters, in chapter 15, the Lord had tested the people with the water in Marah. And now here the Lord is going to test the people again. And the way that He tests the people is by giving them commandments that are supposed to be obeyed. It's by giving them laws. The law of the Lord is good and is holy and is what people need in order to know what the Lord requires of them.

So the Lord is not only going to provide Himself in leading and guiding them through the wilderness, He's not only also going to provide the food that they need in the bread and the meat, but He also provides the law. But there's another thing that the Lord is going to provide here to His people, and that is rest. The Sabbath day is also provided here in this chapter, because as he is instituting the regulations of how they were going to gather the bread that was going to come from heaven, they are told that they were supposed to gather and to collect this on a daily basis. They were not supposed to collect more than that. But also they are told that they are not to collect on the Sabbath day.

On the day before, they were supposed to collect twice the amount so that they will have enough on the Sabbath day. Why? Because as he says, the Sabbath is a holy day given to the people in which they were supposed to rest. This glorious Lord God of Israel, beloved brothers and sisters, He has given Himself as the covenantal God, dwelling among them, providing for them what they needed to eat, the bread that comes from heaven, and also providing the law and the commandments that they were supposed to obey, by which they were going to be tested. and also He provides them the Sabbath as a rest.

And all of this is glorious because these four things are pointing towards the greatest provision that the Lord God of Israel has given to humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is the greatest provision that God the Father has given to humanity. It is in the Lord Jesus Christ that we have the dwelling presence of God tabernacling among us, dwelling among us, among the people of God. It is Jesus Christ who is the true bread from heaven, is the bread of life, not the one that is going to satisfy the physical needs of the people, but the one that will satisfy the eternal needs of the soul and the heart of His people. It is God Himself in Christ who is the fulfillment of the law, and it is in Christ that we find the end of the law for righteousness.

And it is Jesus Christ, the true Sabbath, the rest of the soul of the people of God. The Sabbath was given to the people of Israel as a type and as a shadow of what the Lord Jesus Christ would provide to the soul of those who by grace through faith are united to Him. So it is Christ. The one that is the rest of the soul. It is the one that provides the place in which the soul of the believer can rest, not only on a day per week, but eternally.

From the moment that we have in grace, we have faith in Him, and independently of the circumstances, in the immediateness of our circumstances, our soul finds rest in the person of Jesus Christ, and praise God for that. Because the second aspect of this chapter is not only the provision of God for His people, but beloved brothers and sisters, it's also about the nature of the heart of men. Because the people that had seen the wonders of God being taken out of the land of Egypt, being taken through the Red Sea and seeing the mighty wonders and power of God, these people that complained three days after in the waters of Marah, are also the people that are going to complain again. It says in the text, 2 months and 15 days after they had been removed or taken free from Egypt, they are going to grumble against Moses and Aaron, which is a grumbling against God Himself. They are grumbling against God.

And if you remember in Exodus chapter 3, in the end of chapter 3, it says that the Lord heard the groanings or the complaints of the people of Israel who were in bondage in the land of Egypt. They were complaining not only to God, but they had complained about their circumstances already in the land of Egypt. And they're going to say, we had meat and bread and all of these things we had in Egypt. And it seems that they are saying, God, we are going to die here in the wilderness. These people were grumblers and complainers.

But before we address the nature of that, rambling and complaining takes to a second aspect of the heart of many in this chapter, and that is disobedience. Because they were told that they were not supposed to gather more than a portion on a daily basis. And the first thing that they did is, or some of them did, was that they were going, they went and collected more of the daily portion. First, disobedience. Then the Lord said, you are not going to go out on the Sabbath day to try to find more bread or manna.

And they did so. They continue in disobedience. They were not only grumblers, but they were also disobedient. And everything that the Lord was doing was to test the faith of these people. What is the nature of a grumbling heart?

And what is the nature of a disobedient heart? The question that we need to ask ourselves and try to answer biblically. It is, brothers and sisters, a heart that is self-centered. It is a heart that is focused utterly on him or herself. It is a heart that derives satisfaction and peace and rest from the circumstances in which we are and everything has to be so in place and in order according to our standards so that we will not complain about it.

These people were in bondage and in slavery, and those circumstances were the reason of their groanings and their difficulties. And now when they're in the wilderness, and they think that they don't have food, and they have water, and they see the difficult circumstances. They grumble and they complain because peace for them was derived from their inward satisfaction and their perception of their circumstances. Everything had to be in place according to what they perceived in their own standard so that they will be in peace and in rest. That is a heart that is centered in self and not in the ways of God.

You see, brothers and sisters, that in a sense, we can summarize salvation in that. In that the Lord comes by His Holy Spirit and then He changes our heart from stone into flesh. So then the desires of the heart of the person are not centered in self anymore, but the eyes are pointed to the person of Christ. And then we rest upon not the circumstances and the things that I can do to be successful in my circumstances, but my eyes look up to Jesus Christ. My eyes are focused on placing the person of Jesus Christ, and then His ways are the desire of my heart.

This is what the Psalmist says through the Psalms continually and continually, that your ways might be my ways, that your desires might be my desires, that my heart might be your heart, that your burdens might be my burdens, that the heart of God might be the heart of his people, so that people may rest entirely in what he says that he is going to do and apprehend those things with saving faith. that despite of the circumstances, that despite of the wilderness, that despite that we have even weaknesses in ourselves, our eyes are not placed in who we are and the things that we do, but in Christ. And then when our eyes are placed in Christ, he becomes the guiding God that dwells among us. He becomes the bread of life that is sufficient to provide for everything that we need. He becomes the fulfillment of the law in which we rest because it's not by works, but it's by grace.

And he becomes the rest of our souls that take us by his hands and that makes us more like him. So we say death. is myself, and now alive to Christ, and make me more like Christ, and kill the remaining of myself. Nothing good in me, but I point to Christ alone." It might be that the grace of our hearts and the hope of our souls, brothers and sisters.

Let's pray.