Why work? Why not just be a lazy bum on a park bench somewhere? What does God say about work especially in these days? In an age of high unemployment, what does God's word say? Well, one of the chapters of the Bible that deals with work extensively is Exodus chapter 16. And in our series going through the book of Exodus we come to chapter 16:1 and it says this:
“The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the Lord 's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death." Then the Lord said to Moses, "I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days." So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?" Moses also said, "You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord." Then Moses told Aaron, "Say to the entire Israelite community, 'Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.' " While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, "I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, 'At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.' "That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, "What is it?" For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, "It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat. This is what the Lord has commanded: 'Each one is to gather as much as he needs. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.' " The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. And when they measured it by the omer, he who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little. Each one gathered as much as he needed. Then Moses said to them, "No one is to keep any of it until morning." However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them. Each morning everyone gathered as much as he needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away. On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much-two omers for each person-and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He said to them, "This is what the Lord commanded: 'Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.' "So they saved it until morning, as Moses commanded, and it did not stink or get maggots in it. "Eat it today," Moses said, "because today is a Sabbath to the Lord. You will not find any of it on the ground today. Six days you are to gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any." Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none. Then the Lord said to Moses, "How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where he is on the seventh day; no one is to go out." So the people rested on the seventh day. The people of Israel called the bread manna. It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. Moses said, "This is what the Lord has commanded: 'Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the desert when I brought you out of Egypt.' "So Moses said to Aaron, "Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it. Then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come." As the Lord commanded Moses, Aaron put the manna in front of the Testimony, that it might be kept. The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan. (An omer is one tenth of an ephah.)"
Here the Bible tells us that God led his people from the happy holiday they had at Elim back to the hard work of crossing the desert called Sin. (no relation to the English word sin!) Many of us have come back from holidays, from Christmas break, from the public holidays over the new year, and now we come into a new year, a year to work. And our challenge in this passage is to learn from what God taught the Israelites. All of us love our times of rest, our holidays, but the reality is that you and I grow best when we are under the pressures of normal working life day-to-day. When we're at the hot coal face we may find the materials for that industrial diamond that we need. We grow as a Christian as we learn the lessons of work and we need to remember these early lessons that we learn from work.
I remember when I began working one of the first lessons I learned was what a tough old taskmaster of a boss said to me. “You need to work hard so that when you get your pay check you don't have to blush because you didn't earn it.” “Work hard,” he said. But here we are reminded that God is the one that has something to say about our work, that work which takes up one-third of our day, if we sleep for eight hours and work for eight hours. Then God has something to say about that working period in our modern-day and age. And the Bible has answers to all of life's questions because God gives us a pattern for human work. For this New Year and in your day, what does God say about work?
We need to look at the situation in this passage. Here are two and a half million refugees, crossing the Sinai Peninsula, and now they've gone on for around 30 days and the supplies have probably begun to run low. So they begin to grumble.
Hence, the first main point I would call ‘grumblers galore’. The old saying that the devil finds work for idle hands. Well, the people weren't working. They were just putting one foot in front of another following the cloud every day. And now they began to grumble. They got into a routine. The daily march. The drudgery had set in and so the grumbles began.
Notice, firstly, that while they were grumbling galore, they forgot that grumbling has a short-term memory. Verse 3 tells us that they remembered back and they thought of the meat pots and sitting around in Egypt. They forgot the pain of slavery. They forgot the lack of freedom. They forgot the whips of their taskmasters. They forgot all that God had rescued them from Their past was idealized. It is very unlikely that slaves ate pots of meat every day, maybe at best they had meat as a Sunday roast, however unlikely as it sounds. Israel had heard of what God had done and now they had seen it. More than that they were short on memory because they had sheep with them and cattle with them that had come out of Egypt. The problem was those sheep and cattle were their assets. Rather than using their livestock they expected God to bail them out.
The reality is when you and I follow Jesus, when we leave sin behind us, when we're done with the ways of this world, then we forget the emptiness of our old way of life. We forget the hopelessness of being without Christ. We forget the many depressions that came from the emotional turmoil of being disconnected from our Creator. We must stop grumbling and remember what God has done.
Secondly, grumblers are also short-sighted. Verses 7 and 8 tell us that while the people grumbled against Moses it was ultimately against God that they were grumbling. Grumbling cuts through the lace curtain of what we see around us and grumbles against our invisible God. It wounds God who is hidden by our circumstances. We grumble about other Christians and hurt our common Father’s feelings. We grumble about the church that Jesus died for, to make his bride. The Israelites fail to see God's provision in their life. Grumblers forget God's presence with us always and so grumblers are short-sighted.
Thirdly, grumblers are also short on faith. Grumblers think that God will let them down. God often delays his help until we come to the end of ourselves and we learn to pray. But, if He who did not spare his only Son on the cross for our sin, will he not give us all things as he has promised? You see God does care for you. He has counted all the hairs on your head and you are more precious than all the tiny birds in the trees around your house. Grumbling does the work of the devil. Grumbling accuses God's people. Grumbling demotivates people around you and the cure for grumbling lies in trusting God. Grumbling fails to trust him and have faith in Jesus. Notice that the cure lies in accepting the situation he has put you in and trusting God's wisdom for that situation, that God will care for you, that God loves you, and that he has a purpose in putting you where you are at right now. So, if you're grumbling, learn from the grumblers galore in this passage, to turn from that, and see what God says.
The second major thing we learn from this passage is what I’ve called “a gauge of your faith.” Verse 4 tells us that obedience to God's instruction for work becomes a gauge or a measure of God's work in your life. Work gauges of your faith in God. Work measures how much you trust God. God's people were given clear instructions on how to gather manna and quail as a gauge of their faith. The first thing we need to do when we work, in gauging our faith, is to “focus on God.” God needs to come first in all our work and our labour. We must learn to look up to God. The New Testament puts it this way that we are to do all our work “as unto Christ.” Not for that boss that's looking over your shoulder, or for the pay check at the end of the month, but do your work as unto Jesus. That's what he teaches us. We must learn that as Israel looked up and saw God's glory in the clouds, in verse 10, so they responded with a focus on God.
A good question to ask yourself is: “when I work, am I doing it focused on God, looking to him?” In other words, you and I must work because God is the one that gives us work. He is the one that created work right from the beginning in the garden of Eden, long before sin came into the world. He gave work to Adam and Eve and he told them to maintain the garden, to keep it up, to look after all that he had planted for them, and all the fruit trees. To prune them and to keep them producing all the fruit that he had designed them to produce. Work was something God gave from the very beginning, tending the garden, and work was part of God's plan for you and me as human beings. Work is good. Now when sin came into the world sweat was added to that work. Sweat runs down our forehead and into our eyes and makes our eyes sting and smart. The reality is that work, in and of itself, is good. Though now, we have the added disadvantage of sweat. But the reality is we are to focus on God who gave work, then you gauge your faith by making God the centre of your work.
The second thing we need to see in gauging our faith is seeing that food for every day is the result of our work. Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Then he says go out and work. From the work, he gives you he will feed you, your daily bread. He will give you the strength. He will give you the job. He will give you the contacts, the opportunities that come your way that enable you to work. For Israel, they daily saw the connection between the early morning work and the food on their table. The problem is for many of us today we go to work and we do our work and we get a salary at the end of the month and we forget the connection between that money in our bank account, that enables us to pay our bills and buy our groceries, is connected directly to each day's work. Each one had to wake up early before the sun melted the harvest of manna on the ground and in a real sense, they could not rely on yesterday's savings, on that which they had accumulated. Yesterday’s work went rotten. Isn't it so sad with our savings these days? They disappear in bank crashes and stock market losses. However, we need to work “as unto Christ” every day and make him the focus.
Our biggest problem, of course, is that in our modern world they retire us at 60, or 70, whatever the date. The reality is God created us to work, maybe lighter work, as we get older and weaker, but we are to work. I want to encourage you to work as unto Christ every day. But if you do have to retire make sure you don't just retire and put your feet up and die soon thereafter but keep working in some way or another. God has provided these opportunities. And serve him with all that you are.
If we are to see that food for each day is a result of our hard work, we need to see thirdly that faithfulness to God's Holy day of rest is something that God requires of you and me. That's what it says that if we're going to gauge our faith we need to see that part of that faith is resting on one day in seven. That's what verse 22 and verse 23 tell us. Interesting that it's a fact that God supernaturally takes our work and makes it last for an extra seventh day a week. In other words, he says, ‘work hard for six days and I will give you seven days’ worth of food.’ He takes our work and blesses it. He adds to it! Rest then is so important to work. Rest is why God intervenes in time and space and makes our work stretch an extra day in seven. He rested after creating everything in six days and we are to rest now. I must tell you that this is an unusual concept. Many people have struggled with this. Atheist societies have reacted and rebelled against us twice in history.
Once during the French Revolution. They discarded everything the church taught and said, ‘Now we will have a 10-day working week. It will be like the metric system. 10 days not seven days.’ And they tried to get people to work for nine days and then rest for one day. And guess what they found. Productivity declined so dramatically they went back to a seven-day week. Well, the communist revolution in Russia tried the same thing. They tried a ten-day week. Wherever people have become workaholics it's destroyed them, either in their health or relationships, or something else. God calls us to trust him and to demonstrate our faith by resting. A good question to ask yourself is, ‘Are you living by faith? Are you resting one day in seven as a faithful response to what God has told you?’ Measure on your faith by your work. Because God is the one that gives you a pattern for human work these days.
If there is a gauge for your faith I want you to see thirdly, from this passage “a great feast.” A great feast is had when we do work God's way because there are some things that we can't earn. The manna that the people of Israel got was free. God's gracious provision. Our jobs are his provision. In our lives, they are gifts from God. We are also to pray to God as a church for the unemployment in our age. We are to look for ways to solve that unemployment. That unemployment dehumanizes people. If we have a job we are to serve God joyfully these days. And so that manna in the desert was a meal in one. Verse 31 describes it as white and tasting both sweet and flowery. To feed two and a half million people for 40 years, six days a week, now that's a miracle.
John the beloved Apostle records Jesus and he tells us that Jesus likened the manna from Heaven with himself (John 6:31.) He tells us that as God fed his desert people so Jesus is God's spiritual food for a world in a desert of sin. Today we are reminded that daily we need to come to Jesus Christ. Daily, we need to receive his forgiveness for our sins. Daily, we need to come to Jesus and ask him to not only forgive us, but to fill us with his Holy Spirit. Daily, we need to come to God and to give him our work. Daily, we need to give him our will. His will be done here on earth, as it is in Heaven. Daily, we are to give God our plans and ask the Holy Spirit to supernaturally add his blessing to everything that our work entails. Then our work gives us rest, and peace, and joy, and the resources to share with others, and help others, and love others as God has loved us.
Psalm 34:8 tells us: “Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the person who takes refuge in God.” I need to ask you, have you come to Jesus Christ and taken refuge in Christ for your hungry soul? Have you found manna in Christ? Have you cried out to Jesus for forgiveness and asked him to feed you daily, spiritually, in every part of your life? It is God who gives you a pattern for human work. When you're not working for him you may become critical and cynical. You need to remember that you can then become a grumbler. Grumbling against God can lead to you forgetting the terribleness of sin. You sin against God in grumbling. You fail to trust him. You can complain or you can roll up your sleeves and get down to work. Work is a gauge of your faith as you focus on Jesus and do everything as unto Christ as you realize that your work, puts his food on your table. Be faithful to rest one day in seven, as God did, and as he commands us to do in the Ten Commandments. God calls you to trust him because you have then come to Jesus Christ for a great feast, to be full of hope full of love, full of his peace, and joy, and patience, and kindness, and perseverance through the sweat of work. Do you know Jesus Christ your Saviour and have you put your total trust in Jesus Christ?
Choose today. Choose at the beginning of this new year to start feeding on Christ daily. Feed on Christ and choose to do that praying to him telling him about all your work plans laying it out before him and involving Jesus as the centre of your work, of your life, of your family. Doing everything as unto Christ, not for that grumpy boss, but for Jesus and doing it to his glory. So before all the intrusions of the day come in, gather your manna. Gather God's Word into your heart and hide it there, for all the challenges that lie ahead. And then trust God to do your work for six days as you work “as unto Christ.” And then rest. Stay in your home, not shopping or banking, but rest before him and show that you are a follower of Jesus by your good work, your hard work, and your faithful rest. Every week as you rest for God, you rest because He is the One that has given you this gift. Trust him. Do you know this?
Let's pray together. O Lord Jesus thank you for this reminder from your Word, very practically, on how to work. We realise, Lord that we need to turn to you and we pray that you would meet with us. Help us to trust you in these difficult days. To do things your way and to keep being faithful to you. Meet with us we pray, Lord, and direct our thoughts we pray. Make us faithful as we put our faith in you. But for some of us Lord Jesus we are conscious that we need to come to you and cry out, ‘Jesus be the manna of my life. Be the Saviour and change my attitude at work. Change me, Lord Jesus, to work “as unto Christ” and to do everything for Jesus. And so lead us, Lord Jesus, we pray. Direct our thoughts and our minds that we would glorify you. For all this, we ask in the all-powerful name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
I pray that God has met with you through this blog and encouraged you to work for him this year, whether it's in the office, or school, or varsity, or the factory, or within the body of Christ. But serve him faithfully. And then may your life bring Him glory, and praise, and honour, both now and forevermore. Amen.