Sermon Tone Analysis

If you have your Bible (and I hope you do) please turn with me to Exodus Chapter 16.

Our text for this morning is found on pages 110-112 of the Red Pew Bible in front of you.

Keep your Bible open, or follow along from your electronic device; the text will also be on the screen.

>The Israelites have grumbled about not having any water to drink.

And now, they grumble about a lack of food.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

This is true: grumblers grumble.

You can probably guess what the grumbly Israelites continue to do here:

We actually have some footage of a couple of these grumblers: [Play Commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UO2A2p-19A ]

Carol Brady is right; most people aren’t themselves when they’re hungry.

Some even get a little hostile when they’re hungry.

It’s called “hangry”—hungry and angry about being hungry.

It starts when you’re a baby, screaming and crying until you get fed.

And it continues even into adulthood, screaming and crying until you get fed (i.e.

John Hough threw the biggest temper tantrum last week.

He was hungry at 10:30 and I told him he’d have to wait until noon).

For the Israelites, being “hangry” is just the newest emotion that leads to complaining and grumbling and whining.

P.G.

Ryken writes: “Whining is the Israelites’ besetting sin.”

Yep.

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim—that wonderful place with 12 springs of natural, delicious Best Choice Drinking Water and 70 palm trees—and headed back out into the desert on their way to where they were going, led by Moses, led by the Lord.

The whole Israelite community marches on, and before long, the whole community is grumbling against Moses and Aaron.

The whole community.

This—grumbling, whining, complaining—is Israel’s besetting sin.

Did you catch what they said?

“If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt...”

Wow.

They’re saying that suffering the plagues or drowning in the Red Sea alongside Pharaoh and his army would have been better than being a little hungry.

Wow.

Really, what they’re saying is: “We would rather serve Pharaoh.”

“At least with Pharaoh we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted.”

This is probably a bit of revisionist history.

They’re remembering it better than it was.

No one I know ever does this.

I’ve never heard anyone exaggerate the advantages of a former situation.

“Boy, those were the good ol’ days!”

Really?

When?

Point me to the “good ol’ days”, would ya?

Every generation longs for days gone by or complains about how things are now.

We’re not meant to long for the good ol’ days (as if there was such a time); we’re meant to long and work for God’s Kingdom here on earth.

The Israelites, like many of us, exaggerate how good the past was.

The grass is always greener.

Never mind the fact they were beaten and oppressed; never mind the fact that Pharaoh attempted the genocide of all their sons; never mind the fact that they were slaves used only for manual labor, slaves for 430 years!

Now, to be fair, grumbling kind of worked for the Israelites a few stops ago.

At Marah, where the water was bitter, the people grumbled, and presto-change-o, the water became sweet.

A little grumbling produced good water to drink.

So now that they need food, perhaps a little more grumbling will work.

In response to their grumbling, the Lord rains down bread from heaven for them.

Grumbling works.

Grumbling, however, was and is a serious breach of faith against the living God.

In no time, the people of God have forgotten who God is and what He has done for them.

This took one month.

(Moses lets us know that all this took place on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt; they came out of Egypt on the fifteenth day of the first month).

One month.

They’ve forgotten, quickly.

And grumbled.

This is their M.O., their modus operandi.

This is how they do.

The Lord knows how to deal with grumblers, and he does so in ways unexpected:

The text—Exodus 16—shows us that grumblers need:

To Glimpse God’s Glory

The people were grumbling well before their one-month anniversary of being led out of slavery.

In no time, they have seemingly forgotten all about the Lord and His mighty work on their behalf.

What they need is to be reminded of their salvation and of the Lord’s glory.

They are still in need of coming to know and to appropriate for themselves that it was the Lord who brought them out of Egypt.

“In the evening, you will know that it was the Lord…in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord...”

This is the sort of thing that people living in a thoroughly polytheistic and syncretistic society needed to hear often: it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt.

The people of Israel are not alone in this.

We, too, live in a thoroughly polytheistic and syncretistic society.

Let me ‘splain.

The Church is not immune.

The ol’ U.S. of A is certainly not immune; this country has always worshipped a plethora of gods (that’s polytheism [poly=many, theos=god]—“You worship your god, I’ll worship mine, we’ll be just fine.”).

We don’t have to look far to find an idol or ten, a false god, something we worship; we don’t have to look any further than our own hearts, idol factories that they are.

Look to the person next to you; you may very well idolize them.

Consider your preferences regarding what we do here on a Sunday morning, about this building, about certain traditions; some of them might be sacred cows that need to be tipped over.

Idols abound: sports, money, sex, status, country, family.

We live, and are active participants, in a polytheistic society.

And we are quite involved in syncretism (salad-bar theology, buffet-style theology: a little of this and a little of that.

“I’ll take a little Christianity and mix it with a political ideology (or take a political stance and call it Christianity), add a little Joel Osteen, some New Age teaching, dress it up with some non-Biblical end-times literature, and some bacon bits and croutons for crunch.”

Ours is a syncretistic age.

And we might be just as guilty as mixing this with that as anyone else.

God doesn’t give us everything we want, so we’ll take what God can do for us, but we need more.

We need more than He gives, more than He has to offer, so we also look to Pharaoh—he gives us pots of meat, for goodness’ sake!

We tend to grumble when we forget who God is and what He’s done for us.

We grumble when we forget that it was the Lord who brought [us] out of Egypt, [out of slavery].

We need to know that it is the Lord who saves.

“There is only one Yahweh, He is the only real God, and it is He—not any other god or force or factor—who brought the Israelites out of Egypt.

This, His miraculous provision of food for them after they left Egypt, should have reminded them of who He is and how He continued to provide for them.

He is the same, the only God who brought them out of Egypt and now continued to be their (if they got the point, one and only) God.” —Douglas K. Stuart

The people of God needed to glimpse the glory of God anew.

God wasted no time in giving His people a glimpse of His glory.

He manifested His glory by immediately appearing in the cloud while Aaron was still giving them instruction.

God’s glory is His impressiveness, His awesomeness, the sense of His greatness.

This is felt in terms of fear, and awe, and amazement, and the sense that one is not in the presence of anything merely worldly.

God cannot be seen, but here He lets His glory be sensed.

The Israelites had no trouble sensing God was among them, in power and presence.

They all turned and looked toward the desert where the glory of the Lord was.

The Lord’s response was, in part, to remind the Israelites who He was.

When they went out and got their fill of food—quail and bread from heaven—the they would know, once more, who the Lord their God was