Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

Manna and the Sabbath

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: Manna and the Sabbath

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 052

Dictation Name: RR171AB51

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. God commended His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Worthy is the lamb that was slain, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessings. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father we give thanks unto thee for Jesus Christ, thy Son, our savior, who gave His life that we might live. Grant, oh Lord, that in our living we show forth His life. Grant, oh Lord, that day by day we recognize that in Him, all things must be made new. That all things must be conformed to Him and to His word. Grant us, oh Lord, the resolution, the faith, and the courage to labor for thy kingdom, and to remember that all things were made for thy purpose and thy glory. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is from Exodus 16:22-36. Our subject: Manna and the Sabbath. Exodus 16:22-36. “And it came to pass, that on the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for one man: and all the rulers of the congregation came and told Moses. And he said unto them, This is that which the LORD hath said, To morrow is the rest of the holy sabbath unto the LORD: bake that which ye will bake to day, and seethe that ye will seethe; and that which remaineth over lay up for you to be kept until the morning. And they laid it up till the morning, as Moses bade: and it did not stink, neither was there any worm therein. And Moses said, Eat that to day; for to day is a sabbath unto the LORD: to day ye shall not find it in the field. Six days ye shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is the sabbath, in it there shall be none. And it came to pass, that there went out some of the people on the seventh day for to gather, and they found none. And the LORD said unto Moses, How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws? See, for that the LORD hath given you the sabbath, therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days; abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day. So the people rested on the seventh day. And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. And Moses said, This is the thing which the LORD commandeth, Fill an omer of it to be kept for your generations; that they may see the bread wherewith I have fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you forth from the land of Egypt. And Moses said unto Aaron, Take a pot, and put an omer full of manna therein, and lay it up before the LORD, to be kept for your generations. As the LORD commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up before the Testimony, to be kept. And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited; they did eat manna, until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan. Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah.”

The exodus account from the plagues on through the Red Sea and the wilderness journey is a series of miraculous events, none of them the kind that modernistic or atheistic man finds at all believable. At the same time, the simple fact is that the impact of these events had clear historical consequences and imprints. As a result, the skeptics have had a problem. They must account for these events naturalistically, but their efforts have been pathetically silly. I have read any number of accounts explaining the way manna occurred. Usually I can’t remember what was said the next day because the argument was so absurd.

Certain aspects of this episode need to be cited before calling attention to the theological meaning. First manna, it was like coriander seed, white and tasted, we are told, like wafers made of honey. It was on the ground six days a week. On the sixth day they gathered enough and it lasted until the sabbath. Thus second, on the sixth day they gathered two quarts, or two omers, and it remained fresh for sabbath use. Then third, the manna could be eaten boiled or baked, and apparently also without any cooking. Then fourth, while the manna was usually perishable, a pot of it was kept among the holy things and later in the Holy of Holies as a reminder of God’s providential care. This did not perish.

It is of interest that pagan nations had a great curiosity about Israel’s religion, about Israel’s lack of an image of a god, and about the remarkable contents of the Holy of Holies. More than a thousand years later, the contents were still so impressive that the Romans took them to Rome. The Ark of the Covenant was thus prized by Israel’s conquerors. Then fourth, or fifth, Israel was fed with manna for forty years, until they reached the borders of Canaan, just before taking Jericho.

Then next, in spite of the miraculous provision of manna, some people refused to believe that God would not provide it on the sabbath in spite of His plain word. They went out on that day to gather it and found none, and for this God rebuked them. The sabbath law, with respect to manna, was an aspect of God’s testing. As we saw last time, God tests us both through the troubles He gives us and the blessings.

McGregor said of the desert Hebrews, and I quote, “In every way they went on showing when tested that they were not true servants of God, but slaves left loose.” The Arabian wilderness was a good place for slaves because slaves do not exercise providence. For centuries, the Arabian Peninsula was exploited by its people. They cut down its trees to carry on a charcoal trade, and they thereby turned fertile lands into dry deserts. The same, of course, was done with North Africa. There are parts of our country that are good wheat-growing areas that have about the same rain as much of the Sahara, but think of the difference between the two.

The giving of manna and the sabbath observance are very closely linked. One aspect of this was to cultivate historical memory. Again and again, as we have already seen, Israel was told to commemorate and to remember the acts of God. The pot of manna had this purpose. We, too, are required to remember God’s mercies and to be grateful. We must remember that God is the source of all judgment. We pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” so that we may daily remember whose government is total and all-inclusive. In Chadwick’s words, and I quote, “The bitter proverb that eaten bread is soon forgotten must never be true of the Christian.”

We have, in this text, the first reference in the Old Testament to the sabbath. There are people who say the sabbath was not observed until this time. Only worshipped as people from time to time, or weekly when they had the time that was most convenient, observed it. Whatever kind of worship and rest that occurred previously now gave way to the sabbath as a matter of calendar and month{?} Of course, there are those who say it was always observed from the days of the Garden of Eden, but we don’t find evidence for this in scripture. Some explanation was thus necessary by Moses, because it was something new, the regular weekly sabbath, to bring to their minds what God now required. The pot of manna remained as a testimony to God’s providence and to the sabbath. By the time of Solomon, the manna had disappeared, perhaps as a result of the Philistine victory over Israel a few generations earlier under Eli. In Hebrews 9:4, we are told that the manna and the Holy of Holies was kept in the golden vessel.

It is interesting that Israel did not show any religious excitement over the quails. They saw that apparently in spite of Moses’ statement saying that God was going to bring them as a natural event, but the manna seemed strange to them so they made quite a to-do over it.

The sabbath is at the heart of the manna episode. Because sabbath observance is a national and covenantal fact, it’s origin is in this event. Phariseeism made a great deal of the sabbath, and it saw the origins of sabbath regulations in this event. So, they made all kinds of rules to prove how holy they were in the observance of the sabbath. The Pharisees said that sabbath travel had to be restricted to about two thousand yards, no more, because that supposedly marked the distance from any part of the wilderness encampment to the center, where later the tabernacle was placed. And, of course, among orthodox Jews to this day, and orthodoxy is a continuation of Phariseeism, they will not so much as turn on a light switch on the sabbath. They hire a neighbor or gentile boy to come in and do it, and they will not pay him on the sabbath.

In the wilderness, Israel had milk and butter from its own flocks, and occasionally some meat. At different encampments, where they remained long, they perhaps grew enough grain to provide some flour. We do have in texts such as Numbers 7:13, 19, 25, and 31, references to offerings of fine flour mingled with oil. They obviously grew some flour, uh grain. In Deuteronomy 2:6, we have a reference to the purchase of food with money from the Edomites. At other times, water was also purchased. We are not told that Israel lived solely upon manna but that it was their basic daily food.

In Numbers 11:7-9, we are given more data on manna. We are told that it could be ground in mills, or beaten with a mortar, baked into cakes, and so prepared in a variety of ways. In this text, verses 29-30 in particular, we find that some strange uses have been made of it. One Jewish sect of old, Sabbatarians, maintained, and I quote, “That no man should change his position from morning to the evening of the sabbath.” And this was because the statement “abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place in the seventh day,” which referred to the fact that they were not to make it a day of labor, but a day of rest, but this is the Pharisaic mentality and so it made the sabbath a punishment. This small sect of Jews insisted that you didn’t move at all. Now, that must have been quite a punishment, but over the centuries, men have been prone to substitute rigorous absurdities for simple obedience, as though such things meant a higher sanctity and a higher obedience.

According to one scholar, Rylaarsdam, the word “sabbath,” may be related or cognate to the Babylonian word, “Sapatu,” and he said, “On the Babylonian sabbath, there was a cessation of activity. Sabbath days were considered to be days of evil.” Now, this fact is a very interesting one, and it pinpoints the uniqueness of the weekly biblical sabbath, because it tells us the difference between the world the bible tells us is the real world and the world the ungodly believe in. The Babylonians, like most cultures, virtually all, held that man lives in an evil world governed by evil forces. These forces are metaphysical, metaphysical evil governed by a blind fate. But the Bible tells us that man lives rather in a moral universe, that evil is a moral fact, not a natural fact, not a metaphysical fact.

Instead of an evil day, the biblical sabbath celebrates the goodness of God and the government of God. We take hands off our lives our the sabbath rest, in the confidence of God’s absolute government and His providential care for us. It is a way of saying that God is in charge. The sabbath is a way of affirming the doctrine of predestination. Manna was an evidence of this provision and care, and at the same time, it was a testing of Israel’s faith, and Israel’s trust in God. At the heart of the sabbath meaning is our trust in God and our recognition that the reality of time is not determined by time but by God. All meaning comes from Him, not from the events we face nor from ourselves.

As Morgan stated, and I quote, “The people were to understand that their life was to be daily dependence on God.” The sabbath, or Lord’s Day, has a long association with joy and gladness, and with freedom. To view life and whatever powers there may be as evil, or as merely blind and meaningless forces, is to rob life of both peace and freedom. You cannot be free in a world without meaning. Outside of the sphere of biblical faith, fear and darkness permeate the mind of man. There is no ground for an ultimate trust. Life is treacherous then, and the world, untrustworthy. But, given the ultimacy of the triune God of scripture, we face a world created and governed by our redeemer. Only then, is a true sabbath possible, only then can we truly rest.

Our Lord promises, “To him that overcometh, will I give to eat of the hidden manna,” meaning that in Him, we have unseen and supernatural resources. We are then more than the world can see in us. The sabbath thus means not only rest, but strength. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee for the hidden manna, Jesus Christ. We thank thee that there is more in us than ourselves, more strength in us that our strength, and more of a future for us than we can ever see or imagine. How great and marvelous are thy ways and thy provisions, oh Lord, and we thank thee. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience]This Pharisaical overcompensation seems to be one of the instincts of the U.S. Supreme Court with regards to their decisions on religion, or freedom from religion.

[Rushdoony] Yes, they presuppose a universe in which only they can provide order. That’s why you have totalitarianism. You’ve got to provide order in the universe and if man doesn’t provide it, or if God doesn’t provide it, man says, “I will,” then he is saying, “I will be god,” and that’s exactly what we face today in Washington, in the Supreme Court, and elsewhere of course, all over the world. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] Well, if you go into a bookstore now, you see whole shelves, whole sections on diabolic behavior, evil forces. . .

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And the religious section, it’s got every religion, with Christianity playing a very minor role.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and what I’m seeing especially in books published in the last year and a half is an accelerated pace of robbing from the past anything that is Christian, so that instead of calling attention to all that Christianity has done, for example, for the poor, over the centuries, or to take care of abandoned children, every example to the contrary, pagan examples of it many of them, within Christendom, is culled out of history to build a case against Christianity as the most monstrous faith the world has ever seen. It’s becoming increasingly the intellectually respectable thing to do, and some of the most monstrous statements are made about what scripture ostensibly teaches. And a citation in one instance I was reading yesterday was not to the Bible but to some scholar, a European scholar. So, we are seeing the systematic reconstruction of history in terms of an anti-Christian belief.

[Audience] At the same time, there’s a spade{?} of books deploring{?} the decline of the United States and the spirit of the American people.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely. A few books to the contrary are coming out and is it the May Chalcedon report that is in the hopper right now? That has a long book review by John Lofton, which is a gem, about a book which gives the lie to a great deal that has been said. It’s very important article. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that because Jesus Christ is Lord, our prospects are bright and glorious for they come from thee. Make us joyful in the future that is ours in Jesus Christ, knowing that all things shall be brought into captivity to Him. Make us faithful in thy service. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.