In the wilderness, God tells us to trust that his provision is better. For the Israelites, that provision is bread—manna. “When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For they did know what it was’” (Exod. 16:14-15). The manna is named for its very “what-ness”—the fact that the Israelites didn’t recognize what it was.
The strangeness of God’s provision is a reminder that God’s ways are not our ways. God knows what we need, even if we don’t. Murray Pura reminds us that “How God chose to feed the people was unexpected. The way he worked to help them did not look like anything they had seen before. Yet they trusted it, ate it, and lived. We also must be prepared for God to work in unusual ways in our lives. We must be careful not to turn away from something because it appears odd and unfamiliar. Many times God does something and we say, ‘What is it?’—only to find out it is the very thing we need.” So, “Can God spread a table in the wilderness?” (Ps. 78:19) Yes, if we have the eyes to see what his provision looks like.
So, God says, when you hunger and thirst for the life you used to know, trust that what God gives you is better. And what God gives us is himself. God gave bread in the wilderness—Jesus tells us that he is the bread. What God has given us is himself. In the lives of the Israelites, let us remember that it is indeed GOD—GOD!—who “causes them to turn,” as Exodus 13:18 tells us—“causes them to turn” to the wilderness, to take, as some translations put it, the “roundabout way of the wilderness.”
If God takes us to the wilderness to speak to our hearts, trust that is ultimately for our good. Wilderness is a hard place, to be sure, but it’s a place where God is. It’s for this reason, I think, that when Moses muses on the wilderness period, just as the Israelites are to enter the Promised Land, his response is ambivalent, multi-faceted. On the one hand, he speaks of the terrain as “howling, wilderness, waste” (Deut. 32:10), the “great and terrible wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground” (Deut. 8:15). On the other hand, he speaks movingly about God’s provision: “[God] fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, and in the end, do you good” (Deut. 8:16).
When you are hungry and thirsty for the life you used to know, trust that what God gives you is better. Here, you will find God—and find yourself.