The bread you did not know

A few years ago I was in Israel, on an outreach — to tell Jewish people about the Messiah. I was in the north, near Caesarea Philippi and in Kiryat Shmona, in the kibbutzim along the border with Lebanon. It is some time ago now, but I still remember it well.

I met all sorts of people there. Many musicians and artists, creative types, busy with all kinds of things — and nearly all of them were seeking a connection with something supernatural, as they themselves saw it. And at Caesarea Philippi there is a cave that musicians use in their worship of the idol Pan — and that is telling, for Pan is precisely the god of the wild and of music, with his pan-pipes. Music and worship, directed at a god that people themselves have invented.

And what stayed with me most was this: there was a clear hunger. A hunger for something that stood outside themselves.

And that hunger — for something outside yourself — is exactly where this Scripture passage comes in. For hunger, it turns out, is not always a lack. Sometimes it is a gift. But first begin by feeling what it is.

Imagine you are really hungry. Not 'a quick snack' hunger. Real hunger, for days, with nothing in sight. Your stomach cramps, you grow dizzy, you can think of nothing but food.

That is how a whole people once stood. In the wilderness, among the sand, without fields, without shops, without stores. And in the morning there was something on the ground. Small grains, white, like frost. No one knew what it was.

On the Sabbath, on Friday evening, we still think back to that. Two loaves lie on the table — the challah — with a white cloth over them, and that cloth recalls the manna. When everyone is seated, our children are usually impatient: may the cloth come off yet? But first we light the candles — that belongs to it too, though we sometimes forget.

For those candles are for us the image of the sun that rises. For that is how it went with the manna: there lay dew, like frost, over the ground, and only when the sun rose and the dew lifted did the manna become visible. So with us, when the light is on, the cloth comes off — and there lies the bread. And then the question of old comes up of its own accord: what is this?

For that question is no invention of ours. That is really how the Israelites stood there: they looked at it and said to one another, in Hebrew: man hu? — 'what is this?' And that is where the name comes from. The stuff was henceforth called manna: literally 'what-is-this'. For forty years they ate bread whose name was a question.

This week Moses tells that story back to the people, just before they enter a good land. And he lays something underneath it that you easily miss. Listen:

'And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not … that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.' — Deuteronomy 8:3

Read that again, for there is something strange in it. God let them go hungry. On purpose. It was no accident, no misfortune along the way. It belonged to it.

Why would you let someone go hungry on purpose?

That sounds harsh. And I will not talk around it: it is harsh. But look what hunger does to a person.

When everything goes by itself, you do not notice what you live on. You eat, you are full, you give it no thought. Only when it falls away do you feel how dependent you really are. Hunger strips you. It takes away all the frills and shows what you really lean on.

And the text says exactly that. Those forty years were there, it says, 'to know what was in thine heart' (8:2). Not because God did not know — but because they had to know. You only come to know yourself when it gets hard. Who are you when you have nothing left to hide behind?

And then came that strange bread. Every morning anew. And you could not keep it — whoever tried to hoard it for the next day found spoiled stuff the next morning. You got enough for today. Today. And tomorrow again. So you learn, day after day, that you do not have it in your own hand. That it is given. Not by bread alone — but by a hand that opens afresh every morning.

Now I understand that 'God let them go hungry' sounds contradictory. Elsewhere you read precisely that God is righteous, blesses, does not withhold the good. And that is usually what we focus on: on what happens, on the action, on the experience of the moment. But look here not at the happening, but at the God behind it. The God of Israel, who lets His people go hungry in order to be able to satisfy them afterwards.

For that is the beautiful thing: when you are hungry for God, He can satisfy you. And notice the difference — only when we receive from God are we truly satisfied. Not when we arrange it ourselves, not when we pull it from somewhere else. Only when we come to Him with our hunger and open our heart. Those creative people at Caesarea had that hunger; the question is never whether you are hungry, but where you take it.

And then comes the warning — at a strange moment

You would expect the most dangerous moment to be the hunger. The wilderness, the emptiness, the lack. That is surely where you lose sight of God?

But Moses says the opposite. Listen closely to when he warns:

'Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God … when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and when thy herds and thy flocks multiply … and thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.' — Deuteronomy 8:11–14, 17

Not when you are hungry. But when you are full. When your house is fine and your barn full and everything runs. Then it is dangerous. For then it suddenly seems to go by itself. Then you say, perhaps without daring to say it aloud: 'I got this done myself.'

And that is so recognizable it almost hurts. Forgetting does not happen with a bang. No one decides one day: 'from now on I will forget God.' No. It creeps in through the fullness. You no longer need Him to eat today — the fridge is full. You no longer need Him to feel safe — the door is locked. And bit by bit it shifts: from 'received' to 'earned', from 'given' to 'self-made'.

Do you know that little sentence, 'my own power got me this'? It need not be about money. It can be about anything. My discipline. My talent. My hard work. My good choices. All perhaps true — but notice the moment it tips over: the moment it becomes a reason to no longer have to be grateful to anyone.

And over against that the text does not set: 'then do nothing'. It says something kinder: 'thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth' (8:18). Your power is not denied. You may work, build, achieve. But the power itself is also given. Even your ability to get something, you have received.

Not because you were so good

And then Moses goes a step further, and he pulls something out from under it before it can arise. Soon they will stand in that good land, and then they might think: we got this because we deserved it. Because we are simply better people than these peoples here.

Moses cuts that off, three times in a row:

'Speak not thou in thine heart … For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land … Not for thy righteousness … for thou art a stiffnecked people.' — Deuteronomy 9:4–6

'Stiffnecked' — that is an old word for stubborn, stiff in the neck, unwilling to bend. And notice: Moses says this to his own people. Not: you were so good. But: you were difficult, and yet He carried you.

That is liberating, if you hear it rightly. For if you got it because you were so good, then you have to stay good to keep it — and then you live in fear. But if you got it while you were stiffnecked, then it does not hang on your performance. Then it is really a gift. And a gift you cannot earn; you can only accept it — or forget that it was one.

Returning — not forward

There is an old Hebrew word that holds all this together: teshuvah. It means: returning to God. The people had, in its ways, strayed from Him — and it may return. Not to a place, but to Him.

And I must be honest, for here lies a pitfall I too can fall into. Modern man — and the modern Christian just as much — sometimes uses the faith for his own ideals. To go further, to be progressive, to 'build God's kingdom on earth'. We need not dig into the details, but the tendency is that we deploy God and His Word to carry out our own plans — under the guise of progress.

And teshuvah says something else. Not: forward, your way, with God as the engine. But: back. 'My own power', 'my own righteousness', 'my own ideals' — it is always the same movement forward, away from the giving hand. Returning is the opposite direction: not taking, but receiving again.

And what does God want, then?

After all those warnings you might grow afraid. What must I then do to get it right? And then comes a sentence that asks at once very little and very much:

'And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul?' — Deuteronomy 10:12

'What doth the LORD require … but?' As if it is little. And at the same time: it is everything. To fear, to walk, to love, to serve — with your whole heart. That is no checklist of rules you can tick off. That is a direction for your whole life.

And then there stands an image I find beautiful, even though it sounds strange at first:

'Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.' — Deuteronomy 10:16

That is a figure of speech, not an operation. There is something around your heart — a hard layer, a shell, something that holds it shut. And the question is whether that may be opened. You cannot do that entirely yourself; a little further on in the Bible God promises to do it Himself. But the direction is clear: a heart that no longer sits tightly shut, but can open. Soft instead of hard. Reachable.

And look where that open heart leads straight away. Not to piety in a vacuum, but to this: God 'doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger … Love ye therefore the stranger, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt' (10:18–19). You recognize your open heart by this: that you look out for the one who falls outside. And you know why — because you have been one yourself.

'Has God forgotten me, then?'

Now the second reading, from the prophets. And you need to know when we read it. Last week was the first Sabbath after the heaviest day of mourning of the year, the day of the destroyed temple. This is the second Sabbath after that. Two weeks of comfort in a row.

And this second comfort does not begin beautifully. It begins with a complaint, and it is exactly the complaint that lies beneath all mourning:

'But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.' — Isaiah 49:14

Forgotten. That is perhaps the worst thing you can feel. Not that someone is angry with you — that is at least still attention. But forgotten: fallen out, out of view, as if you no longer matter.

And now listen to the answer. It is one of the tenderest sentences in the whole Bible:

'Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.' — Isaiah 49:15–16

Graven upon the palms of His hands. Not written with a pen — that rubs out. Graven, engraved, as you carve a name in stone or in your skin. Every time God opens His hands, your name is in them.

And do you now see the reversal of this week? Man is the one who forgets — precisely when he is full (8:11). And God is the one who never forgets, not even when a mother could. We ask, afraid: 'am I forgotten?' But the question should really run the other way: am I not forgetting Him, now that everything runs?

And then it suddenly becomes very practical — two pairs of hands over against each other. Have I begun to watch my hands? My doings, my works, what I achieve? Or do I look at His hands — where my name stands engraved? Do I build on my own work, or on what God has already prepared?

And then this part of the prophet ends with a curious command. While you are still thinking about that forgetting, he says: look down, to where you come from.

'… look unto the rock whence ye are hewn … look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you.' — Isaiah 51:1–2

You are hewn from somewhere. From a rock you did not choose yourself. Your beginning does not lie in yourself — it lies further back, in Abraham, in a promise made centuries before you. That too you have received: your descent, your ground, the rock under your feet. Remember that word a moment, rock, for that is how we come to the last reading.

'Whom say ye that I am?'

Do you still remember, at the beginning — those creative people I met, who were seeking something supernatural? The remarkable thing was this: to find it, they went down. Into a cave, guided by a complicated, self-invented teaching. They sought something supernatural, and went down, into a system of their own. Hold that image a moment.

For I had to think of it at the third reading. For it takes place at exactly such a spot. Centuries ago a man stands with a little group of friends at an enormous rock face — Caesarea Philippi — with that same cave: the sanctuary of Pan, where with music a self-invented god was worshipped, and of which people said it was a gate to the realm of the dead. There, with all that stone and all that idolatry above and around Him, He asks a question.

First an easy one: who do people say that I am? And the answers roll in. John the Baptist, some say. Elijah. Jeremiah. One of the prophets.

All opinions you pick up off the street — hearsay, what people make of it. But then He turns it around, and suddenly it becomes personal:

'But whom say ye that I am?' — Matthew 16:15

And Peter — the most impulsive of the lot, who usually blurts it out first — says it:

'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' — Matthew 16:16

And you would expect Jesus to say: well guessed, Peter. But that He does not say. He says something far stranger:

'Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.' — Matthew 16:17

'Flesh and blood' — that is an old way of saying: an ordinary person, out of himself. And Jesus says: this you did not think up yourself. You did not puzzle it out, did not reason it, did not pick it up somewhere. It is given to you. From above. By the Father.

And there everything of this week falls together. The deepest thing a person can know — who God is — you do not make yourself. You cannot reason your way to it. Just like the manna they did not know. Just like the power that turned out to be given. Just like the rock from which you are hewn. Your knowing of God too is received, not made.

And then He says that sentence about the rock, exactly there, before that cave:

'… thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' — Matthew 16:18

Before the cave they called the gate of the realm of the dead, He says: those gates do not hold My people back. And what does He build on? On a rock — on the confession that just now came not from flesh and blood, but from the Father. What carries is, once again, something that did not rise up out of man himself.

I will not pretend I know exactly what 'this rock' is; that has been discussed for centuries, and that is all right. But the point that stands is this: something is being built on what is received, not on what someone invented himself.

And notice the ending. He forbids them to tell it around (16:20). The truth is real — but it is not immediately carried out as a possession. It is first carried, kept. A truth you have received, you need not grab hold of and trumpet around in order to keep it.

The God you invented yourself

And now back to that cave of Pan. There you have it in miniature: a god that people invented themselves, worshipped with music and all, in a hole in the rock. Such systems do not bring you closer to God; they carry you ever further away, and you see ever less well who He really is.

And now comes the uncomfortable part, for this is not something about 'those seekers over there'. I have to say this to myself too. Yes, as a Christian you can also hold a picture of God that you have assembled yourself. A God made after how you think He ought to be. And do you know what is often the deepest source of our disappointments — in the faith, and in our life? This. We are disappointed in a god we invented ourselves. He does not do what we had decided He would do, and we feel let down. But that god was never there.

And that is why that confession at the rock is such a liberation. 'Thou art the Christ' — and 'flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee'. The real God is not the God you assemble to your own measure. He is given. And He is many times greater than everything we can think up.

What is this?

And now I want to go back one more time to the beginning. To that bread whose name was a question. For forty years, every morning: man hu — what is this?

On our Sabbath evening we light two candles. And at the one we say: this is the sun that rises — the Sun of righteousness. And for us that points to Yeshua, the Lord Jesus. For as the rising sun took away the dew and made the manna visible, so at that light the bread becomes visible. And so, we believe, that manna points in the end to Him.

For He says it Himself, in John 6:

'Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness … I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger.' — John 6:49, 35

There the question of forty years falls into place. What is this? It was never just bread. It pointed ahead — to the One who says: with Me the hunger stops. Do you still remember, right at the beginning, that you are only truly satisfied when you receive from God? Here is where that leads. Come, and be satisfied.

And that is why for us, on that Sabbath evening, when the cloth comes off and the bread lies there, it is always a moment to be still.

Two questions to take with you

Lay it side by side, everything from this week. Bread whose name is a question. Hunger that teaches you what you live on. A warning that falls not at the lack but at the abundance. 'My own power' over against 'He gives you the power'. 'Not because you were so good.' A heart that may open. The stranger you love because you were one yourself. A mother who does not forget her child. A name engraved in two palms. The rock from which you are hewn. And a man at a rock face who says to his friend: this you did not invent yourself — My Father showed it to you.

I do not know which image catches on with you. One is enough for a week.

But I give you two questions, and they belong together.

The first: where are you so full that you have forgotten you received it? Walk through your house, your day, your abilities, even what you think you know about God — and ask at each piece: did I make this, or receive it? And what would change if I saw it as a gift again?

And the second, for when you feel precisely empty, or forgotten: you stand engraved in His palms. Not in pencil. Carved in. Even if a mother were to forget her child — and that can hardly be — then He will not yet forget you.

And beneath both of those questions lies this. God is many times greater than everything we can make of Him. The moment you truly begin to see that — His sovereignty, that He is God and you are not — there remains really only one posture. Not your fist around something. Not your hands full of your own power, your own rightness, your own ideals. But your hands open, and empty, and stretched out to Him in dependence. So you stand before the God you did not invent yourself: with empty hands, ready to receive. And precisely then you are satisfied.

Read it over, think about it — and tell me freely where you would place it differently than I.