When you were a kid, did you ever wish you could see into the future? Most kids wonder what will happen to them as the years pass by and they grow older. Where will they go to school? Will they go to college or university? What about a career? (
My mentality at the moment), Will they get married and have a family?
This kind of thinking doesn't end when a person reaches adulthood. Singles wonder whether how they will turn out to be in time. Small kids dream about how high school life is gonna be. College and university freshmen wonders about their eventual career path, older people prepare or worry about their retirement years.
Human nature compels us to look ahead with wonder. Dreams of future make the awfully nonsense we go through worthwhile. Anticipation of future events gets us up in the morning and force us to plan for tomorrow. It's what separates a man from his best friend, his dog.
The Israelites in Exodus were no different from us today. Faced with an uncertain future and an immediate need for food and water, they started grumbling. While they had always labored during their years of slavery, at least before Moses and Aaron led them out of Egypt.
God heard their cries, and responded by promising to provide for them. Those of us who read the bible know the story well, at least the fundamental part of it. Each morning, flakes of bread appeared on the ground. But no one could store what they gathered. Moses instructed the Israelites to gather only what they needed for the day, strictly nothing more, nothing less. Tough to do when we always pre-plan for our own future. For the Israelites, storing food for future survival.
Why was God limiting what they gathered?
Because the Israelites needed to understand what we need to learn. Is to sustain a good relationship with God in the present.
Our past is nothing more than the story of how we got to where we are. Indulging in the past cause us to become stagnant, and pretty much unsatisfied when the present is not comfortable as it was. We can't find God by worrying or dreaming about the future, in which i did too much and still is. But the point is that we should live out our relationship with God in here and now. God longs for us to trust him all the time.
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