Sheldon Clowdus

Disciple . Husband . Father


Do we really trust God?
I was reading this morning from Exodus 15 when I noticed these 2 verses: Exodus 15:25 and Exodus 16:4. What struck me in these verses was God's reasoning for what He was doing for the Israelites. Basically in both instances God tells Moses He is putting a process in place specifically to test the Israelites. He wants to see if they will obey His commands or not.

In chapter 16 God is setting up the process for collecting the manna He will send for the Israelites to eat. That process is to gather enough for everyone in the family to eat for one day and then whatever is left at the end of the day, throw away. The day before the sabbath they are to collect enough for 2 days.

According to the account, the reason for this process was basically to see if God's people would obey Him. In Exodus 16:4, God says,"Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not."

I have heard other explanations for why God chose to send manna in this fashion, including teaching the Israelites to trust Him for their daily provision. While that may be true, the text itself gives a reason: testing. Sometimes God does something in our lives or asks us to do something just to see if we will obey Him.

We can look for deep meaning and future ramifications of obedience, but what God wants is for us to obey Him because He asks us to and because we trust Him. The only way to determine that is to ask us to do something that has no "deep" purpose other than "God said so." What God is interested in seeing is will we obey when we cannot see a good reason to or when we don't understand why He is asking us to.

Really the questions is do we trust God. If we do, then why He asks us to obey is secondary to the fact that He does ask us to obey. If we really trust Him, then we know that whatever He asks us to do is the best thing for us to do.

So the next time God speaks, and you can't figure out why He is leading you in a certain direction, maybe He is testing you to find out if you really do trust Him implicitly.

Of course, He already knows the level of your trust, so maybe the testing is so you can see how much you trust Him.......



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