Those
who complain in the wilderness, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in
the land of Egypt” forget the family members who never made it out of Egypt
alive and that the Egyptians didn’t need the Lord’s hand to help kill them. But
then we tend to reconstruct the difficult days of the past in the light of
present troubles thinking that what was was not as bad as what is even though
what is and what was are often the same thing. Dying at the hands of the Egyptians
or of starvation in the wilderness is still dead. It is to God’s credit that
this constant complaining does not lead God to “walk like an Egyptian” (The
Bangles) and be done with the whole assembly. It is a preview of God’s struggle
with a people whose “love is like the morning mist.” (Hosea 6:4) The God who
provides manna and quail to ungrateful people will continue to give them bread
to eat, even if it is the bread of tears, in the hope that they will recognize
that freedom in the wilderness is better than slavery in Egypt. God’s hope for
us is that in following the way of the Lord we would prefer to live in radical
freedom, no matter how difficult it is, than to dwell in the comfortable
prisons of our own design.
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