Our Daily Bread
The radical economic implications of depending on God
22 May 2016 Salvationist
found themselves in the wilderness. It didn’t take long for the boisterous praises of Exodus 15 to turn into bitter complaints about the lack of food and water. “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread” (Exodus 16:3 NRSV). Freedom might be a good thing, but empty stomachs trump freedom. In Exodus 16, God responded to the complaints of the Israelites by sending manna, bread from heaven, to cover the ground each morning. The Israelites were given strict instructions about how to “harvest” the manna. First, each Israelite was to gather only enough manna for that day (that is, daily bread).
Second, if they had some left over at the end of the day, they were not to keep it. Any attempt to store or stockpile the manna would fail as it became rotten. Third, on the sixth day of the week, they were to gather enough manna for two days. Surprisingly, manna kept over for the Sabbath would not rot. Finally, on the seventh day, the Sabbath, they were not to search for manna. The Lord had already provided enough bread on the previous day. With these provisions in place, Israel received its daily bread. The Yearning for More This story is often interpreted as a test of Israel’s willingness to obey God’s commands, and, to some extent, it is that.
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he Lord’s Prayer includes the petition “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11 NRSV). I have usually interpreted “daily bread” as our requirements for physical survival—food, shelter, drink. Our petition, then, is that God would be faithful in providing the basic necessities of life. But on further examination, I have found that this request has a rich background that casts it in a different light. The expression “Give us this day our daily bread” takes us all the way back to the early history of Israel at the time of the exodus from Egypt. Having escaped from Pharaoh’s service by crossing the Red Sea (see Exodus 14), the Israelites
BY DONALD E. BURKE