p. 40Ladies and Gentlemen,—
Excuse me for holding you to the subject of the murmurings. The current is setting in so universally against the Bible that we have to hold fast by our moorings. The moorings are stronger than any current, even if the current should become as powerful as the Falls of Niagara. Still, if we don’t fasten our boats by the moorings, the strength of the moorings will not prevent our boats from being swept away.
The record is, that six weeks after Israel’s departure from Egypt, the travelling assembly arrived and encamped “between Elim and Sinai,” and while there, “the whole congregation murmured against Moses and Aaron.” The cause of the murmuring was want of food: “Ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Ex. xvi. 3). It must strike us as very p. 41 natural that this want should arise; for they were a vast multitude: and they were in a desert region.
The argument I would submit to you is this: The record of the murmuring proves that the murmuring occurred; for on no other principle could we understand the record being made. And the occurring of the murmuring proves the pressure of want: for it is not supposable that the people would have murmured if they had had plenty. And the occurring of the want proves more than one thing: it proves that the whole enterprise of the Exodus was not a human enterprise: for what sane leader would have taken a body of people without supplies into a wilderness where none were to be had? (and Moses gets credit for the highest wisdom, even at the hands of unbelievers, as well he might, if they imagine the wonderful law was his invention). But the more immediate significance of the occurring of the want arises from the fact that they got over it. Israel’s invasion of Canaan afterwards, under Joshua, is proof of that. The question is, How did they get over it? How could they have got over it if only human resources were available? Think of 600,000 fighting men, besides women and children; or, if you think it might be only 100,000, think of the number of mouths demanding food every day, in a place where there was none.
Ladies and Gentlemen,—Face the problem “fair and square.” Don’t run from it. Don’t pull your caps over your eyes. Look and think. There is something to look at. You are not asked to look into empty space. It is not imagination. The Bible is there: the murmuring is there: the scarcity is there: a famishing mob is there, in a barren wilderness: and they survived it forty years. You p. 42 positively cannot get rid of a single element in the situation. What do you say is the explanation? How were the Israelites relieved? How did a vast congregation subsist for years in a barren land? Must they not have perished, if some extraordinary mode of supply had not arisen? They did not perish. Supplies came from somewhere. Do the circumstances admit of any other possible source than the one alleged in the narrative? “Then said Jehovah unto Moses, Behold I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day. . . . And it came to pass. . . . in the morning, the dew lay round about the host. And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoarfrost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, What is this? for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat. . . . And the house of Israel called the name thereof, Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white: and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey. . . . And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited: they did eat manna until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan” (Ex. xvi. 4, 13-15, 31, 35).
Accept this, and the whole case is intelligible. Deny it, and you have to go to work and do violence to many things that will not bend to violence. First of all you have to do violence to Christ. You will have to get Him out of the way: for He said, “Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness” (John vi. 49). Get Him out of the way you cannot. His name and His principles are the greatest of p. 43 contemporary realities, rooted in all the countries of civilization, in a way that nothing but His resurrection and His miracles can account for, as you will discover, if you study the circumstances under which Christianity was first planted in the earth. You will have to do violence to the Bible. You will have to say the Bible is a book of lies; and in this you will have to go against reason, for the one feature distinguishing the Bible from all other books is its merciless truthfulness, as in its record of the condemnation of Moses, and the crime of David, the sin of Peter. As Carlyle said, “The Bible is the truest of all books.” You will have to do violence to Moses: for he alleges these things. You will have to say he wrote what was not true, in face of God’s endorsement of him as a faithful man (Num. xii. 7, 8), and Christ’s command to men to “hear” him (Luke xvi. 29). Or you will have to say that Moses did not write these things, and then you come into collision with Christ, who says he did (John v. 46, 47), and with the whole testimony of a nation’s history: for the Jews from the beginning are the witnesses to Moses as their leader and law-giver, just as the Mahometans are historical witnesses to Mahomet’s part in the establishment of their system and the authorship of the Koran.
Ladies and Gentlemen,—The way is absolutely barred. Retreat is hopelessly cut off. There is nothing for it but surrender to the fact that Israel were miraculously fed with manna in the wilderness. Do not be so simple as to clutch at the suggestions of some travellers that possibly the nutriment in the case was a glutinous food to be found on some desert shrubs, which some call manna. Is it possible that the scanty supply of such an article, p. 44 barely sufficient to save a party of half-a-dozen from starvation, would suffice for an assembly of thousands? And if the source of supply was of any such natural character, how would you explain the fact that there was no downfall on the Sabbath? and that there was a double supply on what we call Saturday? On the Sabbath, said Moses, “Ye shall not find it in the field,” “Jehovah has given you the Sabbath, therefore He giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days” (Ex. xvi. 25, 29). And how would you explain this command from God to Moses: “Fill an omer of it, to be kept for your generations: that they may see the bread wherewith I have fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you forth from the land of Egypt” (verse 32).
Again the way is barred. There is no rational escape from the testimony of Moses, confirmed by Christ, that Israel was miraculously supplied with manna on the occasion of their complaint that Moses had brought them into the wilderness to kill them with hunger. Historical, moral, and economical necessity compels the acceptance of it. And what is there against it? Nothing but an indisposition on various mistaken grounds to believe in so unusual a thing. This is the mere insubordination of the ignorance, with which, Ladies and Gentlemen, I will not insult you by supposing you sympathize.
I need not point out that if God fed Israel with manna in the wilderness, the whole scheme of Divine revelation is proved, and the whole Bible is established; for it is not conceivable that God would begin a work and leave it unfinished, or that the work He performs would be performed imperfectly.