Grumble, Grumble, Toil and Trouble

We are following the Israelites, and if you ever wonder why something is in the Bible, it's because human nature does not fundamentally change, and God wants history to teach us that fact. The second thing we need to realize is how the Bible is pointing to Jesus.  So, not only do we learn about how broken we human beings really are, but how much we need a Savior.

How often do people say, "Well, why didn't the Jewish people get Jesus?"

"Why doesn't that person just do ahead and accept Christ?"

"Can't she see how sinful her life is?"

It's a Pharisee moment. How so?  We are recasting the person's predicament, attitude or desires into our own frame of reference.  When the Pharisees interrogated Jesus, they had already decided that He was not who He claimed to be and they wanted Him to discredit Himself with His answers to their questions. Their attitude was, at its core, 

Well, We would never talk to such despicable sinners! Why does He even bother?  He should be in the synagogue, studying the Torah with us, not fraternizing with people God clearly disapproves of. We stand with God.  He should be, too.  

We do the same thing.  In other words,

"I would have accepted Jesus in His day."  (Are you sure?  He made claims about His equality with His Father that you may have found blasphemous or at a minimum, very unsettling.)

"I accepted Christ.  Why can't he?" (Are you him?  Do you know his inner story? His life?)

"I saw my sin."  (You saw your sin?  Wasn't it the Holy Spirit who pointed it out to you, and perhaps it was many, many times before you truly saw your condition for what it was? How long did He work with you, revealing the saving grace of Jesus and the depth of your sin before you responded?)

When we minimize the other person's life and superimpose our responses over theirs, we start down the road to grumbling.

Yes, grumbling.

Let's get a definition from an online dictionary of the word: "the action or fact of complaining in a bad-tempered way." 

"Bad-tempered" is not what God wants to see or hear in His people. 

Let's define it from a Hebrew perspective: "The word in the Hebrew that is used here is layan which basically means to remain or stay. It is a refusal to move forward out of lack of faith and receiving divine instruction. I would give this a rendering of worry or fretting. Worry is nothing more than a lack of faith and refusal to receive divine instruction." [1]

Let's meet up with our wandering Israelites: 

"The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, 'If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.'” (Ex. 16:1-3).

OK. The people are now thinking about how things used to be, and grumbling about it. Why? Wait for it: the lack of food.  These are the same people who saw God do awe-inspiring miracles.  Not once, not twice, but over and over again. 

OK, you Israelites:  Let's review. Life in Egypt was acceptable, because you had food?  Let me highlight the choice words.  How about:

• "Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. 'Look,' he said to his people, 'the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.' So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly." (Ex. 1:8-14) 

Doesn't sound like Disneyland, does it?  Let's keep going.  How about this:

• "The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 'When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.'” (Ex. 1:15-16)

Great. But because of the fecundity of the Hebrews, harassing the midwives wasn't enough.  Pharoah brought his own people into it: 

• "Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: 'Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.'” (Ex. 1: 22)

Awesome. You now had a society focused on ferreting out little Hebrew babies and murdering them.

Moses grows up, having divinely evaded this decree and we meet him outraged by his people's brutal treatment: 

• "One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, 'Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?'  The man said, 'Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?' Then Moses was afraid and thought, 'What I did must have become known.'” (2:11-14)

Were the men afraid of retaliation from their overlords and so turned on Moses?  He didn't look like a slave, nor acted like one. Did they think, 

Why would some Egyptian-looking guy come to the aid of us slaves?  Is he a spy, keeping track of what we're doing, ready to report back to whoever sent him? We'll be punished, that's for sure!

God saw the violence, the hurt, the anger and the exhaustion of His people:

• "During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them." (Ex. 2:23-25) 

Not only did God see His people's suffering, He appointed a savior who He would use to liberate them. He chose Moses and spoke to him from a bush on fire, burning but not being consumed.  Just like the Israelites:  They were in the fire of slavery, but they were not going to be consumed: 

• "The Lord said, 'I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.'” (Ex. 3:7-10) 

Rescue. Deep understanding of misery. A new place to go where life will be better. Seeing the oppression. Sending a savior.

This is God's agenda from the word go.  He heard, He acted and He delivered His people with a beautiful display of miracles through His chosen leader. 

Does this pattern, by the way, ring any bells?  

God hears our cry.  He understands deeply our misery.  He desires to take us to a place that is new and free from slavery to sin.  He sees how oppressed we are by our sin, and He sent a Savior.

But once in the desert, the people actually thought their former life was better. 

Really?

This is the power of sin in our lives, that we once we face conflict, deprivation, or anything else that pushes hard on our faith, we begin to think back... Maybe my life back then wasn't so bad.  Well, at least I had ______________.  

Now, if we are not careful, we will start to grumble.  Grumbling stops the process of us trusting God, because it makes us sit down in the road of self-pity and acrimony towards God.  In other words, we take a bit handful of narcissism and shove it into our mouth.

Then, with its bitter taste on our tongue and our soul feeling empty, we fail to remember all of God's mercy, love, miracles and presence in our lives.  

Anguish, pain, sorrow and a feeling of abandonment, as painful as these emotions are to express, we are still conversing with God.

Grumbling means we have stopped talking to Him, yet demand He still talk to us. 

In His love and mercy, He keeps moving in our lives but grumbling can become a way of life, if we are not careful.  

It happened to Israelites.

It can happen to us. 

 

[1] https://www.chaimbentorah.com/2024/04/hebrew-word-study-grumble-lavan/