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00:36 Amen. Welcome to the cafe. Good to be here today.
00:39 Hope you’re having a wonderful day. We’re so thankful to have you here. I’m so thankful to have you here.
00:45 Amen. I’m praying for those that listen and for the radio stations that broadcast our ministry and Christian radio in general. They’re in my prayers constantly.
00:58 We pray over the ministry at church. We don’t take for granted you listening here today. We’re very thankful.
01:05 I’m very thankful. I know my family is and our church family is. This is definitely one of the biggest ministries we have, if not the biggest one.
01:14 So I just want to thank you this morning. Thank you for listening, for tuning in. And guess what? We should not just be grateful for those that partake in the fellowship together, those that study the Word together, but we should be grateful to God.
01:33 Because you know, there’s a really interesting passage of Scripture in the Old Testament that shows God’s response to ingratitude. God’s response to ingratitude. And let me start by saying the Old Testament is absolutely relevant to the New Testament Church, to the Age of Grace, to the church-age believer.
01:54 How can you understand what it means to be under grace, what it means to have liberty in Jesus Christ, being saved by Christ? How can you understand what that means if you don’t understand the law, if you don’t understand the Old Testament, if you don’t understand the level of God’s holiness and his expectations? So no, we are no longer under the law. And I’ll get to that in a little more detail in a bit. But when we see how God responds to the ingratitude of his people, it should sober us up, it should make us fear the Lord and understand his great power, and how much he hates sin and gossip and murmuring.
02:37 So, we’re here in Numbers 11, Numbers 11. And I’ll just start here in verse 4, Numbers 11: 4. And the mixed multitude that was among them fell a lusting, and the children of Israel also wept again and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? So here we have in Numbers, the children of Israel are fully in the wilderness. They’re in that 40-year journey in the wilderness.
03:07 They have been provided manna from heaven, which was like a cake that would fall in the evening time in the early morning, and then they would kind of pat it down and bake it. And it had a taste like oil, the Bible said. I can’t think of exact, I’ve had ideas, some people call it maybe a wafer.
03:29 I mean, I don’t know if it was like a, you know, kind of English muffin, bread. I don’t know, only God knows. But I know that God loved them so much that He provided every single day to meet their nutritional needs.
03:46 And there’s also a Bible and the fact that he met their material needs, their shoes never wore out, and all of the rest. But He provided their needs nutritionally, and of course there’s scripture in the Old Testament about God providing water. And this is a picture of how man will have their basic needs met and say to God, that’s not good enough.
04:10 And we can see that here today, especially here in America, where people have been so incredibly abundantly blessed, and yet they still aren’t willing to thank God for it. They still are asking for more. Let’s go on to verse 5 where we see them asking for more, the Israelites, God’s people.
04:30 Verse 5, we remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic. So verse 5 and numbers 11 tells us that they in Egypt had cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. Who knew? I never knew that they had those things, and I could see how they are good.
04:55 I’m a big fan of cucumbers myself. My wife likes garlic and onions a lot. I guess I eat it more now because she really does like it.
05:03 They had great food in Egypt, and they were slaves. And now they just have this manna in heaven, but they’re free. Think about that.
05:11 Verse 6, but now our soul is dried away. There is nothing at all besides this manna before our eyes. So you see how the Israelites are showing ingratitude to what God’s provided for them, and how they’re looking back on their worldly time and saying, we missed that.
05:29 And really what they’re truly saying is, God, you haven’t given us what we really want, and you’re only giving us what we need, and that’s not good enough for us. Verse 7, and the manna was as coriander seed, and the color thereof as the color of bedlam. And the people went about and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it, and the taste of it as the taste of fresh oil.
05:55 And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it. So here we see from verse 7 through 9 in Numbers 11, that this is how God’s program, God’s food service program for the Israelites was occurring. He was providing it miraculously every evening as the dew fell upon the camp.
06:19 And it was something easy that they could make. My wife is Laotian and Thai, and she still uses a mortar or pedestal to make some dishes, Amen And so that might have been a stone type of thing that they’d have around, or they’d have a pan to make these cakes out of what was falling, that looked as if it was a coriander seed, right? And so they would ground it up, and kind of pat it up, and cook it, and they could eat it, and it would sustain them. And that’s how God’s program worked.
06:53 And here we have in Numbers 11:10, Then Moses heard the people weep throughout their families, every man in the door of his tent. And the anger of the Lord was kindled greatly. Moses also was displeased.
07:07 Notice how Moses is a man of God, and that as God is displeased, so is Moses. Do you know, we should be displeased with what displeases God. We should be disgusted by sin.
07:19 In this world, there is so much pressure to conform to sin, to accept sin, and to somehow twist it that God’s okay with sin. And oh, how good the politicians are at doing that. But it is not okay with God.
07:32 Sin is not okay. Ingratitude is not okay. And we, as men and women of God, those that have been saved, been born again, amen, those that have accepted that free gift of salvation that only comes by the blood of Jesus Christ, we should be fully focused on the fact that if God doesn’t like something, we don’t like it either.
08:00 The idea of repentance is looking at sin as God sees it, and relating to that sin as God sees it, saying, I’m disgusted by this. This is unholy. This is unnatural.
08:09 The Bible word would be vain or improper use. I don’t want anything to do with this. Verse 10, then Moses heard the people weep throughout the families, every man in the door of his tent, and the anger of the Lord was kindled greatly.
08:17 Moses also was displeased. So we see in verse 10, the Lord is angry. And Moses said unto the Lord, wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant? Wherefore have I not found favor in thy sight, that thou layest the burden of all this people upon me? Remember, there was many hundreds of thousands of people, if not a million, that Moses was dealing with.
08:33 Verse 12 here, have I conceived all this people? Have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, carry them in thy bosom as a nursing father, beareth the sucking child unto the land which thou swearest unto their fathers? Whence should I have flesh to give unto all this people? For they weep unto me, saying, Give us flesh that we may eat. I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me. And so the burden of all of these people, who clearly were ungrateful, who clearly were gossiping and murmuring, right? And they were very upset.
09:13 It was too great for Moses to bear alone, and it was too difficult. And what we see here is that man cannot bear the burden of sin alone. We need God’s help, and God provided that help.
09:30 Verse 15, And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favor in thy sight, and let me not see my wretchedness. And the Lord said unto Moses, Gather unto me seventy of men of the elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be elders of the people, and officers over them, and bring them unto the tabernacle of the congregation, that they may stand there with thee. And so we see here Moses is so distraught, he’s asking God to take his life.
10:07 He said, I can’t deal with this, Lord. This is too big of a burden for me to bear. And sometimes we get to that point, that breaking point, and what he does is he asks God for help.
10:14 And God immediately provides help and says, We’re gonna get 70 elders here, and those 70 elders are gonna bear the burden with you, and God is gonna give them the Spirit. They’re gonna speak prophecy, and Moses alone won’t have to bear that burden. I’m gonna touch on that in a future message about the Spirit that the Lord gives these 70 elders.
10:34 But in this message, I want to focus on the ingratitude, because there is so much happening here with people today that are not grateful for what the Lord has given them, for what the Lord has blessed them with. And what do they do? They just sit there and say, I want more, more, more, more. Or they pervert God’s Word and say, I don’t want to follow it this way.
10:56 I want to retranslate it, or I want to go to church that doesn’t preach God’s Word, or I want to have that, check that box of being religious or holy, or try to fill that emptiness in my heart without actually living by how God’s commanded me to live. Have you ever thought about that? I was a young person in my early 20s and at a large church, and it was a modern church, but the church was preaching biblical doctrine, and it was hard for me to discern if in that environment what they were saying was true. That really, you know, if God, you know, what the preacher was saying, and the youth pastors and so forth, that if God truly meant what was in His Word, that everybody, you know, that I was surrounding myself with and the whole culture that I had been engulfed in, all had to go.
11:46 And I’m thinking, is that possible to throw out the worldly movies and the worldly music and all of the inappropriate things in my life and all of it, to get rid of all of it, the alcohol and and the bad language, and really just modern-day culture, modern-day sinful culture. Is that what God was calling me to do? And it took a long time for me to rationalize that, because I didn’t have much of an experience with that. I didn’t see a lot of people that had really been separate that I could relate to, though I believe and I know the Lord had put people in my path that were able to model that to me and for me, and I thank God for that.
12:27 And at the same time, there was so much difficulty and stress in thinking about, well, you really have to forsake the world and take up your cross, and what does this all mean? And yet with the Israelites, they were dealing with the same issue. They were craving the things of the world, wanting to have what the world offered, wanting the sweet taste of those cucumbers and garlic and onions and so forth, that savory taste. They wanted that, and they were going to complain about it to the point where they were basically crying, because they were living a different life than they had imagined themselves, and a different life than what they had witnessed in the world.
13:09 And what happened is God’s wrath was kindled, because they were not grateful to God, and in short, they were punished. They were sent so much quail that they ended up getting sick, that God ended up sending a plague upon them. When we see plagues, sometimes we need to realize that’s God’s judgment, and we need to realize that we here in America are long overdue for God’s judgment, and He’s been very long suffering with us, and that’s why the more time goes on, just my opinion here, I believe these plagues that we see today are God’s judgment on a ungrateful people, just like He did then.
13:48 And now the difference is, we are under grace. So if you have been saved, the Bible tells us there’s no condemnation to those that are in Christ, to those that love the Lord, and the idea here is if we’ve been saved and we’re living for God, we are not under condemnation. We are not being judged in that way, because we are saved by the blood of Jesus.
14:07 And I thank you for listening. I’m going to pick up this topic again in the next episode, so be sure to tune in. Take care, God bless, and Amen.