Fed with "What?"

I’ve learned that if you’re going to continue growing in God, then you must learn to receive something you don’t understand.

When the children of Israel leave Egypt, they are faced with a dilemma in the wilderness. How will they feed their multitudes? In the Promised Land, they will eventually become an agricultural community, but for now they are nomadic. They don’t have time to plant seed, irrigate crops, and wait for a harvest. They have to stay in rhythm with the cloud by day and the fire by night.

Furthermore, it doesn’t seem like the wilderness is teeming with wildlife, just waiting to become someone’s dinner. The Israelites are wandering through desolate places, left to rely upon God’s hand alone for their sustenance. The good news is that the hand of God is not a closed one. However, what He gives them requires them to trust Him.

To feed them in the wilderness, God gives the children of Israel something they have never experienced before. Even when they do experience it, they are still not quite sure how to describe it. Thus, they give it the name “manna.” According to Strong’s, that word literally means “whatness.” They named the food after their initial reaction to it: “So when the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was . . .” (Exodus 16:15).

How unusual for God to bring them into the wilderness and them feed them with something they can’t explain. They simply have to trust that it’s good because it comes from Him.

Though the children of Israel don’t live on manna for the rest of their lives, this wilderness episode reveals something important about the nature of God. He has no problem giving you “whatness” to eat. He has no problem feeding you something you don’t understand.

Before the children of Israel eat manna, their founding father, Abraham, had to receive something he didn’t understand, either. God tells him to go “to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). He doesn’t provide a lot of other details. God simply speaks and expects Abraham to obey. As he walks out the word, God will reveal more along the way. God will show him the land, but not until Abraham starts moving. Abraham had to receive the word and act upon the word before he could understand the word.

Consider Peter’s experience in Acts 10. Through him, God is going to extend the Gospel beyond the Jewish people to the Gentiles. He gives Peter a vision to prepare him for this. However, the vision doesn’t make a lot of sense to Peter at first. He sees a sheet with all kinds of unclean animals. Three times it is lowered from heaven and descends to the earth. Here is how Peter responds: “Peter wondered within himself what this vision which he had seen meant . . .” (Acts 10:17). Soon, clarity comes that the unclean animals represent the Gentile peoples that God has now accept through the Gospel. What’s amazing to me, though, is that Peter doesn’t disregard the vision just because he doesn’t understand it at first. He receives it, ponders it, and then, eventually, understands it. An initial lack of understanding doesn’t interfere with his willingness to receive this vision from God.

Daniel models this implicit trust in God as well. Throughout his life, Daniel receives dreams and visions that he does not understand. That reality is summarized in Daniel 8:27: “I was astonished by the vision, but no one understood it.” Often, after Daniel has a supernatural encounter with God, he must follow it up by seeking to understand what he just experienced: “Then it happened, when I, Daniel, had seen the vision and was seeking the meaning . . .” (Daniel 8:15, emphasis added). He sees the vision first and then seeks the meaning second. Notice that he is wiling to see it before he understands it. Daniel continually seeks to understand the bit of “whatness” he receives from heaven because he is first willing to receive that “whatness.”

Examples abound in scripture of God working in this way. It’s not just how God fed Israel in the wilderness or how He spoke to Abraham, Peter, and Daniel. It’s a part of the way in which God interacts with humanity. He feeds us with things we don’t understand in order to test our trust in Him. Will we trust He is good, beyond our understanding, or will we reject the things we don’t understand? Will we yield to His ways that stretch our minds and hearts, or will we limit our experience of God to our natural comprehension? God wants to give you manna–not because He wants to keep you ignorant of what He is doing, but so He can expand your appetite into arenas that your mind can not yet fathom. He is awakening your hunger for things you can not yet name.

Will you trust Him to give you something you don’t yet understand?