Do you see the many lessons God was teaching in this passage? Of course, one of them is that as His children, we can depend on and trust in God to provide for us. God sent the manna to teach the Hebrews they could depend on Him for all their needs. In his commentary on Exodus, Philip Graham Ryken notes that back in the Old Testament, the New Testament (John 6), and still today, believers tend to be more interested in God’s material or physical blessings than His spiritual blessings. He observes in John 6, that when Jesus explained He would meet all their physical (temporal) needs, "but more than that, He would meet all their deepest spiritual needs forever" (Ryken, Preaching the Word: Exodus: Saved for God’s Glory, Crossway, 2005, 430), the crowds were more interested in what Jesus could do physically and materially for them. Ryken writes:

When the people heard this, they did exactly what the Israelites did in the wilderness: They grumbled and complain-ed. They wanted God on their own terms; so they weren’t interested in what Jesus had to offer. They didn’t under-stand that this was a matter of life and death, that the difference between eternal salvation and everlasting damna-tion is faith in the Son of God (Ryken, 430).

Note those words, "They wanted God on their own terms." In his teaching of Exodus in August 1990 at Indian Springs Camp Meeting, John Oswalt, like Ryken, made reference to the fact many Christians today are more focused on themselves than they are on God. Oswalt referred to the modern believer’s "lust for blessing." If you don’t think this is much of a problem, take careful note of the Christian books which become bestsellers, such as Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (Warner Faith, 2004). The personal pronouns in the title speak volumes about the kind of gospel Osteen proclaims. Many believers in the church are willing to follow God as long as He meets and supplies their needs "on their terms."

What Osteen and others in the church fail to see is Scripture’s clear teaching that, yes, God will provide our physical needs, but on His terms, and in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, what is emphasized is our daily needs. In Exodus 16:4, in His effort to teach the Hebrews to depend on Him, God said, "The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day." In other words, "that day only." The only exception was on the sixth day, the day before the Sabbath, when they could gather twice as much (Ex. 16:5). They were not to hoard manna. Indeed, they could not.

In the New Testament, when Jesus taught the disciples to pray, it should be no surprise that He makes this same emphasis: "Give us today our daily bread" (Matt. 6:11; Luke 11:3). Many Christians all over the world repeat this prayer in their worship services. There is nothing wrong with that, but are we serious about what we are praying? Do we really depend on God for our daily meals? This emphasis is even found in Proverbs (Prov. 30:8). In this time of refrigerators and freezers, don’t we tend to think, "I can take care of my meals for today and tomorrow and the day after that"? This is exactly why so few Christians are serious about a simple lifestyle. We believe we can meet our own basic needs. What we want God to do is give us more of everything we crave, so that we have more than enough of the things we really need, while we are blind to the danger God was trying to teach the Hebrews, namely, that we must depend on Him every day for our basic needs.