Exodus 16:31–36 (NKJV)

And the house of Israel called its name Manna. And it was like white coriander seed, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.

Then Moses said, “This is the thing which the LORD has commanded: ‘Fill an omer with it, to be kept for your generations, that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.’ ” And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a pot and put an omer of manna in it, and lay it up before the LORD, to be kept for your generations.” As the LORD commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up before the Testimony, to be kept. And the children of Israel ate manna forty years, until they came to an inhabited land; they ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan. Now an omer is one-tenth of an ephah.

 And the children of Israel ate the manna forty years. That’s a long time. The first iPad came out in 2010.

God provides miraculously for the children of Israel all that time. It’s an almost inconceivably grand example of God’s love and providence. In the end, virtually every Israelite has been eating manna all their life. It’s like breastfeeding for 40 years. Your whole life has been dependent on one thing. I can’t imagine the mindset that would produce.

God commands them to keep an omer (about a half-gallon) of the manna for your generations, that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.

It’s unusual for God to want something like this preserved. The human tendency toward idolatry makes keeping sacred artifacts problematic. People tend to worship such things – plus copycats abound. For example, if you gathered together all the alleged pieces of the cross of Christ, they would fill a house.

But in this one special case, God wants the evidence of an enormous miracle preserved, so that the people can see it for themselves.

And remember.

If you could preserve one thing, or one moment, what would it be? Of all the events of your life, which ones would you say were bucket list awesome? What deserves to be memorialized? Birthdays and anniversaries get celebrated every year, but do we preserve any artifacts?

Yes. Pictures. With social media, everything has become a Kodak moment. We’ve actually witnessed the beginning of “totally recorded history” in our lifetime. We don’t have memories of what happened; we have movies. Of everything.

But in Old Testament times these events were in danger of turning into little more than old folks telling stories.

This needed some hard evidence.

The weekly study guides, which include discussion questions, are available for download here:

https://www.ailbe.org/resources/itemlist/category/91-deep-studies