Obselesence of Manna, Big Macs, and Longings for Home

So I'm slowly making my way through the Old Testament book of Joshua. Last week I was in Joshua 5, as the Israelites make their way towards Jericho.

One little piece of their journey really struck me as I was reading about the camp-out at Gilgal after the incident with the flint knives:

¹⁰ On the evening of the fourteenth day of the month, while camped at Gilgal on the plains of Jericho, the Israelites celebrated the Passover. ¹¹ The day after the Passover, that very day, they ate some of the produce of the land: unleavened bread and roasted grain. ¹² The manna stopped the day after they ate this food from the land; there was no longer any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate of the produce of Canaan.

Manna was what I thought about here. Manna literally means "what is it." It was bread that the Lord provided each morning for the Israelites as they journeyed for forty years in the desert.

This made for an interesting relationship between the Israelites and manna. On the one hand, forty years of manna, and you'd probably be longing for a Big Mac. On the other hand, manna was the gracious provision of God, a tangible, daily reminder that God was watching over them and taking care of them.

But in this passage, manna is put in a different context--that is, in contrast with the food of the soil. Manna, as good a gift as it was, was a symbol of the Israelites root-lessness. They were a wandering, nomadic nation. Hundreds of thousands of people without a home, without a place to rest or call their own. Every morning, they gathered manna and were reminded of their homelessness.

To eat the produce of the soil means that you have been in one place long enough to walk through the planting/harvesting cycle. It means that the Israelites were finally in a place to call their own. They were in the promised land. They were home.

As I meditated on this, I wondered about the manna in my own life. What in my life now is a gracious provision from God that I am grateful for but also reminds me of my temporariness? And of course there's only one answer: all of it.

My life is filled with tremendous blessings from the Lord: family, friends, work that I enjoy. But all of this, to varying degrees, is manna. It is all temporary.

And the regular intervals of struggle, frustration, and disappointment alongside the fleetingness of the moments of joy and wonder and awe are all deliberate. Like manna that spoiled after a day, everything in my life has a built-in obselesence. This is on purpose.

Like the Israelites, we are not yet home. One day in Christ, all the struggles and sorrows will be gathered up, healed, and poured back on us to become a part of our glory and beauty; all the joys and wonder that we experience in part now will be permanent, ever-growing parts of our moment-by-moment experience.

Then, we too, will be done with the manna of life here and now, the temporary generous blessings of God that sustain us for this part of our journey. Then the journey will be over. It will be time to dig into the real, the good stuff. We will do this forever. We will be home.