Hunger For...?

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Complaining was one of the many negative character qualities of the children of Israel. They weren’t that long out of Egypt—accompanied by many HUGE miracles that attested to God’s provision for them—when they were grumbling about the “room service”. Several times food and water were the issues. But though God could have avoided the conflict, He didn’t, preferring to test the faith of His people and to teach them valuable lessons about that faith. He let them go hungry for a reason.

In Deuteronomy 8:3, Moses speaks these words to the people: “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord”. So important was this lesson that Jesus used the latter part of the verse in His contest with Satan in the wilderness. (Matthew 4:4)

The children of Israel must have wondered about the application of the lesson—their concerns were with physical food, the kind that calms the growling of the stomach and fills the hollow in the belly. But the lesson was all about trust even in the midst of growling stomachs and hollow bellies. It’s a lesson about first things first: knowing Him, glorifying Him, reflecting Him—hunger for Him.

In my preparations for an upcoming retreat I ran across these words by Larry Crabb in his book, Finding God:

“With his generous heart overflowing, he refuses to withhold anything from us that will help us know him better. In his own sovereign way, without consulting with us, he patiently arranges things in our lives so that we experience him as the satisfier of our souls, as our loving bridegroom, as a good God who never intends anything but our joy…God wants to be found. He delights to be known. He rejoices when we are close to him. But our search for him must be on his terms. And those terms involve a radical shift away from our natural inclination to evaluate his goodness. He will not tolerate anyone sitting in judgment of him. We are not the judges. We are rather the judged, the forgiven, and the invited. ‘Come, taste and see that the Lord is good.’ I long to taste more of the Lord’s goodness. But I will not get it as long as I think he is obligated to resolve my problems. God will not let me find him if I regard him as nothing more than a useful tool for obtaining my own desires.” (page 106-7)

Israel’s lesson was the lesson of these words from the sermon recorded for us in Matthew 5-7: “…seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well”. The connector between the phrases is important. It is not “…seek his kingdom and his righteousness so that all these things will be given to you as well”, a self-serving, manipulative attitude, but rather putting our lives at His disposal for His purposes, seeking Him, knowing that He will do for us what is best even when, whatever form it takes in our particular situation, our stomachs growl and our bellies are hollow for a while.