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The Sustenance of God
Brian Mashburn
January 13, 2008
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The Sustenance of God
God's very character is to sustain life. He does not create life and then fail to sustain it.
God is utterly dependable...though we don't always live like it.
God will always come through...though we sometimes doubt.
God is never foiled...though most of us sometimes wonder.
The wilderness journey of the Hebrews from the land of Egypt to the Promised Land represented a wholesale change in how the people of God would operate - including how they would live and who they would live in dependence to. Weaning the people of God to depend on the "bread of Heaven" rather than the "bread of Egypt" was a long-suffering task for God. Even as the people doubted and cried out regularly, God's consistent sustenance and provision became epic for all of God's people for all time, as seen when the prophet Nehemiah still referred to it hundreds of years later, "For forty years you sustained them in the desert; they lacked nothing, their clothes did not wear out nor did their feet become swollen." Neh 9:21
God didn't give them bread by letting them "work for it" because He wanted them to know it was His hand alone that fed them. He didn't give them meat and water in any "conventional way" because He wanted them to know that they can depend on Him entirely. He wanted them to be done with the ways that Egypt had conditioned them to operate. Freed.
A parent can help their child a million times, and the child still look up at the parent and say "I need you to help me?" in an urgent, doubting way. How many times do parents have to say, "I will always take care of you. I will not let you down."
How many times does God need to say it?
Well, here's one more, written hundreds of years after Nehemiah. "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word." Heb 1:3
And He's trying to say it again, today, hundreds of years after that. He's trying to say it to you. Whatever wilderness you face today, He's trying to say, "My peace I give you. I will never leave or forsake you. You are mine. Nothing can snatch you from My hand. All is well. I will sustain you."