Part of our evening routine before we tuck our boys into bed is to read the Bible together. Our hopes in this is to fulfill God’s role for us as parents as laid out in passages like Duet. 6 and Prov. 22:6. We have found that the Lord has used this training experience not just for our kids but for us as well. Our boys are very inquisitive which, if my wife and I are being honest, can be down-right exhausting at times. Their questions come in all shapes and sizes. There are times when we look forward to answering them and other times when we just look forward to getting them to bed! The other night, however, the Lord used a question from our 6-year-old that taught us a valuable lesson about our God and how we interact with His Word.
Recently we have been working through the story of Moses leading God’s people out of Egypt and into the promised land. If you know anything about this story then you know that the Israelites have got to be the worst travelers in the history of traveling! If you thought the complaints from the backseat were bad on your last family road trip open up the Old Testament again and look at what Moses had to deal with! When you get to Numbers 11, Moses has gotten to the point where he would rather die than listen to another complaint from this people. Now they want meat. They’re tired of the same old menu so they make their demands known. This upsets Moses because he has no idea where all this meat is going to come from but it also upsets the Lord because they continue to choose to whine, complain, and grumble rather than trust God’s provision and care over them. God then tells the people that they will have meat to eat, “not one day, nor two days, nor five days, nor ten days, nor twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you.” How’s that for an answer! God responds this way because in their complaining and weeping they have rejected Him and His plan for them. If it is meat they want, then meat is what they’re going to get!
Moses is still unsure about where all of this meat is going to come from. He can’t seem to fathom a whole month’s supply of meat for over 600,000 people. So, God has to confront Moses as well in vs. 23 by saying, “Is the Lord’s power limited? Now you shall see whether My word will come true for you or not.” Here is how the story ends, picking up in vs. 31, “Now there went forth a wind from the Lord and it brought quail from the sea, and let them fall beside the camp, about a day’s journey on this side and a day’s journey on the other side, all around the camp and about two cubits deep on the surface of the ground. The people spent all day and all night and all the next day, and gathered the quail and they spread them out for themselves all around the camp. While the meat was still between their teeth, before it was chewed, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord struck the people with a very severe plague. So the name of that place was called Kibroth-hattaavah, because there they buried the people who had been greedy.” The Lord provided the meat as He said He would in the form of quail but because of the greed and grumbling of the people they also got a side of plague.
Now, this is where our 6-year-old comes in. Right now, Jude is on an animal kingdom kick. If there is something that he can choose to watch on TV it’s a kids’ program called “Wild Kratts” which follows the Kratt brothers as they educate kids on different creatures in the wild. As far as Jude knows, Quail don’t regularly fly. It is only if they need to and he’s right. So, naturally he would ask, “How did this happen?” This sparked our interest too. Yes, it could be possible that God just miraculously plopped a group of quail in the midst of the camp but it could also be possible that He designed these birds to specifically carry out His will. We found that the second is true! The quail of the Middle-Eastern part of our world migrate. Guess where their migrating path travels? From the sea over the route of the Israelites. Want another fascinating fact? There is a specific time when quail meat is poisonous and dangerous to eat. When they are migrating! Isn’t God’s Sovereignty amazing? That He would specifically design this bird, it’s flight pattern, and the changes its body goes through to carry out His will, to reveal Himself, and to teach a very important lesson. There’s no way we would have dug into this truth unless a certain 6-year-old opened up our eyes to the importance of asking questions and digging deeper into our Bibles. There is truth to be found in Scripture but as Solomon calls us to, we’ve got to search for it like treasure. This means slowing down, this means reminding ourselves that we don’t know everything, and taking the time to study like a 6-year-old to discover some amazing truths about our God.
Studying, Asking, And Digging For Truth With You, Pastor Rudy