manna Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

Wind Bringing Quails - common quails in Gaza today — Common Quail

Skeptics often claim that the Old Testament accounts of God providing for Israel are a bunch of silly fairy tales. One target is the way God sustained the Israelites in their journey from Egypt to the promised land. Two weeks ago, we posted about God supplying manna. Another area of interest is the wind bringing quails in massive numbers into the camp of the people (Exodus 16:12-13 and Numbers 11:31-32).

The Middle East Eye website carries an article titled “Quail Season Brings Rare Treat for Meat-Starved Gazans.” It tells of a regular migration of quails from Europe to the Middle East. If the wind is blowing against the migration, the birds become exhausted and land on the Gaza shore, where people capture them in nets to provide a source of badly needed protein. The point is that there is a natural way in which quails can provide food for a nation of people even today.

God provides for His people in two ways. One is by miraculous acts that are not natural and which require a direct act of God. These are rare, but they do happen. Jesus did things that have no natural explanation, and their purpose was to verify that Jesus was the Son of God. One of my favorite gospel songs is a song by the Booth Brothers titled “Ask the Blind Man, He Saw it all.” That kind of event does not have natural explanations.

However, far more common are situations like this one where we see God using natural forces to provide for the needs of His people. This action is no less significant because the timing met a specific need for the Israelites. God could have provided quails for food by any method He chose, but seeing the wind bringing quails to Gaza today offers strong support for God acting through natural processes in the biblical account.

Explaining the Manna in Exodus — The Gathering of the Manna by James Tissot

Christians sometimes make the mistake of devising naturalistic theories to explain biblical events. A classic example of this is explaining the manna of Exodus 16:14-35. It is true that certain insects in the Middle East secrete an edible substance. Some restaurants serve it and claim that it is the same manna that God provided to Israel in the wilderness.

The best-known example of wild explanations of manna was by Immanuel Velikovsky in his book Worlds in Collision, which was popular in the 1950s. Velikovsky claimed that Venus was ejected by Jupiter and became a comet that contained edible fragments containing carbohydrates which provided the manna of Exodus 16. Now we have people claiming that fragments from the ort cloud of material outside our solar system are the source of the manna.

We should first point out that there may be hydrocarbons in space, but there are no carbohydrates. There is a vast difference. The biblical account tells us that the manna could be baked (Exodus 16:23) and that if it was kept overnight, it “bred worms and stank” (verse 20). Baking would ignite a hydrocarbon. The Bible describes the manna as “like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (verse 31). None of those things match the composition of a comet or Venus. We have landed on Venus, and the surface is familiar rock types like ones found on Earth.

Many things in the biblical account can be explained in natural ways. For example, it is not difficult to believe that quail could descend on a population in significant numbers (also described in Exodus 16). Explaining the manna as a product of insects, as it is today in smaller quantities, would not explain its properties and regard for the Sabbath (verse 23). We could only interpret that as an act of God. How the manna was produced becomes an untestable question, and constructing explanations with wild assumptions damages faith instead of supporting it.

Tag: manna

Wind Bringing Quails to the Israelites

Explaining the Manna in Exodus