They Were Told Not to Keep Any of It Until Morning

There is one word in the fourth petition that I read past for about twenty years, and it is not bread.

Give us this day our daily bread.

There is a period of time in that sentence, twice, and I had always heard it as a rhythm rather than as content. It sounded devotional. It did not sound like it was making a claim.

Then I taught a class on the Exodus and had to look at where that word comes from, and it stopped being background.

Because the day in that petition is not a poetic touch. It is a direct reference to a food supply that operated on a rule about days, and the rule was strict, and people broke it immediately, and the text tells us exactly what happened when they did.

The rule and what happened

The instruction is short and it is not softened anywhere.

And Moses said, Let no man leave of it till the morning. (Exodus 16:19, King James Version)

And the next verse says they did not listen, and some of them kept it, and it went bad overnight.

Now, the point of that story is easy to get wrong, so let me be precise. It is not a story about greed being punished. Nobody in the account is described as wealthy or as hoarding for profit. They were frightened people in a desert who had been slaves and had never in their lives had a guaranteed meal, and keeping some back is the most understandable thing anybody in Exodus does.

It is a story about a supply that was designed to be received rather than stored.

And there is one more detail worth having. The same chapter says that when they measured it, the one who gathered much had nothing over and the one who gathered little had no lack. Whatever else that means, it means the arithmetic in that camp was not being done by the gatherers.

You have never once been the one doing the arithmetic on this, and the measuring in that camp was His rather than anybody's (Exodus 16:19), and the Spirit is the one who quietly settles what a person could not have settled by gathering harder.

And the reason is stated later, by Moses, looking back at the whole thing.

And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:3)

That he might make thee know. The daily rhythm was teaching something that a full storehouse could not have taught.

You are being taught something by the shape of the supply rather than being punished by its size, and Deuteronomy 8 says the purpose out loud. The Spirit is the one who does that teaching in a person rather than the circumstances doing it on their own.

What the petition is actually asking

So when Jesus hands His followers a prayer, He puts a day inside the request for bread, and everybody standing there would have heard the reference.

Give us this day our daily bread. (Matthew 6:11)

Not give us this year. Not give us enough that we need not ask again. Give us this day, and then the word daily on top of it, which the Greek makes stranger still and which the old translators wrestled with.

That is a petition designed to be prayed again tomorrow.

And I want to say something honest here, because there is a version of this that becomes cruel. Nothing in this petition is a promise about how much anybody will have. It is not a mechanism, and asking it well does not change the number in anybody's account, and this site will never say otherwise. It is a request, made daily, by people who are dependent, to a Father who is not.

You have been given a prayer that assumes tomorrow will need its own asking, and that assumption was built in by Him rather than being a failure of provision (Matthew 6:11), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a repeated request into a relationship rather than into an anxiety.

What we are actually asking for when we ask for the year

Here is the thing I had to admit in front of my own class, and it was uncomfortable.

When I ask God to settle the whole year, I am usually not asking for provision. I am asking to stop needing Him about it. What I want is a state where the question is closed and I do not have to come back.

That is not wickedness and I am not going to call it that. It is exhaustion. Coming back every day is tiring when a person has been under pressure for a long time, and wanting the matter closed is what anybody tired wants.

But it is worth seeing clearly, because a person who understands what they are asking for can ask for something better.

You are permitted to be tired of asking, and no verse anywhere makes the tiredness a fault (Lamentations 3:23), and it is His Spirit who supplies mercy that is described as new every morning rather than delivered once in bulk.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:23)

New every morning. Which is the same shape as the manna and the same shape as the petition, and it is described there as faithfulness rather than as stinginess.