Miracles in the Desert
From the Series: Miracles
Speaker: Dr. Dick Foth
Date: April 11, 2010
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Transcript
Dick Foth
Hello. Today I get to talk about two things I love the most. I love God the most and I get to talk about food. Ruth and I have traveled across the United States, tens of thousands of miles over the years, and in that process, we’ve stopped in all kinds of little towns. Ruth can tell you where we were by the antique stores, I can tell you where we were by the restaurants. So, as part of the ‘Miracle’ series, what I’d like to do is to share some Scriptures with you. You’ve been reading and going through the Bible and I understand that you are now going through Numbers, so I’m going to reference that this evening, but let me start with Exodus Chapter 16 and the story of the children of Israel coming out of Egypt and they are going into the desert. This is how it reads in the first few verses.
1 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the LORD's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death."
When people get really hungry, they get mean. At least I do, and that’s what’s happening here.
4 Then the LORD said to Moses, "I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days."
When you turn to Numbers 11, here is what it says. They are out in the desert and they’ve been eating this bread from heaven, this manna stuff for a long time. In verse 4 of Numbers 11, it says:
4 The rabble with them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and said, "If only we had meat to eat! 5 We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. 6 But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!"
7 The manna was like coriander seed and looked like resin. 8 The people went around gathering it, and then ground it in a handmill or crushed it in a mortar. They cooked it in a pot or made it into cakes. And it tasted like something made with olive oil. 9 When the dew settled on the camp at night, the manna also came down.
Now, they were told that they were to gather it for six days and on the sixth day, they would get twice as much. If you’ve read this text, you know that they were to get twice as much because they were not to gather it on the Sabbath. If they gathered too much, it got maggots in it and it rotted and all kinds of crummy stuff. Or if they went out on the Sabbath, same deal. This in Joshua, the 5th Chapter and 10th verse, this is what happened. They had been eating manna for 40 years.
10 On the evening of the fourteenth day of the month, while camped at Gilgal on the plains of Jericho, the Israelites celebrated the Passover. 11 The day after the Passover, that very day, they ate some of the produce of the land: unleavened bread and roasted grain. 12 The manna stopped the day after they ate this food from the land; there was no longer any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate of the produce of Canaan.
They are 30 days into their trek. They don’t know this but they are going to wandering around for 40 years, 4 decades. They are 30 days in and they start whining and complaining because they are hungry. I get that. I whine and complain when I’m hungry. I don’t have to go a month before I whine and complain. If I don’t get food in a day or two, I’m grouching. So they did that and God said, ‘Ok, I’m going to provide for you every day.’ And He provided for them this stuff, if you will, it said it was like dew. People have evaluated this and they say it’s like the resin on the plants, but there are things that mitigate it just being a natural thing, that in fact it was a supernatural thing. As they keep eating this, they start saying it’s the same old same old and they want to go back where they came from. It is interesting how they forget how hard it was to be a slave and they want to go back because they have these memories of food. I get that. I have memories of food. Some of you growing up, there was a favorite meal. Some of you, it’s mac and cheese, or something mom fixed. Just for fun, this is not biblical or anything, just for fun, think of your favorite meal, either when you were a kid growing up or now. You got it? One the count of three, I want you to shout it out. Ok? One, two, three… See, there it is, all of us know something. For me, it’s a New York strip streak with vegetables, some blue cheese on it, you know. We all get the food thing. Why do we get the food thing? There are dozens and dozens of things related to food in Scriptures. Starting at Genesis with the Garden all the way to Revelation where Jesus says, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone will open to Me, I will come in and eat with him.” Well, that’s an interesting thing for God to say. And there are all kinds of miracles related to food in the Old Testament. Elijah being fed by the ravens, Daniel and the Hebrew children in bondage and they said, ‘Why don’t we do this diet and we’ll show you who is as strong.’ But this is a miraculous connection to food. Jesus is linked to those kinds of miracles in the gospels all the time. He feeds the 4,000, the 5,000, He takes a little bit and makes it a lot. There are all kinds of things related to food. I’m saying why food? Why food miracles? And that’s what is miracle is about. It’s a food miracle.
Some of you have taken psychology and you read about a guy named Abraham Maslow. His hierarchy of needs, the baseline of the needs is the physiological needs, food and water primarily. Here is the God who designed us, both for Himself and for food. If the food piece doesn’t happen, there is no reason for us to have a connection to God because we are dead. Here is this God who says, ‘If I’m going to show Myself to them, I need to show Myself to them in the place where they get it everyday. The manna miracle is not like, this is going to sound like an oxymoron, it’s not like an ordinary miracle. An ordinary miracle is bam, somebody’s arm is healed, or bam something happens. But this one is the gift that keeps on giving. This is the one that goes every day for almost 40 years. I’m thinking, so what? How does that relate to me? He is the God of design. He designs us for Himself and He designs us for food. He is the God of provision; so many of the miracles have to do with his providing something at just the right time. Let me give this definition of a miracle. A miracle is an act which only God can perform. It isn’t about coincidence, or if I try really hard, I could do one of those. A miracle is an act that only God can perform and it is a sign that points to Him. When you read about miracles in the New Testament, it calls them signs and wonders. The reason for the miracle is not just so a cool thing can happen, but it is to point to God Himself, to draw us to Him. It is not just about making me feel better, it is about Him. If there was ever a need for a miracle, it is in the desert place. Let me say that again, if there was ever a need for a miracle, it is in the desert place. Take that as a metaphor. Some of us here tonight are right there, in a dry place; in a place where we cannot possibly see how we can go forward. We don’t know how this is going to work out. Sometimes when that happens, I get scared and sometimes when that happens, I just whine, and I complain and I grumble. That’s where these people were. In the desert place is precisely the place that I need a miracle.
Some of you have heard me tell this story before. I love telling this story. It was 1945, I was three years old. The Second World War had just ended. My parents, my sister and I were in New York City. My parents were going as missionaries to South India. We were waiting for the ship to leave and a scarlet fever epidemic went through New York City. I got scarlet fever and it went into a mastoid infection in my ear. The doctor checked it and said they had to somehow try to stop it because if it continues, it will go into his brain and kill him, and if it doesn’t kill him, the chances are it will make him deaf anyway. My parents, at that time, you couldn’t get the kinds of antibiotics we have today. Penicillin was pretty new and all that stuff. But they send night letters, what we called night letters. Those of you who know about email and new into texting and twittering and tweeting and all that stuff, but back in those days, the fastest way you could get something somewhere was either by telegraph or by night letter. They sent night letters to all the congregations that were supporting us from California and they said to pray for Dickie. He needs healing; we need a miracle. Two or three days later when I was supposed to go in for an operation, the doctor from the hospital called, early in the morning, and talked to my father and said, ‘Reverend, I’m holding two sets of x-rays in my hand, one from 72 hours ago, and the one I just took, and I just called to tell you that there is nothing wrong with this boy.’ We serve a God, we follow a God, we embrace a God who does miracles. I don’t know how that works, I’m just glad it did.
In the grand story of things, coming back to the food thing, in the grand story of things, this is such an essential piece for people. Here is Jesus, who, when He teaches us to pray, He says, “This is the way you pray: Our Father, Holy be your name, give us this day our daily bread.” On the one hand, you say God you are holy, now what’s for dinner? We live in a culture that, for the most part, doesn’t need food miracles. There are 40,000 children around the world who starved yesterday and they needed one of those, whether it came through us or some other way. But the fact is that miracles happen, I believe, in desert places. Miracles happen when somebody trusts God. Moses and Aaron trusted God. God said to them, ‘This is a test to see if these people, the whiners here, will obey Me. I’m going to do a miracle and put a little twist to it and I want them to obey Me. I want them to follow my instructions.’ Miracles happen when people trust God.
One year after 1945, I was in the hills of South India. I had contracted malaria, what they called then malignant malaria. In Africa, they called in black water fever. I was four years old. I had been delirious for three days. I turned to my mother in my delirium and said, “Mommy, I’m going home.” They didn’t know whether that meant America or heaven. They didn’t know which one of those. Not long after that, within a matter of minutes after that, there was a knock on the door. We were at a place called Brooklyn Missionary Home at 7,000 feet in the tea plantations of South India. My mother went to the door and there stood a single lady missionary, an Anglican from Britain, England. She said, ‘I was in prayer and the Lord told me and impressed on me that I should come and pray for Dickie. May I do that?’ My mom said, ‘Absolutely.’ I don’t remember this because I was out of it, but she said that this older lady came in and knelt down by my bed and put her hand on me and prayed that the Lord would break this fever and save my life. Malignant malaria is that strain of malaria that is more severe and can kill you more readily as opposed to other kinds of malaria. Within a matter of hours, my fever broke. Somebody trusted God there. I would submit to you it was my mother and father and an Anglican single lady missionary from Great Britain.
Miracles happen when we are in the desert place and we trust God. I think one of the points of miracles is that it gives us some place to look back to and say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here but I know that at this point in time, God showed up in a powerful way. I couldn’t make it work and He did it.’ The idea behind that is the Hebrew word ‘Ebenezer’ hitherto has the Lord helped us. We saw Him do this and this and this and we have every reason to believe He can do this right here in front of us.
I was with my cousin this afternoon. My cousin spent 36 years with a group called Youth with a Mission. Anybody know that group? They work around the world. I’ll never forget him telling me this story. He said it was back before the wall fell in Eastern Europe. He said, ‘We were in an Eastern European country and we felt we needed, felt impressed that we needed to go open a coffee bar in West Berlin. He got on the train with a friend and were heading across Hungary, a Communist country. We had a visas and passports and tickets and about 100 kilometers into the country, they came through and told us we had the wrong visas and they put us off the train in the middle of the night. And they put us off the train in the middle of the night in a Hungarian town. We had three American dollars, no tickets now to West Berlin, and no visas. What do you do when you are in the desert place? Well, according to this Book, you trust God. You say, ‘God, what I need here is a miracle. I can’t do this, I need to trust You.’ He said, ‘So we joined hands on the train station platform, my wife Carol and this other guy and I, and we joined hands and we prayed. We said something like this, ‘Lord, up to this point, You have embarrassed us with your blessing, and we don’t know where to go from here but we need to get to West Berlin and we feel like You impressed it upon us, help us find a way.’ Within a short time, an English guy came up to us and said, ‘I think I found a place for us to get new visas.’ So they went and got visas and came back, but they only have three American dollars. But you have to trust God and trust means that you do the next thing. Trust is doing what you can do, not what you can’t. So they got in line at the ticket counter. It’s early in the morning now and people were coming to market. They got up to the front and they put down three American dollars and said, ‘Three tickets to West Berlin.’ And the ticket lady just shook her head. And Carol was standing over there praying, ‘Lord, we don’t know what to do, we are just doing the next thing.’ Often doing the next thing is where you find the miracle. And across the train station platform, a little lady with a bandana on her head came walking up to the counter and apparently said, ‘Three tickets to West Berlin’ and turned and disappeared into the crowd. Carol chased her and she was gone. My cousin said, ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an angel but I think they may be Hungarian!’ Miracles happen in desert places. Miracles happen, I think in part, so I can point back to something. Miracles happen when somebody or some bodies trust.
Let me close with this story. When I was 36 years old, I was pastoring near the University of Illinois. I got a call from a college saying, ‘We are looking for a president and your name is on the short list.’ Long story short, it came down to two of us. The trustees voted five times every hour for five hours on a given morning and it was tied between this other fellow and me. He was a friend of mine. I knew him. He was a very qualified person. A couple of guys left and they voted again and this fellow got it. He became the president. The Chairman of the Board called me and said, ‘Dick, thanks for letting your name stand, we appreciate that, but we want you to know that Dr. So-and-so got it.’ I said, ‘Terrific, he is a great guy, great choice, thanks.’ But I had this check in my heart and I turned to my wife and I said, ‘Ruth, I have this feeling that we’re going to get another phone call.’ Three weeks, almost to the day, the telephone rang again and it was the Chairman of the Board and he said, ‘Dr. So-and-so, after praying and thinking about it, feels like he shouldn’t do it. Would you reconsider?’ I said, ‘I need a couple days. I need to talk to Ruth.’ I hung up the phone and I drove home and walked into the house and Ruth was standing at the top of the stairs. I said, ‘Ruth, you’ll never guess who called me.’ She said, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘The Chairman of the Board at Bethany.’ She said, ‘Oh dear God!’ Now, she doesn’t usually exclaim like that, and I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘I was standing here two hours ago kneading dough for pizza and this thought came that I was going to be the wife of the next president of Bethany College.’ And she wasn’t going with anybody else! She said, ‘At first when I had that thought, I thought it was the devil so I rebuked it! Then the voice said again, ‘my timing is right, I am true, I am faithful.’ When she said that, I knew it was over. The trustees hadn’t voted yet but I knew it was done. It scared me. I went in and I was praying and asking why I was nervous. And it was like He was talking me through Scripture and I went to Philippians 2 where it says Jesus, who didn’t think it a prize to be held on to, the glory of God, but let it go, He takes the servant’s role, and so forth. He said, ‘Foth, your problem is that you are afraid to fail. You know you can pastor but you’re not sure you can president, and you’re afraid to fail.’ They did the vote, it was like 22-1 for me to come. I looked for that one for a long time, trying to figure out who it was! I was supposed to go there in June, but I went out periodically between February and June, and in April, I went out and they had a big gathering. It was for delegates and pastors and delegates from congregations. This was a church-owned college. They came to this business meeting about the school. There had been a lot of fraction about the school, a lot of stuff going on in northern California, which is where it was. What I didn’t know when I said yes was that we needed $100,000 between April and June 30th to make the budget work. And in 1978, $100,000 was a lot of money. It’s still a lot but it was really a lot then. So they introduced me to the seven or eight hundred folks at the Reading Municipal Auditorium in Reading, California. They said, ‘Why don’t you say a few words about your presidency and what you’d like to see.’ I said something like, ‘I’d like to see students graduate from here who are always learners. I’d like to see students graduate from here with cool heads and hot hearts. I’d like to see students graduate from here who are like practical mystics with regard to their spiritual lives, like two inches off the floor but not off the wall, people not crazy but sharp.’ I said some other things, and then I said, I just blurted it out, ‘By the way, we need a hundred grand by June 30th.’ This was April 30th. Then I sat down. A guy, a pastor stood up and said, ‘Our church would like to give $1,000 for that need.’ Somebody else said, ‘We’ll give $1,000.’ Within 20 minutes, we had $32,000. Then they had to break because they had an evening meeting. The next morning, we came back and they told me to say a few more words. So I said a few more words and the thing took off again. Somebody gave $500. A youth pastor stood up and said, ‘We’d like to give $100.’ Another said, ‘We’ll give $150.’ All of a sudden, a young man came down the aisle and stood at one of the microphones. They had microphones set up for a business meeting in the aisles. He came down and said, ‘I always wanted to go to Bethany College but I never had the money. Two years ago, I was ready to go but then my wife got pregnant; then last year I was ready to go and she had kidney surgery; and this year, I was ready to go and we just found out she was expecting again, but I love the college and I’d like to give $200 but I don’t have $200.’ By this time, tears were running down his face and he said, ‘But I’m going to trust God for $200 by June 30th.’ He went back and he sat down, and as he sat down, an old man way in the back row jumped up and said, ‘Son, you just got your $200!’ And somebody else jumped up and said, ‘Our church would like to take care of those baby expenses,’ and somebody else jumped up and said, ‘We’d like to pay the first semester of your tuition,’ somebody else said, ‘We’ll pay for the second semester.’ We got that kid through his junior year in five minutes! It was unbelievable! I was just stunned. By the time we finished, people had given $156,000. They had paid for two babies. They were giving money to each other. And all of a sudden, this guy is standing down here at the mic and he said, ‘I’ve been to this mic three times, you’ve got all my money, but I have to tell you that I’ve said some stuff about leadership at the college and about the Board of Trustees that I shouldn’t have said. I should have come to you guys and I didn’t. I need to repent and ask your forgiveness. He said, ‘Mr. Chairman, would you forgive me?’ The Chairman of the Board is going, ‘Well, sure!’ All of sudden, guys were waiting four or five deep at these mics and they were just confessing that they had been backbiters and said stuff they shouldn’t have said and all this stuff. Finally an old cowboy down in the front row raised his hand and said, ‘Mr. Chairman, point of order, apparently a lot of people need to repent here. Could I make a motion for repentance?’ The Chairman said, ‘Well, yes you can.’ He asked for a second and the motion carried and he said, ‘All of you who need to repent, stand up.’ All these people, 200 preachers, stood up. And he banged his gavel and said, ‘You are forgiven!’ And the place went crazy and they started cheering and whistling and crying. It was that first guy that stood up. He could have been the only cat in the whole place that stood up, but when he stood up, it was an opening for the Spirit to come through and do a miracle.
If you go to northern California and you go to one of those congregations today, 30 years after the fact, and say, ‘Do you remember the meeting in Reading Municipal Auditorium?’ They will look back and say, ‘Absolutely!’ It was a desert place, a difficult place. Somebody trusted God. It gives us a chance to look back and say that day, God showed up.
Some of us here desperately need God to show up tonight. We are in a desert place. And just in this moment you can trust Him. In this moment, you can say this is where I need it Lord. This is the manna moment, what are we having for supper? It’s a miracle time. Would you bow with me?
Lord, thank You for your grace. Thank You for the privilege of being your people We want You to know tonight that we trust You and we will never get over You. As You said and did in the desert for the Israelites all those years, You have done for us. Because of that healing in New York City, I still stand tall, if You will. Because of the healing in South India, I still remember. Because of Bethany College in Reading, California, I can look back and say that was a moment that no human orchestrated. Nobody set that up, except You. So Lord for the ones or the several here tonight who need to see You show up in a particular place, we don’t demand but we know You want to, so we just say Lord, we are hungry, we have a need, we are not complaining, and we ask that in your own miraculous way for You to show up, even as we walk from this place. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
