"THOU SHALT NOT" ... WHINE.

1 Corinthians 10:11                                                                            Sivan12/ בסיבן יב

These things happened to them as an example . . .

were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.

It seems that few things exacerbate the Father more than his people griping and complaining. He can freely set before us the best food ever concocted in the kitchens of heaven, but we will still complain and would rather have the dainties brought by slavery. And why do we complain? There is really nothing wrong with the food Hashem gives us except that, it is not what we want.

Woe unto us and to our evil inclination! This tendency to complain and always wanting more was the basic lusting nature behind the sin in the Garden of Eden. We always seem to want what Hashem in his goodness and wisdom withholds from us, and like today’s manufacturers of goods, the devil is always happy to oblige. The worst of it is that today’s worldly merchants know about our natural bend to whine and gripe and they constantly play on it in order to make a profit. They constantly tell people, “Aren’t you tired of this or that, behold I have the solution that will help you not to have work so hard, be more comfortable, or here is the food that will delight your palate, all for only $ . . . ! How can you live without it?” They make a profit and feed on our complaining nature.

It is so easy to look at the children of Israel in the desert and wonder how they could complain so much, but in reality, we complain as much as they do and about the same things. Food, hard work, leadership, and the sometimes-monotonous daily grind of life seem to be our main areas of complaint. We feel that the way God does things is not good enough. We must improve on his plan for us and make every decision in our lives from the color and consistency of our hair to whether or not to have children. We even want to decide the day of our death and call it Death with Dignity as if Hashem was not able to do that for us. We always think that we deserve more than the simple life our Father would have us live according to his will, so we enslave ourselves to another master: the Master Card! But Yeshua told us that we cannot serve two masters, that we cannot serve God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24, KJV).

The area of complaint that seems the most destructive in the congregational body of Messiah seems to be each other. Whereas we complain about having to put up with others, we seem to forget that also others have to put up with us. We always feel that people should have learned certain lessons by now so we show ourselves intolerant and impatient. We forget that in the Father’s eyes, we probably should be a bit more advanced ourselves in our spiritual growth and that we only exist by the mercy of his great compassion.

May we learn from the lessons of the children of Israel in the desert and realize that these things happened to them as an example. They were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come (1 Corinthians 10:11).

P. Gabriel Lumbroso