The Staff of Life
R. D. Hitchcock, D. D. Deuteronomy 8:3-6 And he humbled you, and suffered you to hunger, and fed you with manna, which you knew not, neither did your fathers know… I. We are to consider what OUR PERIL is. In one word, it is the peril of an over-mastering materialism. Look on England today, the England that speaks to us through Liverpool and Manchester, through Cabinet and Parliament, her stout hand not upon her heart but upon her pocket, cold towards us, sneeringly indifferent to the triumph of law, order, and right, anxious only about the cargoes of cotton, which are to feed her whirling spindles. Tell us, ye British statesmen, tell us, ye sordid sons of heroic sires, are Constitutions only parchment? Are nations only herds of farmers, artisans, and traders? Is chartered freedom only sounding rhetoric? Is duty only a name? Is honour dead? And is there nothing for us, in this nineteenth century, but to delve and spin and trade, to clutch and hoard, to eat and drink, and bloat and rot and die, and make no sign? II. What OUR DELIVERANCE must be. Deliverance is what we want; not mere respite, lifting the agony from our spirits to lay it over upon our children; deliverance, complete and final. What avails it in a raging fever, rapidly nearing its crisis, that we comfort ourselves with cooling drinks, while the disease is striking boldly at our vitals? It is written in God's Word, and written in all the history of the race: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Such is the Divine regimen for the nations. They live, if they live at all, by no felicity of position, soil, or climate, by no abundance of material good, but by the living word of the living God. Work we must, and shall, and should. And work will bring us wealth. And wealth will bring us power. What then? Need wealth be idolised, or spent upon our lusts? Need power he vaunted and abused? If so, we perish, as Tyre and Sidon perished; perish, as Carthage perished; perish, as, according to the Indian legend, the last of our gigantic mastodons perished, smitten down by the thunderbolt of the Great Spirit. Thank God, it need not be so. Nor is it our task to lay our feeble, ineffectual finger upon this vast revolving wheel, which carries the whole machinery of our earthly life, and bid it pause. It is not our task to slay this giant of our material prosperity, and stretch his huge corpse out across the continent. Ours is the far grander task of teaching the giant wisdom, and subduing his earth-born energies to Him who has told us that "Man shall not live by bread alone." How, then, shall men and nations live? "By every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"; so reads our text. The Hebrews in the desert had no need of bread; they were fed with manna from the skies. But our Lord proved that there was no need even of manna. It was enough for Him, as the Son of Man, that He had faith in God. On this He feasted, while He fasted, the forty days. It was God's commandment, which He obeyed in fasting, and this commandment, thus obeyed in faith, was the bread He ate. The commandments of God, then, are the bread of life for the nations. If a Christian people, then we must be loyal to our calling, baptising our unexampled material prosperity into the name of Christ, and dedicating our wealth, with a wise and eager generosity, to Christian uses. (R. D. Hitchcock, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: 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 doth man live. WEB: He humbled you, and allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna, which you didn't know, neither did your fathers know; that he might make you know that man does not live by bread only, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of Yahweh does man live.