They Remembered the Fish and Forgot the Whips

Two years out of slavery, a whole nation stood in a desert and said they wanted to go back.

And listen to how they said it, because the way they said it is the whole thing. They did not say we miss being owned. They did not say we miss the quotas. They said this:

We remember the fish, which we ate in Egypt freely. The cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick.

That is a grocery list. That is a beautiful, specific, mouth watering grocery list, and every single item on it is true. They did eat those things. Egypt is a river country and the food there was good and there was a lot of it, and a person working the Nile delta ate better than a person walking across a wilderness.

None of that is a lie.

What is missing from the list is everything else. The bricks. The straw they had to gather themselves after the quota stayed the same. The infant boys. The four hundred years. Their own voices, crying out, which is the reason God came down in the first place.

Memory did not lie to them. Memory edited.

The list is completely accurate

Read what they actually said, and notice that not one word of it is false.

We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick. (Numbers 11:5, King James Version)

Which we did eat in Egypt freely. Freely. That word is doing something dangerous, because it is technically true and completely misleading. They did not pay money for that food. It came with the arrangement.

And that is exactly how a costly arrangement describes itself from the inside. It presents the part that arrives and never mentions the part that is taken, because the part that is taken is not itemized anywhere. It is just how life is.

You are not crazy for missing something, and remembering the good of it has never once meant you were wrong to leave. That is not me excusing homesickness. Numbers 11:5 records their list accurately and Scripture keeps it, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person feel the pull of an old arrangement without being dragged back into it.

Whatever feeds you gets a vote

Here is the thing under this passage and it is the thing this whole site turns on.

Every arrangement that feeds a person creates a loyalty in that person. Not always a big one. Not always a conscious one. But something happens in the human heart toward whatever is putting food in front of it, and that something is not neutral.

Those people had been out of Egypt for two years and Egypt still had a vote in the room. It could still make them say a sentence out loud in front of God. That is loyalty, and none of them would have called it that, and every one of them would have said they hated the place.

That is what makes this hard to see in yourself. The loyalty does not feel like loyalty. It feels like an opinion. It feels like realism. It feels like remembering.

You have a place where your loyalty actually runs, and God has never once been afraid of you tracing it. Numbers 11 shows a free nation still speaking for a country that owned them, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person a thing about themselves without crushing them with it.

What God did about it

Now watch how God handles the complaint, because it is not what I expected the first time.

He is angry, and the passage says so plainly, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But look at what He actually does. He gives them meat. He sends quail, in enormous quantity, for a month.

He does not lecture them about gratitude for a chapter and then leave them hungry. He answers the stated need and lets the deeper thing come to the surface where everybody can see it.

There is also a mercy in that passage that gets missed: right in the middle, Moses tells God he cannot carry these people alone, and God's response is to give him seventy elders to share the weight. In the same chapter as the complaint, a man says this is too heavy for me and God distributes it.

You are not being handled roughly, and He has never once answered an honest hunger with contempt. Numbers 11:17 has God taking the weight off one man's shoulders and spreading it across seventy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to say out loud that something is too heavy.

Two years is not very long

I have to say something to the person who feels stupid for still missing it.

Two years. That is how long they had been out when they said this. Four hundred years of an arrangement does not come out of a body in two years, and God did not seem surprised that it had not.

Whatever a person leaves, they were in it a long time. The habits of it stay in the hands. The reflexes stay in the gut. And the day somebody walks away from a thing is not the day it stops having an opinion about them.

That is not failure. That is arithmetic.

You are further out than you feel, and the pull has never once been proof that you went back. Numbers 11 sits two years into a forty year journey, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person walking through the stretch where the old thing still talks.