just a thought on manna

6 hrs

i was explaining something the other day,
that eating kosher, that what is clean, is good for one's physical health, but that understanding the implication of what eating clean food means and applying that is good for one's spiritual health.
knowledge being food for thought, as it were, sticking to the clean food of the scriptures is desired, but watching mindless stuff, reading about worldly knowledge etc and then bringing that into your thoughts is eating unclean.

and that brought me to think of manna.
see, the israelites were fed with manna provided to them during the entire process of traversing the wilderness.
and there ends the Torah.

what do i mean by stopping abruptly like that?
when the scriptures continue, as the israelites cross over into the promised land of israel, the manna also abruptly stops, and the israelites are now to eat of that what the land produces.
the manna that is the Torah had been given, and they'd fed on it (oy vey, with enough complaining as they went along) to GET them to the promised land.
now, it was up to them to gather and produce their own food.

allow me to phrase it like this -
mindlessly following what the Torah says is still eating of manna, with the implication one is still wandering in the wilderness, not yet having entered the promised land.
it is now expected that one starts contemplating things, gathering and producing wisdom and understanding, and eating the fruits thereof.
now one has crossed into the promised land.

it is not just to follow Torah, it is to then work on understanding it.

this is very similar to what paul described as milk, for not being ready yet for solid food.
as the Torah was manna for the israelites, the entire scripture, mindlessly read, taken at face value, is milk.
contemplating the implications of what one has read is the solid food.
the work one does with what one's read produces the solid food of understanding we're all looking for.
(the Spirit leads one in this, we're not left alone)

i hope i've managed to give just that slight further encouragement, but, point is, don't listen to me, don't necessarily listen to others either (who too often just repetetively give manna and milk), go eat the food yourself, read scriptures. and NOW work on it.