(Ex 16:2-4.12-15)

Exodus 16:2 In the wilderness the whole community of the Israelites murmured against Moses and against Aaron.

Exodus 16:3 The Israelites said to them, "Had we died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we were sitting by the pot of meat, eating bread to our fill! Instead you have brought us out into this wilderness to starve all this multitude."

Exodus 16:4 Then the Lord said to Moses, "Behold, I am about to rain down bread from heaven for you: the people shall go out to gather a day's ration every day, that I may test them, to see whether they walk according to my law or not.

God's people on the march stop in the middle of the wilderness, for the specification between Elim and Sinai (Ex 16:1). And it is precisely when we find ourselves in the middle of the desert, far from the two opposite ends, when we see no way out, that faith begins to waver. We do not know what future awaits us, where we will end up and how we will get out. Easily, one's thoughts run back to past lives, which, even in slavery, offered something to look forward to.

The provisions they had brought from Egypt are beginning to run out, and the desert is not a source of food. They have left Egypt, the land of material abundance, but have not yet reached the land they thought of as the region where milk and honey flows. Difficulties are strong temptations for every man. Was it really worth abandoning the safe, the certain, to begin a journey of uncertainty and insecurity?

The temptation arises from the loss of faith. One no longer sees God. One no longer understands his will. One is no longer able to see behind history the wise hand of God who desires only one thing: that one has faith in Him, the only source of life and blessing for man. Once faith is lost, murmuring begins. Murmuring is a deadly poison. It is enough for one to start murmuring for a thousand others to become defiled and then the camp of the Israelites becomes a source of discouragement and further loss of faith. Murmuring is the renunciation of faith in God.

Dying to die, it was better to die in Egypt. There is death in the abundance of food and there is death in scarcity. The Lord could have chosen to let us die in Egypt rather than end our days in the desert. What future remains for those in the desert but a miserable, slow death by starvation? So the life that Satan offers us can also appear beautiful and fulfilling when one compares it with the desert in which the Lord places us to lead us to eternal life. Everything has been forgotten, everything forgotten, everything now removed by the Israelites. Thirty days in the desert were enough to forget all the great wonders performed by the Lord in the land of Egypt and at the Red Sea.

Which present is better, the one in which one dies of hunger or the other in which, although one must die, one dies in abundance? Better to die in abundance than in destitution. This is the choice of those who have lost their faith. He, on the other hand, who preserves faith, knows that the present is not one of death but of life, because it is governed by the Lord. Man, however, does not see God's government and thinks that everything is in his own hands. Seeing our hands full, when they are empty, can only be done by faith. This faith is absent in God's people today. It takes all of God's wisdom and patience to stabilise his people in faith. The whole of history is this untiring work of the Lord.

There is no direct relationship between God and his people: everything goes through Moses. Israel complains to Moses, God speaks to Moses. Without Moses nothing from heaven comes down to earth and nothing from earth goes up to heaven. Moses is a figure par excellence of Christ. No one can claim a direct relationship with God the Father, bypassing the Son. The Son sees the Father face to face, and we do not know the Father except through the Son and insofar as the Son makes him known to us. Without the word of Christ it is impossible for us to know the will of God, nor would we know how to begin our journey of salvation, and on what food we must feed in order to have eternal life.

Israel complains about the lack of meat and bread. The Lord will send a food from heaven that not only keeps us alive, but makes us grow into another life. It is a food that is not the work of our hands, but a gift from God. It comes from heaven and not from the earth. It cannot be stored in man-made warehouses, nor can it be kept for the next day. It is given every day and every day must be lived in prayerful expectation of this food.

Here is the first rule of the bread from heaven: everyone must trust God, must believe that tomorrow He will give bread again. The bread from heaven requires daily faith. I only gather today's bread because tomorrow the Lord will give it to me. If I gather today's bread also for tomorrow, it is a sign that I have already lost faith in my Lord. I do not believe that He will give it to me again tomorrow. Jesus also gave us this test of faith. We too in the Our Father ask for this day's bread. Today for today. Tomorrow for tomorrow. Every day for every day, in its everydayness. This is our great difficulty: living by faith in the everyday.

"That I may test him, to see if he walks in my law or not". The food that is freely given from heaven is not an easy way out or an easy solution to get to eternal life without difficulty. It is a test for us: not simply because we have to wait for it every day, but because we are not given to see beyond the appearances of bread. It is the gift of the Lord, but how can we see in this different bread, the food that is given for eternal life and even more the flesh of Christ that is given for the salvation of the world? In our relationship with God, faith is indispensable, and faith is given by hearing the Word as it comes from the mouth of His Son and by eating the Word who is the Son Himself, offered as a sacrifice in atonement for our sins. Just as God trusts and relies on Moses alone, so the Lord's people must place their faith in Christ alone. 

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon)