1 Corinthians 10:3 Commentary and Bible Study

What does Paul mean? Did Israel eat spiritual food when they ate the manna? When the Jews said to Christ, ‘What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work? Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat’, the Lord answered them, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world’ (John 6:30-33). No, the manna, although it was supernaturally provided, was a physical foodstuff. It was not spiritual. In eating the manna, Israel was not eating spiritual food. But the point Paul is making is that those who by faith had eyes to see understood that the manna it was representative of the spiritual food that God would provide. That is how New Testament believers understand the manna as they look back. It was type, a picture of Christ, the bread of life. So those Old Testament people had the equivalent of the bread of life which we have, even though many lacked the faith needed to see it. Likewise, they drank the same spiritual drink that we drink, if by faith they understood the meaning of the miracle that God was working in their midst. They drank of that same spiritual Rock, which was Christ.The children of Israel did not like the manna; they called it light bread. They despised it, once they got used to it, but it was given miraculously every day. It appeared by the power of God; it fed and nourished them and kept them strong and healthy. This miracle of God constantly before them meant that they ‘did all eat the same spiritual meat’, a direct lesson every day in the grace of God and the power of God, and yet they fell. In their way, the representative church had astonishing demonstrations of God's grace and God's goodness, and yet they fell. ‘Did all drink the same spiritual drink, for they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.’ Here is the striking of the rock at Horeb, when Moses was commanded to take the very same rod which had been used to symbolically divide the waters at the Red Sea, and he was commanded to strike the rock, and water flowed in such abundance that there was a deep river, and, we are told, it followed them. Nobody is sure how it followed them, whether the river or the stream that flowed from Horeb literally followed them wherever they were in the wilderness, or whether it was that, wherever they were in dry and arid places, water was miraculously produced and provided, and their minds went back to the original miracle when Moses struck the rock. Either way, for all the years in the wilderness that water was supplied by miraculous means by Almighty God, and they drank of it every day.