The Bread of Affliction and Bread of Heaven

The bread of affliction is a reminder that it was the one true God who brought them out of slavery and sustained them ~ in much the same way He sustained them by miraculously providing them with the bread from heaven, a bread with leaven: manna. And manna was a symbol of an exponentially greater bread of heaven, Jesus Christ, the greatest sustainer, who said in John 6:32-35:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life: whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”

As much as we celebrate the Israelite exodus from Egypt, the lived experience for the Israelites is that it was a brutal experience, to say the least. It meant death to at least 600,000 Israelites. When the exodus began, the people left so expeditiously and frantically, that they didn’t have time to bake their bread (Exodus 12:39). In Exodus 13, Moses declares an annual ritual, The Feast of the Unleavened Bread, as a reminder to the people that the LORD brought them out of slavery by His strong hand. Unleavened bread, as you are likely aware from taking communion, is flat and tasteless. For these reasons, it is referred to as the bread of affliction (Deuteronomy 16:3; 1 Kings 22:27; 2 Chronicles 18:26; Isaiah 30:10).