The Banquet No Man Can Make

What Pride Costs, and Who Ends Up on the Table

For a while I believed Israel ate a dragon.

The case is not a stupid one. Numbers says a wind from the LORD brought the quails from the sea, and quail are not sea creatures. Psalm 74 says God broke the heads of leviathan in pieces and gave him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness. Job says leviathan is king over all the children of pride, and Israel's camp that day was thick with pride. Put those three beside each other and a fourth sentence forms on its own: the quail were the monster.

So I wrote it up. Then I handed it to someone who took it apart.

Exodus calls them quails. Psalm 105 calls them quails. Psalm 78 calls them feathered fowls like the sand of the sea. The word in Psalm 74 that the King James renders people inhabiting the wilderness is a hard word, and the Greek translators two centuries before Christ did not read it that way at all. The reading did not survive.

What interests me now is why I wanted it to.

I did not come to that passage asking what God said. I came asking whether God would say the thing I had already decided would be magnificent. When the text set down something plainer, I went looking for a way to send it back to the kitchen.

That is the subject of this essay. I was standing inside it the whole time.

Can God Furnish a Table?

Israel got hungry in the wilderness, and hunger is not a sin. Neither is grief, and neither is asking. Lament is faithful speech.

But the psalm reports what was said:

"Yea, they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?" — Psalm 78:19

That is not a request. That is a cross-examination. They put God on the stand, demanded that He produce, and named the exhibit themselves. Meat. Not manna. Meat, or the case is closed.

I have written elsewhere about the two reflexes suffering produces, and how quickly a sufferer can slide from lament into indictment.^[1] Appetite is another way into the same room. You can hold up a real hunger and inform God that His goodness will be measured by whether He fills it the way you specified.

God granted the motion.

A wind went out, and the quail came, a day's journey on this side and a day's journey on the other, and the people gathered all that day and all night and all the next day.^[2] Then:

"And while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people…" — Numbers 11:33

They buried the dead there and named the place Kibroth-hattaavah. The Graves of Craving.

The place is not named after the wind, or the miracle, or the God who supplied more meat than six hundred thousand men could eat. It is named after the appetite that ordered it.

"And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul." — Psalm 106:15

Israel prayed. God said yes. The yes was the judgment.

The Banquet No Man Can Make

Another man wanted a hearing.

Job asked for a court. He asked repeatedly. And when God finally answered him out of the whirlwind, He did not produce evidence, offer a defense, or explain a single thing about the children Job had buried. He described an animal.

Read Job 41 as what it is. A list of questions.

Can you draw him out with a hook? Put a cord through his nose, or bore his jaw with a thorn? Will he beg you? Will he make a covenant to be your servant forever? Will you play with him as with a bird, or leash him for your girls?

Then verse six, which I had read a hundred times without hearing it:

"Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?" — Job 41:6

Can you throw a dinner party out of this thing? Can you butcher him and sell him by the pound?^[3]

The expected answer is no. No man hooks him, hosts him, or sells him. Whatever else leviathan is, he is not food.

Hold that question open. The rest of the Bible answers it.

The King and His Mirror

But God is not pointing off into the distance.

Set Job 41 beside Job 29, where Job describes himself.

Job's face shone on people; leviathan's sneezing flashes light. Job's bow was renewed in his hand; arrows cannot make leviathan flee. Princes fell silent before Job and nobles held their peace; the mighty are afraid when leviathan raises himself. Job sat as chief and dwelt as a king among his troops. And leviathan, God says at the end of it all, is king over all the children of pride.^[4]

God did not point into the dark and say, there is a spirit out there called pride. He described a creature no man can master, and then named it king over everything Job had spent three chapters becoming.

Job was not secretly wicked. God calls him perfect and upright in chapter one and tells the friends in chapter forty-two that Job spoke of Him what was right. The friends who assumed hidden guilt were the ones God rebuked. Job is vindicated against them and corrected by God, and those are not the same verdict.^[5]

What grew in chapters twenty-nine through thirty-one was not concealed sin. It was a self-portrait, and it kept growing while an innocent man defended it.

Pride that comes out of wickedness is easy to disown. Pride that comes out of being genuinely wronged, genuinely right, and finally having to say so out loud, is not.

God showed Job what a self-portrait looks like after it finishes growing scales.

The Hook in the Dragon's Jaw

Job's questions do get answered. Not by Job.

Ezekiel is told to speak to a king:

"Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself." — Ezekiel 29:3

There is pride in one sentence. A man standing in water he did not make, calling it his because he is standing in it.

And then God works down the list from Job 41 like a man checking off receipts.

Job asks whether the monster can be hooked: "But I will put hooks in thy jaws." Job asks whether he can be hauled out of his water: "and I will bring thee up out of the midst of thy rivers." Job asks whether anyone can serve him for dinner:

"And I will leave thee thrown into the wilderness… I have given thee for meat to the beasts of the field and to the fowls of the heaven." — Ezekiel 29:5

Job asks whether the monster can be hooked. Ezekiel shows us the hook already in his jaw.

Psalm 74 says the same thing in fewer words. God brake the heads of leviathan in pieces and gave him to be meat.^[6] The translations argue about who did the eating. Not one of them argues about what happened to the monster. The lord of the deep ends up as something's dinner.

God does not merely defeat the adversary. He makes the adversary serve the table.

The Exodus Was a Dragon-Slaying

My original instinct was not wrong about everything. God really does feed His people out of a defeated enemy. He simply does not do it with poultry.

Isaiah says it without hedging:

"Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?" — Isaiah 51:9–10

Dragon-cutting and sea-drying in one breath, and the reason given is that God's people could walk through on dry ground. Rahab is Isaiah's own name for Egypt. Scripture remembers the Exodus as a dragon-slaying.

And notice what Israel never does with this monster. The nations around them told stories about gods who won their thrones by barely surviving the sea. Israel took the same beast, filed him under creatures God made on the fifth day, and set him swimming in a psalm that lists him alongside the cattle, the storks, and the wild goats.^[7]

"There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein." — Psalm 104:26

What terrifies the nations is a pet in God's ocean.

Two Suppers

Job's question gets its answer, and the answer is a table.

Ezekiel is told to send out invitations:

"Speak unto every feathered fowl, and to every beast of the field, Assemble yourselves, and come… that ye may eat flesh, and drink blood… Thus ye shall be filled at my table with horses and chariots, with mighty men, and with all men of war." — Ezekiel 39:17, 20

John hears the same summons at the end of the Bible, an angel crying instead of a prophet, calling every bird that flies to the supper of the great God, to eat the flesh of kings and captains and mighty men.

Set that next to Numbers 11.

In the wilderness the birds were the meal, and the people who ate them became the graves. At the end, the birds are the guests, and the proud are the meal.

This is not a modern preacher's trick. Jews reading Job and the Psalms centuries before Christ already expected the monster to be served. They wrote about a coming age when leviathan would be food for the righteous, and the rabbis later built the whole picture out of Job's merchants clause: the feast, the dividing, even a shelter made from the monster's skin.^[8] They were not inspired. They were reading, and they heard the question in Job 41 waiting for an answer.

And in that same chapter of Revelation, before the birds are called, there is another supper.

The marriage supper of the Lamb.

The Host Who Is the Meal

Both tables are meals where somebody is eaten. Only one of them has a volunteer.

Jesus fed a crowd in a desert place, and they came back the next morning wanting more. He told them why they came:

"Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled." — John 6:26

Then they asked Him for a sign, and named the one they wanted. Our fathers did eat manna in the desert. Give us that. Set the table we remember.

And they murmured at Him. That is the wilderness word, the one that follows Israel through Exodus and Numbers like a smell.

He did not soften it. He told them their fathers ate manna in the wilderness and are dead. He stood in front of people asking for the old menu and pointed at the Graves of Craving. Then He said the thing that emptied the hillside:

"…and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." — John 6:51

From that time many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him. They came for loaves. He offered Himself, and they left.

Job asked for a daysman, someone who could lay a hand on both God and man at once, and the book of Job could not produce one. The nearest it comes is a young man who claims to stand in God's stead and admits in the same breath that he is formed out of the clay.^[9] Job dies waiting.

Every other table in Scripture has someone dragged to it. Pharaoh is hooked and hauled. Leviathan is broken and portioned. The kings of the earth are summoned by angels who are not asking.

At the Lamb's table, the host climbs on by Himself and says take, eat.

The sea that carried the quail, that hid the monster, that gave up the beast in John's vision, is not in the new creation. And there was no more sea.

Israel asked whether God could furnish a table in the wilderness. He can. That was never the question. The question was what kind of hunger walked up to it.

I came to this passage with an order already written and asked the text to bring me a dragon. It brought me a mirror, and then it brought me a table.

Two suppers are coming. At one of them the people of the Lamb sit down. At the other, the proud are served.

You will not choose your seat that day. You are choosing it now, every time you come to God with the meal already decided and ask Him to confirm it.