“But Moses said, ‘Here I am among six hundred thousand men on foot, and you say, ‘I will give them meat to eat for a whole month!’ Would they have enough if flocks and herds were slaughtered for them? Would they have enough if all the fish in the sea were caught for them?’

The Lord answered Moses, ‘Is the Lord’s arm too short? Now you will see whether or not what I say will come true for you.’” (Numbers 11:21-23)

Take God out of the box. This phrase has been the focus of many sermons by many different pastors. It is rooted in the thought that, we the created, use our own ideas and understanding of the world to limit what God can and cannot do. When we limit God in this way, we effectively are putting God in the box. This is all a play-on-words to another popular phrase “thinking outside the box” which “is an idiom that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective.”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box) So by definition, when we put God in the box, we are removing God’s potential to be novel and creative in His own solutions. We bound the possibilities available to God down to a set of finite outcomes. And this is what Moses had done in today’s verses. The Israelites were “wailing” over their dining options in the desert, and asked for meat. Moses took this request to God in prayer, and God said He would deliver. But Moses couldn’t comprehend how this could be and questioned God’s ability to make good on His promise. He put God in the box. But God rebuked him for this saying, “Is the Lord’s arm too short?” A rhetorical question obviously pointing out the flaw in Moses’ logic. We should remember that Moses was a great leader, chosen by God to take His people out of captivity. But Moses wasn’t perfect, he made mistakes. Today we need to not make the same mistake, and take God out of the box.