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Grumbling

            So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?” (Exodus 15:24)

          You grumbled in your tents and said, “The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. (Deuteronomy 1:27)

Do everything without grumbling or arguing, (Philippians 2:14)

          According to the Cambridge Dictionary of English, grumble means “to complain about someone or something in an annoyed way.” Even with the few verses I’ve shared above, it seems pretty clear that God takes a dim view of grumbling. My immediate objections to the verse from Philippians are 1) Jesus argued and 2) we’re supposed to obey God rather than man. How do I reconcile these two with “do everything without grumbling or arguing”?

          Before we get to the answer to that, let’s look at what these verses suggest to us about grumbling. From the first two passages, I get the idea that grumbling tends to be done by people who aren’t in the presence of the subject. They didn’t grumble at Moses, they grumbled against Moses. They didn’t come to the tent of meeting to grumble at or to God. They grumbled against Him in their tents. It seems as if grumbling may be related to gossip. You grumble to one another or to oneself about someone else. You don’t deal with the problem. You don’t even tell the person you’re grumbling about that there is a problem. In other words, you separate yourself from the person or situation you’re grumbling about, and stew, and chew on your tongue about it, probably involving others (hence the gossip, and probably slander.)

          This partially answers how we are to do everything without grumbling. If we take our concerns and frustrations to the person involved and resolve the difficulty we won’t be grumbling. Might we be arguing? Yes, we could. But that depends on your definition of arguing. One definition is “give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share one's view.” Another is “exchange or express diverging or opposite views, typically in a heated or angry way.”

          I suspect that the “arguing” that is described is the equivalent of grumbling, only at the person in question. This sort of arguing is the monologue or dialogue that continues after the decision has been made and can include slamming doors and the silent treatment. Jesus never did anything like that.

          Another consideration from this passage is the word “everything.” We can’t do everything. We can’t drive two hundred miles while spending the day cleaning the house. We can’t do something we can’t do. I can’t perform brain surgery. We can’t always obey God and men at the same time. But, we can do everything that we choose or agree to do without grumbling or arguing.  

           One last snippet to consider. How much of the time do we spend arguing with ourselves as we do what we do?

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