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I have often wondered why the LORD took the Israelites out wandering forty years through the wilderness of Sinai after delivering them from slavery in Egypt. If I were God I would have turned north and headed up by the Mediterranean Sea and taken the King’s Highway. The trip would have lasted only a couple of months and there would have been plenty of food and water. But hey, God is God. God is who God is and he does what God does. But God is not arbitrary, nothing is ever purposeless on a whim with God. He had a reason for taking them into the barren wilderness where there were harsh limitations on things needed for life. It was, I believe, to teach them faith by providing for them in the most extreme of circumstances.
So, God took the Israelites through the wilderness to teach them faith. This is a hard one I think for us to grasp. You see, we are not accustomed to saying that God brings hard times upon us, that God causes or lets suffering happen to us and the reason being so that we can come to know God better and grow in faith. We find it very difficult to say that God brings suffering to his people, his beloved daughters and sons, that they might come closer to him. We like to say that bad things happen because this is a messed up world and things just happen or because we brought them upon ourselves and that God will somehow work these travesties out because he loves us. Rarely, if ever will anyone say, “The LORD has brought me out into the wilderness. The LORD is doing this to me.”
But, you know, if we are going to be truly biblical about things; if we are disciples of Jesus born from above in him by the free gift of the Holy Spirit so that we are God’s beloved children as he is; if that is who we are, we are going to spend some time in the wilderness and it’s going to happen because God is going to take us there to go through stuff that seems tailer made to push all our buttons so to speak. God will indeed lead us into the wilderness, into the valley of the shadow of death where our souls are ripped to pieces rather than take us where he makes us to lie down in green pastures beside the still waters so that our souls are restored. He will lead us to painful places where we are forced to ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?” In a world so utterly broken and corrupted by sin, the LORD must bring us to places where in the depths of despair, of grief, of poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of boredom our only resort is to turn to the LORD and ask, “Are you here?”…and we find that God is.
In the wilderness we float. We wander. We wait. We cannot help but ask “How am I going to survive out here?” By nature we, like the Israelites, will complain. We will want to turn back to the way life was before instead of moving forward. We will doubt the LORD’s motive of love. We will take matters into our own hands and serve and worship things that we believe will make us feel better. We will try to bargain with the LORD. We will say “Lord, get me out of the wilderness and I’ll do my best to be a better, more faithful person.” But God’s got bigger plans for us than just wanting to get us to behave a little better. The grace behind the wilderness is that it is not punishment. It is the only healing way for us to move forward as disciples of Jesus and the new life he has for us.
To endure the wilderness we must keep asking the questions “Who are you Lord and why have you brought me here?” This entails that we must keep coming before the LORD in prayer. We don’t come asking for what I perceive I need for things to be better. You see, the LORD brings us into the wilderness to strip us down and show us who we really are. So, it is important while we are in the wilderness to pay attention to what we are feeling because, chances are, we have felt these painful feelings before and buried them over and over again but now the LORD is bringing them forth from the tomb to heal us.
There are things we can do in the wilderness to aid in our growth in Christ. We should feel free to rant at the LORD. We are taught not to be angry and complain to God. But, God’s a big boy. He can handle it. Rant, for sooner or later God very cleverly turns our rants back on us and reveals to us the truth about ourselves.
Once I was in a wilderness and I got on a rant with God. I was complaining that I always seemed to be the one to make painful sacrifices so that other people can be happy. He turned that one around on me one day when he told me, “That’s exactly what I do for you.” I shut up about that and realized it’s part of what real love is.
When you’re in the wilderness read the Bible listening for something to stick out to you and then spend the day or days pondering it. Keep a journal of those things so that you can see the patterns that arise in what you hear so you can discern what is actually from the LORD and what are the things you want to hear.
The wilderness is also a good place to draw together with our brothers and sisters in Christ to worship, to share, to pray and to study. It is by the love of our brothers and sisters that we are built up in Christ and equipped and nourished in Christ. The thing to note about the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites was that they all went through it together. There were no Lone Ranger sufferers. This is the single most significant strength of the small congregation. If one of us suffers we all feel it. This fellowship and support is what the church is all about.
Fellowship in the LORD is what our congregations have to offer particularly now post-Covid. We don’t have the resources here to meet every perceived need that comes through the door. But what we do have is a home and a family to offer those who come asking who is God and why has he brought me to the place that am at in life. Well, God is the mystery of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He dwells richly among us and he calls people here to meet him. Those who come looking for the Lord, will find him and be well fed for the Lord is among us. And, that question about why God has brought us out into the wilderness where we feel so lost is a trickier one to answer, but it usually has a lot to do with meeting him so you can find yourself and find that you’re not alone. Amen.
