September 24, 2014

From Jim McGuiggan... IS "WILDERNESS" THE LAST WORD?


IS "WILDERNESS" THE LAST WORD?

"WILDERNESS" is real and it speaks with a loud voice. Those who deny that human experience has a God-denying look attached to it need their eyes and ears examined. 
Israel and more particularly the Lord Jesus in the Wilderness make it clear that the last word doesn't lie with Wilderness. It lies with a faithful and sovereign God.
When Israel turned from the Red Sea and the wreck of Pharaoh’s army lying on its bank and looked at the wilderness it must have been a real let-down. A brooding, sinister place that with its moaning wind and desolate look was telling them early that it meant to bar their way home. "I’ll bury you here," you can imagine it whispering. But something like forty years later they marched in from that wilderness as the scourge of God against entrenched evil national structures. How was that possible?
Imagine we’re on a high place overlooking the wilderness in the Sinai peninsula and we’re panning it with our binoculars. As far as the eyes can see there's barrenness, stunted growth, waterless land, lower life-forms, pitiless heat, erratic boulders, a struggle for survival, scorpions and serpents competing for the shade, there's dust and the weary wind. Then down below us, suddenly, we’re met by a profusion of color and life. Tents pitched in thousands, all in order and placed with precision around a central Tent. We see herds of goats, flocks of sheep, we strain our ears and the wind carries the sound of laughter up to us, a joyous shout now and then rises to us or the sound of music. How’s this possible? Is it a mirage? Here! In the middle of all this absence of promise there is life, real life, flourishing, thriving life. How do these realities exist here? How do they sustain themselves? In the midst of curse there is this blessing? In this chaos could we expect this order and harmony and thousands who joyfully sang of their freedom? FREEDOM? Is this lunacy?
Israel’s experience in the wilderness was to be remembered for all their generations. Yahweh established the Feast of Booths (Tabernacles) so that they would never forget the time when God guided them through the trackless desert (Deuteronomy 8:15), and spread a table for them in that inhospitable land (Psalms 68:8-10; 78:18-30). God wanted them to grow in their trust of him and nothing has changed.
If we panned the world of nations wouldn’t we see the kind of thing that kills hope, the kind of thing that urges us to be realistic and expect nothing. The nations aren’t only dying they’ve been dying for ages. Forever has come and gone and they’re still dying. With brutality, cruelty and callousness everywhere and cynicism and indifference everywhere else isn’t it time to admit we’re unredeemable and that a God (if there is a God) wouldn’t be worth worshipping if he could see us for what we are and still want anything to do with us?
So we lift our gaze for one more, a final, glance before turning away in despair and something catches our eye and our ear. In the middle of that wilderness of nations we see people gathered in living, joyful worship, alive with hope and proclaiming and singing in these days what people like Moses and Joshua and Caleb proclaimed in their day—gospel! The wilderness is real but so are these people! The wilderness is real but so is the God of these people. The wilderness is real but the very existence of these people in this wilderness proclaims that God is the Lord of wilderness. Any wilderness! National, international, cosmic or personal! The OT church in the wilderness and the NT church in the wilderness of the nations says things to the whole big round teeming world. 
Wilderness has a persuasive word to speak but it doesn’t have the last word.
 
The last word is spelled  J  E  S  U  S and he's Lord of Wilderness for he is IMMANUEL.

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