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.
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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