Praise the
Lord for His unfailing love and His amazing grace. He blessed us with a super
summer like weekend. It is like mid-summer every where yo go., but with the
beautiful exception that the autumn colors are getting exotic and
spectacular. The Lord blessed us with joyful Sunday. Alice and I walked for
miles by the banks of one of the rivers nearby that runs alongside one of the
beautiful parks of our city.
It was
great to be in the House of the Lord yesterday with His people joining His
church around the corner and around the globe. I preached from Exodus 16.
Back a chapter in Exodus, we see the people of Israel singing and dancing by the
shores of the Red Sea. They then enjoy a mini-stretch of Paradise in a pretty
place called Elim, surrounded by 12 springs and 70 Palm trees. But the march
toward redemption could not stop there. A trek through the wilderness had to
come first and no sooner did this journey begin than we find in Exodus 16 a
near-reverse portrait of the celebration and joy of the previous chapter.
Sounds of timbrel, singing, and dancing have been replaced with sounds of
muttering, grumbling, murmuring, and complaining. Suddenly Egypt loomed on the
horizon of their imaginations and transformed itself into a kind of deluxe
resort. The hunger in their bellies tricked their minds into remembering
nothing about Egypt except bountiful meat dishes and all other side
dishes. They complained to
Moses, who told the people that really they are complaining directly to Lord
God himself. Then the Lord God, who is mighty and merciful, heard the people
but curiously enough did not speak a harsh word here. In fact, at this early
stage in Israel's desert wanderings, God did not seem to blame the people for
being hungry for some good food.
God knew
that the wilderness was a place of death. In the Bible the wilderness usually
gets described through the very same Hebrew phrase used to describe the
pre-creation chaos in Genesis 1:1. In Genesis, God moved in to the midst of
chaos to create cosmos but then sin came and chaos made a comeback. Some of
the good creation barriers that God set into place to protect and nurture human
life eroded. Nowhere in the Old Testament (or the New Testament) can this
return of chaos be more clearly seen than in the desert wastes. The wilderness
was the place where the devil ran wild, where demons howled, and where human
life was threatened from every quarter.
The
wilderness was a place of death, but it was also the path the Israelites needed
to take, toward life in the Promised Land. According to one commentator, "in
the heat of the desert there would be many occasions when the very hope of the
Promised Land would shimmer like no more than a desert mirage even as the
people's faith would erode like the shifting sands while their dreams tattered
along with their tents in the scorching desert winds."
The people
of the Lord, loved and blessed by the Lord, begin to grumble and complain
just as all of us do. It is as if it is in our DNA. This was not what they
signed on for, and what they were enduring certainly did not resemble a land of
promise. They needed to know if it was possible that God was with them in this
dreadful place, and on this occasion God seemed only-too-happy to comply by
showering the people with provisions.
In the
the midst of it all, in Exodus 16:10 we encounter what may well be one of the
most startling and vivid verses in the whole Bible, one that should be written
in large letters upon each one of our hearts. Because the people of Israel were
hurting and hungry they were, no doubt, afraid. Their suffering was getting bad
enough that many turned back toward the west, back toward Egypt, back toward
what had been, for better or worse, their home.
It is
thrilling to read verse 10. The Lord God himself gently took the people by the
shoulders and turned them around, away from the west, away from Egypt, and
eastward toward the harsh and terrible wilderness. But what did the people see
when they looked toward this place of death? They saw "the glory of the Lord!"
WOW!
They
looked into the hard times of life and that is where they saw God!
They were not to look for God back in Egypt. Yet, when peering toward the place
of death, they saw glory. They would see this glory in the wilderness new every
morning through the manna. God would feed his people bread from heaven even
though they themselves were not in heaven but in a kind of living hell on
earth. For some reason the wilderness would be the cradle in which God would
nourish and nurture his people toward a deeper faith in the
Lord.
God showed
his glory in the wilderness to foster dependence and trust. In the hard times
of life, all our normal supports get knocked out from underneath us. If the
people were going to go on, it would be only and ever because the Lord was with
them. That's why they couldn't stockpile the manna. if our retirement
portfolio is fat and rich and full and in fine fiscal shape, how much time do we
devote to praying about such a thing? It is fascinating and faith-building to
read that in In the
wilderness God showed his glory to Israel morning by morning so that there would
ideally never be a day when anyone had cause to doubt why he or she was alive.
We tend to think of the manna as only a gift, but God sees it mostly as also a
test. Will they, can they, rely on God?
Nobody
wants to suffer. I do not like suffering. All things being equal, the Lord
God did not create us to suffer, either. God did not launch Adam and Eve into
Eden with the promise of hunger and want, but in the post-Eden world, sickness,
want, hunger, loss, and death are realities. That is not good news but there is
some good news, some comfort to be found in the thought that those things do not
force God to abandon anyone.
None of us
purposely moves out into the wilderness, but sometimes we get cast out into it
anyway and the question then becomes, "Now what? Sometimes it is easy to get
trapped in pain and so hurtle ourselves into a lifelong deep bitterness. It is
also very feasible that by trusting the Lord in and through understandable
laments and weeping to look for the glory of the Lord, that it may just be
revealed to us even here, in this hellish place of death and sorrow.
This is a
hard world of war, rumors of war, terror and violence. It has recently become a
world of killings and beheadings, brutality and barbarism. There are no pat
answers, no easy solutions, no quick escape routes out of the desert wastes
where we sometimes find ourselves.
Jesus has
been to the wilderness. He was there for 40 days and for 40 nights. He
defeated the enemy there. When we end up in our wilderness Jesus meets us there
in that terrible place. It is still a disorienting place. The demons still
howl into our ears there and we may well discover all kinds of reasons to
question our faith, wish for a change, or just generally to turn back westward,
back toward "Egypt," whatever "Egypt" may be for us.
It is then
that the Spirit of Jesus turns us eastward, toward the suffering, and may in the
end somehow and against all odds reveal to us the glory of the Lord. We don't
need to deny the reality of hurts in life. We don't need to let suffering have
the last word on everything, either. But if by the grace of God we can discover
the love of Jesus made the more vivid to us even in the wilderness, then we may
yet find a reason to give glory to God as he leads us along to that better
country.
In
Christ,
Brown
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