Wilderness

The wilderness is not a fun place. Have you ever been in a barren land where there is nothing around? I used to have a job selling power lines and I would go out with our engineer and stake routes for the power lines. We would typically be doing this for oil and gas companies, but this one particular time we actually went to a uranium mine out in the middle of Wyoming. Talk about a wilderness, it was dry, hot and dusty. As we were pulling into a ghost town at the entrance of this mine, he pointed to a little shack of a building and informed me that it housed the only working phone for miles because there was no cell service. It was an interesting experience to say the least.

The wilderness is a metaphor for seasons and times in our lives where we are going through hard things. A wilderness can look different depending on the season that you are in and what God is working in you. The people of Israel were in a wilderness season for a long time (40 years!). Like that ghost town we were in, the communication from God in the wilderness can be limited. This scripture stuck out to me describing their wilderness experience.

"He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD." Deuteronomy 8:3

There are four things that we can learn about the wilderness from this scripture:

Caused you to hunger- God will lead us to places that we will hunger. We don't like being uncomfortable, the people of Israel didn't like it either. At every turn they complained about something that had them looking back at the bondage of Egypt with longing. We will have uncomfortable situations in life, does this mean that God is punishing us? Certainly not, they are an opportunity for us to seek the Lord and draw closer to him. They are the lean places that Paul described when he talked about learning how to be brought low and learning to abound.

Fed you with manna- He will always provide in the midst of the hard times. This is the key to who God is, he does not take us into trying times to torture us. He leads us through the wilderness to display his faithfulness. It may not be everything we want in the moment, but he always takes care of us. Think about how miraculous it was to have food show up on the ground like dew, day after day. It is through the wilderness that God has an opportunity to display his power in a greater way in our lives.

Teach you that man does not live on bread- The people of Israel were driven by their appetite, it was their appetite that caused them to long for the bondage of Egypt. The wilderness will expose our carnal appetites; those things that drive us to pursue the lusts of the eyes, lust of the flesh and the pride of life. These are the things that hold our hearts instead of God.

Every word that comes from the Lord- What the wilderness also reveals is that his word sustains our life. We have to go through the lean to gain a dependency on God that will not be lost in the midst of the fat. If we turn to the Word in the hard times it will develop a habit of reliance on him that will carry us through every season. This is really the building of our faith, when we don't see the reality of his promise in front of us but we choose to believe anyway. When we grab his Word instead of what our natural senses are screaming at us we will overcome.