17th March 2024 

Wilderness Wonderings (4)

In our Lent reflections so far, we have thought about the wilderness as a place of preparation, a place of protection and as a place of pain. The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years while God turned them from a ragtag bunch of freed slaves into a people, a nation. As we read the accounts of their wilderness wanderings, in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, we know that this time was difficult. The Israelites grumble constantly - about the lack of food and water, the discomfort, the hardship they are enduring.

And yet, in that place of discomfort, hardship and lack, God provides for his people. For forty years, they experience, morning by morning, a tangible reminder of God's faithfulness, as they go out and gather the manna to feed themselves for the day. In his last words to the Israelites, which form the bulk of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses says:

"[God] humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna... The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years." (Deuteronomy 8:3-4)

Likewise, as Jesus fasts for forty days in the wilderness in preparation for his ministry on earth, we learn that "angels attended him" (Mark 1:13)

As we continue to reflect on the areas of our life which feel like wildernesses - areas of confusion, areas of pain, areas that seem spiritually arid - I wonder how God might be providing for us? I wonder who he might be sending into the wilderness to attend to us in our need?

One thing I've been noticing this Lent is just how much time many of the best known characters of the Bible spent wandering in the wilderness, either literally - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Elijah, John the Baptist, Jesus - or metaphorically - Paul and many of the early apostles. God does not call us to a comfortable, safe life because it is only when we leave the spaces where we can easily provide for ourselves that we learn to trust in his provision for us. As the apostle Paul says in his letter to the Philippians:

"I have learned to be content with whatever I have... the secret... of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me." (Philippians 4:11-13)