Today’s Lenten reflection was written by Revd Ben Coulter, an Associate Tutor within the Licensed Ministry Training programme.
It is a striking part of the story of Israel that the barrenness of the wilderness is embraced by God as the place for his holy work.
Following their gracious deliverance from the hand of Pharaoh, God’s people Israel found themselves wandering through a wilderness. Between salvation from their slavery in Egypt, and entering the abundance of the promised land, was this dry, deserted, and dangerous place. And it was this place that God chose to form a people for himself.
But why here? Why didn’t God lead them straight to the promised land? Why couldn’t Israel enjoy the fruits of their deliverance as soon as possible? Hadn’t they suffered enough already?
Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy 8 provides an important, if uncomfortable, answer:
“Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you…“
‘Precisely!’ we might cry before we read on. ‘Haven’t they already been humbled enough in their slavery? Did they really need to be humbled again by their own God?’
Well, what we learn as we continue to hear this passage is that this wasn’t a humbling for humbling’s sake. God was certainly not another Pharaoh seeking to crush his own people. This humbling was for the sake of learning. It was a humbling for the sake of maturing—a humbling unto life, not unto death. This was the place for God’s sanctifying work.
For the wilderness provided the place for Israel to come to learn about themselves: ‘Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness…testing you to see what was in your heart…’ The wilderness was the place where what was in their hearts came to the surface—for as God certainly knew, it was one thing to get Israel out of Egypt, quite another to get Egypt out of Israel. The stark and barren land exposed all that was in them—including their underlying love for the Egypt in which they had been enslaved.
But this humbling place of the wilderness was also the place where Israel were coming to know the LORD as their God, and were being taught to live by faith in him as their Deliverer: ‘He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna…in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.’ As painful as the process was, they were coming to know God their Saviour as the One upon whom they could rely for everything.
I wonder what all this has to teach us as the Church today. Are we willing to embrace the barrenness, the unfamiliarity, and the humbling of times of wilderness as God does? Are we willing to trust that God is doing a holy work in us, not in spite of, but precisely through all that the wilderness brings?
