IN THE WILDERNESS WITH GOD
Angus M. Gunn
"Thou wentest after me in the wilderness" Jeremiah 2:2
"I did know thee in the wilderness" Hosea 13:5
THE wilderness journey of the people of God only began after they had experienced three fundamental crises. These are Old Testament illustrations of three great New Testament experiences of being sheltered by the blood, led of the Spirit and delivered by the power of the cross.
For the Israelites the sprinkled blood was God's means by which the entire problem of sin was removed. It represented the sum total of the whole answer of God to the problem of guilt. The blood on the door was all that God had to see for full protection from wrath. It did not matter how they felt about it; they could not even see it, for they were shut inside the door at the time.
Secondly we read that immediately they were freed, they were led onward by the Holy Spirit, as symbolised by the cloud and the pillar of fire. The leading of the Spirit is not for some select few who have had a special experience; it is for all those who have entered into life by the redeeming blood. It is the birthright of every child of God to be led by the Holy Spirit from their first moments of pilgrimage.
Then there was the Red Sea. We read that there God said to them all: "Fear ye not, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen today, ye shall see them again no more for ever. The Lord shall fight for you, and you need only be still" (Exodus 14:13). The position was that even though they had been delivered from the guilt of sin, they were still in bondage to its power; they were afraid of Egypt, under Egypt's grip. It was the Red Sea which brought them deliverance from this bondage and from the world power over them. And look what they had to do to experience release from it all -- simply to accept divine deliverance. God did it all. In the same way, when Jesus Christ died on the cross, He delivered every committed Christian from all the sinful habits which could hold him down. He did not just promise something which might happen in the future: He did it then, when He died on the cross. When we accept what Christ has done for us on the cross, then we can know full deliverance from fear and from the power of sin.
So Israel came through these three fundamental crises, and then went right on with God knowing, as the first chapters of Exodus tell us, how the entire power of sin -- past, present and future -- are dealt with by God's redemption. [27/28] All that follows, in Exodus and the following books, represents their moving forward in the will of God. We read of their joyful and free expectation in the song which came with their deliverance in Exodus 15. They looked forward to being led on and right in to the land of promise: "Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them ..." (v.17). As a redeemed people they now had a sense of purpose, of destiny; they were going somewhere and they knew what it was all about.
The full realisation of redemption is dealt with in the same song which is to be found in the book of Revelation where the saints in glory sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb (15:1-5). Those who sing that song will no longer have to face the wilderness; it will all be past. In Exodus, though, the redeemed throng of singing Israelites found that as they moved on with God, they had to face the wilderness. And so do we. But we go into the wilderness with God.
We are not here dealing with the wandering life of those who are trying to live without God or who have strayed far from Him, but with that way of testing and learning which is the way of His will. In the Bible, "wilderness" is not the sort of bucolic, holiday notion that we associate with the word, but it is desert, a place without life, a place of barren emptiness and hardship. We find now that the Exodus image of the Christian life reminds us that wilderness experiences are absolutely essential for our spiritual growth. Wilderness experiences are inevitable for every Christian on his way forward to the promised land, for something is to be done there which can be done nowhere else.
At the end of their journey, the Israelites were informed that God had led them through the wilderness "to know what was in thine heart" (Deuteronomy 8:2). The truth was that there had to be a sorting out, and God made use of the wilderness for doing this most important work. The wilderness is essential for fullness. After all, the Lord Jesus Himself was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. We know too that Paul had a wilderness experience, and so did David and others. Perhaps the most notable of God's servants who were so tested was Moses, the man who was now at the head of God's ongoing people. He had deep and drastic trials in the wilderness to prepare him for his task. The wilderness is not a chance happening; it is an essential experience under the hand of God. It is His Winter, the time in which He causes His people to put down deeper roots in preparation for the Spring of spiritual growth and the fruitful Summer of fullness.
Not that Israel needed to spend all that time there. Most of what we read took place at the beginning and end of that journey, with the long middle period an unrecorded waste of time. After a little over a year at Sinai they were only eleven days journey from the land. In God's purpose the trial was meant to be much shorter; nevertheless it was absolutely necessary, as part of His will for them. The same applies to us. There is no other way through into the promised land.
This can be an enormously beneficial experience; it can be the very thing that makes you, as it certainly was for Caleb and Joshua (Numbers 32:12). The wonderful spirit found in these two men was born out of the wilderness. They were what they were not because of some special experience of blessing nor because of the support and fellowship of hundreds of others. No, they went through the wilderness with God, and so they learned to triumph. The purpose of the desert is to sift us and bring up to the surface hidden weaknesses. God has no use for 'phoneys'. He needs to deliver us from a world of pretence into a life where we are wholly committed to His will. What He does in us is infinitely more important than what He purposes to do for us in an outward way. It is clear in Israel's case that while He had brought them out of Egypt, He now had to get Egypt out of them. It was deeply rooted in their system as a result of long history. And there is a long history of this world's spirit and ways in you and me. In the wisdom of God He plans to prove His delivering power from it not just by meetings and seminars, but in the trial and testing of daily life.
It can be one of the great reassurances of God's care for us when we find how He engineers and overrules circumstances in our everyday lives which bring to the surface things which we never suspected were in us. So often this is done not by some special Bible message but by the situations in the home or on our job, the clashes which we have with those who are in close contact with us. The test then is as to whether we are going to accept God's verdict on the things which needed to be uncovered, or whether [28/29] we will try to dig in our heels and do what Stephen called "turning back to Egypt" in our hearts. If we are irked or if we are deprived, does this mean the outburst of old nature? Basically what it comes down to is the question as to whether we are in this thing for what we can get out of it; or are we there for the crown rights of Jesus Christ and His authority over our lives. It is in the wilderness that the Lord tests us by depriving us of the things that we prize, to show us what He already knew -- what was in our hearts of self interest. A friend who had been in a Japanese prison camp told me of how horrified she had been at the behaviour of some fellow prisoners who were keen Christians and yet acted so badly when the bread ran short. Things began to surface which she had never expected. So it is in one way or another with us all.
In the Scriptures we are given a frank exposition of the things which were disclosed by the wilderness. Items are pulled out of that story of Israel's history and highlighted in the New Testament also, in order that we might realise how true to life this all is. There is a passage in 2 Corinthians 10:1-13 which pulls these matters out into high relief so that we might realise that this is not just something in ancient history but that which applies to us today. We are told by Paul that there were those who had a genuine experience of deliverance and a taste of the Holy Spirit, yet whose lives in the end became a complete disaster. They never reached God's goal for them. In the wilderness testing they forsook God instead of moving closer to Him. Paul wrote concerning problems in Corinth, but under God he wrote for us all, reminding us of Old Testament illustrations of abiding possibilities. The five-fold warning here lifted directly from the story in the book of Exodus deals with:
