What is the Purpose of Wilderness Experiences?
I grew up in the Mojave Desert of California. I know the dryness of a true desert which can be called a wilderness. I also know the natural beauty and surprises one can experience there. In scripture the people of Israel were delivered from slavery in Egypt (a type of the world’s system) to be led straight into the wilderness (or desert) once they miraculously crossed the Red Sea. They could have travelled for just a few days on into the land of Canaan, yet they remained in the wilderness for many years. What was the purpose of their time in the wilderness? What is the purpose for us when we find ourselves in a spiritual and emotional wilderness? How we respond to the wilderness will determine how long we stay there.
I find Exodus 13:17-18 interesting. It seems that Father God shared his thought process with Moses about this. Putting these two verses in my own words, God told Moses after the people left Egypt that he could take them quickly into the promised land by way of the land occupied by the Philistines. The Philistines were a people with strong military presence and skilled warriors. God said that although that land was near, in knowing the slavery mindset of the Israelites that if they encountered war with the Philistines, they would change their minds and return to Egypt to take up their lives of slavery again. I find it interesting as well that those times of feeling we’re in a wilderness that we tend to long for what has been left behind, with disregard as to how it had bound us.
In their wilderness wanderings, as in ours, God patiently teaches his people how to overcome our fleshly desires, our selfish desires. Just as Israel rejoiced at first finding themselves in the wilderness and no longer slaves, so do we at first rejoice with what we’ve left behind. Maybe that’s a job that we found stressful, or a friendship that seemed overbearing, or a situation that seemed to weary us constantly, for example. There’s relief in being removed from some of what we are walking through. In Exodus 15 we read about their rejoicing as they sang and danced before the Lord - really worshipping him for what he had done to protect, provide, and guide them into the wilderness and out of slavery. Yet they soon discovered that they no longer had masters who provided bread for them. They would have to find a way to provide it themselves. I well remember after graduating from Bible College years ago that my first response was rejoicing at being away from the weekly schedule. My second response was about how I was going to stay spiritually fed from the scriptures without my day-to-day teachers instructing me and revealing insights of truth. So, the wilderness begins to teach us how to go to the Lord ourselves for what we need rather than depending on others to do it for us.
The people of Israel often resorted to complaint and murmuring, casting blame on God or on their leaders when they felt in need of something - water, food (both bread and meat), wanting to do things their own way instead of God’s way, defining their own sense of morality over God’s definition of it, and resisting God’s training of how to overcome the enemies they encountered. All of these are types of the propensities of our fallen nature listed in Galatians 5:19-20. Just to name a few from the list found in those verses: sexual sins, idolatry (setting our primary affection on things other than God), sorcery (the word in the Greek means misusing medicines, i.e. drug use), hatred of others, contentions, jealousies, anger, selfish ambition, envy, divisions, and drunkenness (meaning excessive drinking). There are many more listed in scripture but these are enough to ponder. Do you and I get tripped up by these temptations of our humanness? Of course we do!
The wilderness seasons of our lives are times that the Lord brings us to so we can deal with our fleshly desires by surrendering them to him. He uses this time to teach us to overcome within ourselves the things that hinder us, by the power of his grace and love. It is a space of time in our lives where we must learn to run to the Lord first, remind ourselves continuously of what he has done for us in the past and will do for us in our present and future, and to sit at his feet as he instructs and trains us in how to confront others and ourselves lovingly. He will teach us to live by his rules, power, and authority, and how to look forward to his timing and method in leading us out of the wilderness right into the promised land - the appointed season when his promises over our lives connects us to the reality of living in those promises daily. The promised land is a type of stepping into God bringing fulfillment into our lives of what he has spoken to us.
To resist those wilderness seasons is only to prolong them. Be mindful that one generation of Israel died in the wilderness simply by always resisting the training of the Lord through clinging to their desires. We can be like the second generation that willingly followed the Lord’s ways and found themselves right in the land of fulfilled promises. It didn’t mean they never had to deal with their fleshly desires ever again, but that they had learned to trust God more often than not. This is what we need as well. Embrace the wilderness season that comes to your life as a time when the Lord wants one-on-one time with you. He will teach you to overcome those things that hinder you from having God’s promises fulfilled in your life and will teach you his ways more perfectly. Be blessed as you ponder on what you have learned in your own wilderness season(s) and how the next one may be a shorter timespan because of what you have learned about God’s pursuit of your heart and life. Trust him!