The Promised Wilderness

The preacher Sunday in a sermon about water presented the image of the Hebrew slaves of the Exodus marching through parted waters and stepping out on the other shore right into the Promised Land.

"As if!" I thought. Would that we could go straight there! If only we could fast forward through those forty years of contentions and murmurings, the golden calf stuff, the getting lost, and the quaking in our boots in the face of victory.

Then I thought, little do we realize that our journey through this sometimes strange wilderness of created being is actually the promised Kingdom of Heaven.

If we are troubled by "conflicts on the outside and fears on the inside" (2 Cor 7:5), we are in good company. If our failures and stumbles lead to "godly grief" that leads back to the Way, then this is where the Kingdom has come: right here, not somewhere greater or more glorious. Once we have been crucified with Christ, as Paul says elsewhere (Gal 2:20) we are already walking in newness of life. This is It, we are Here.

The People of God remembered their wilderness days, not only as hardship, but as a honeymoon time with the Lord. They ate manna. The Lord led them with cloud by day and fire by night. They realized, as we can too, that traveling through scrubby desert we are living in the Promise.