48 Valuing the Purpose of the Wilderness

Copyright © Michael A. Brown 2023

‘Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.’ (Hosea 2:14)

      After he was filled with the Holy Spirit, we are told that the Lord Jesus was led into the wilderness where he fasted and prayed for forty days.  In this place, he was not busy, he was not distracted, and his Father had his undivided attention.  It was during this significant period of isolation that Jesus overcame the power of Satan’s temptations, and afterwards he emerged in the power of the Spirit to minister effectively to many people.  This period of isolation in the wilderness was essential preparation for what came later.

      After he was converted on the Damascus Road and later filled with the Holy Spirit, Saul/Paul tells us that he went to spend some time hidden away by himself in Arabia (Gal. 1:17).  There was no ministry or fruit through his life during this period.  God’s purpose was to speak to him and to reveal understanding of the gospel to him.  His religious stubbornness and pride were broken, and later on he ministered fruitfully in Antioch and then as God’s chosen apostle to the Gentiles.

      Consequent to killing an Egyptian foreman for beating a Hebrew slave, Moses was obliged to flee from Egypt and sought safety and shelter in the wilderness of Sinai.  It would seem to him that any further hope of seeing the Hebrew slaves emancipated was lost.  God kept Moses in this wilderness for forty long years.  Having been brought up in the royal palaces, with an education and early preparation in life and leadership to match, this long period in the wilderness would have humbled and broken Moses, and it emptied him of his human pride and arrogance.

      However, it was here that God took Moses through experiences and taught him necessary skills without which he could never have led the Hebrew community through this very same wilderness, after they left Egypt much later on.  He got married and brought up a family of his own in humbling, difficult and challenging circumstances, and he learnt how to be a shepherd, an essential skill it would seem in leading God’s people.  When God did eventually call him to return to Egypt as the deliverer, he had been so emptied of pride and carnal self-confidence that he told God to use someone else instead, thinking that he could not do it, and the narrative even describes him as the humblest man on the face of the earth!

      During his first thirteen years in Egypt, Joseph must sometimes have felt that there was no meaning to his life, and that he was nothing more than a hopeless and wounded victim of the various injustices he had suffered along the way.  Any hope that the dreams he had seen when he was seventeen would ever be fulfilled would seem to have been completely lost, dead and buried somewhere deep in the Egyptian sands.  However, a close reading of his life during this period shows how God was strategically positioning him at every stage, giving him opportunities to practise and develop the management skills that would prove so necessary when he did eventually become Pharaoh’s right-hand man.

      God knows our heart, and he also knows the purpose for which he intends to use us.  He knows that if he is to accomplish his purpose through us, then he must take us into the wilderness first, in order to form us and prepare us for what is ahead.  The wilderness, whether real or figurative, is just as important to the working out of God’s purpose as any other part of our journey.  There are things that God can do in our life only in the wilderness and in no other place.  It is in the wilderness that he changes us and removes things that hinder us.  He forces us to draw deeply on his grace.

      However, the wilderness is only a season in our life.  When God has accomplished what he needs to do in our life in the wilderness, he will bring us out.  He has given us a purpose to fulfil in his kingdom that can only be fulfilled after we have spent adequate time being prepared in the wilderness.

      So do not be afraid of the wilderness.  It is here that you hear God’s voice like never before.  It is here that you have the idols of your life removed.  It is here that you begin to experience the reality of a living God like never before.  Someone once said, “God uses enlarged trials to produce enlarged saints so he can put them in enlarged places!”

‘He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.’ (2 Sam. 22:20)