Have you ever wanted to get away from it all and spend time in an untrodden wilderness? The prospect of backpacking with a friend in the Holy Land, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, may seem tempting at first. But the allure is bound to wear off quickly as the reality of painful blisters and winter’s cold rains hits. Perhaps tropical holidays with sandy beaches and azure waters are our best bet after all.

And yet, in the Bible, it is the wilderness where all the action is. The Torah, God’s revelation, was given in the wilderness, on Mount Sinai. It is in the seeming barrenness of the wilderness, too, that Israelites receive divine nourishment in the form of manna and quails. Elijah encounters the still small voice in the isolation and silence of the wilderness. For Hagar and Ishmael, the dangers of wilderness become a site of divine deliverance. In the wilderness, Moses comes face to face with God in the burning bush, and his life is transformed forever. The wilderness may not be our preferred holiday destination, but it is God’s place of choice for encounter and revelation.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the ancient rabbis saw an intriguing connection between the Hebrew words for “wilderness”—m-d-b-r—and “speak”—d-b-r: “In the desert void the word is sounded; in the fullness of Canaan it is forgotten.”[1] The wilderness is a place of divine speech; the wilderness speaks, or hamidbar medaber in Hebrew. To be sure, God can speak anywhere and everywhere, from an arid desert to a lush rainforest. It is just that the stark and still wilderness has an uncanny ability to strip away the endless distractions and overbearing noises of life so that we can hear God afresh and experience his presence anew.

We often experience this at an individual level, when we find ourselves in a wilderness of sorts in our personal lives. Yes, the wilderness landscape is demanding, with blisters galore and frigid rains aplenty, but it is precisely amid such trials and tribulations, completely stripped of our usual safety blankets, that we can hear God’s voice clearly. Time spent in the wilderness can be a time of renewal and rejuvenation. It need not be a time of despair or dereliction.

What is true of us as individuals is also true of us collectively, as a Church. Today Christians must contend with what often seems to be an unrelenting narrative of decline and anxiety. But what if this challenging season in the life of the Church is not a time of decline and death, but a divinely appointed time in the wilderness—a time of renewal and refinement and a form of divine grace? It may be that we are called to rejoice and to listen attentively to God’s voice. Has he prepared a new path for us to take? As the prophet Hosea puts it, “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.” (Hosea 2:14; NIV). At Ridley, we are passionate about the renewal of the Church in Christ’s mission to our fractured world. What is God telling us today?

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Bibliography

[1] Harold Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 144.