The Desert

It is one of the tenderest and strangest promises in all the prophets, and it comes in the middle of a book about betrayal. Israel had played the harlot, had gone after other lovers, had forgotten the God who fed her. And the answer of the wounded God is not what we expect. He does not say, therefore I will cast her off. He says, therefore, behold, I will allure her. He will woo her back. And the place he chooses for the wooing is the one place she would never have chosen for herself, the wilderness, the bare and waterless waste. He will bring her into the desert, and there, of all places, he will speak comfortably to her, which in the older tongue means he will speak to her heart.

We must let the shock of this land on us. The wilderness is not, in Scripture, a place of pleasant retreat. It is the place of hunger and thirst and danger, of scorpions and drought, of testing and stripping. And yet God calls it the place of courtship. He leads his beloved there not to punish her but to have her to himself, away from the lovers and the plenty and the noise that had drowned his voice. The desert is where he gets her alone. It is not the end of the romance but its renewal, the second honeymoon of a God who will not give up his bride.

WHY THE WILDERNESS

Consider why it must be the wilderness and not the garden. In the land of plenty the soul has a thousand things to lean on, and it leans on them, and so it never learns to lean on God. In the wilderness the props are gone. There is no harvest to trust in, no city to hide in, no lover to run to, nothing between the soul and its God but hunger and the bare sky. This is why God led Israel forty years through the waste, and Moses told them plainly why. To humble thee, he said, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, and to teach thee that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD. The wilderness is the school where that lesson, and only the wilderness, can teach it.

And there, stripped of everything else, Israel learned the taste of dependence, the manna that came new each morning and could not be hoarded, the water from the rock, the bread from heaven. Long after, when the nation had grown fat and forgetful in the land, God looked back on those desert years as the sweetest of the whole marriage. I remember thee, he said through Jeremiah, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. The barren years, when she had nothing but him, were the years he remembered as love. The desert had been their courting ground.

THE WILDERNESS WE AVOID

We do everything in our power to avoid the wilderness. We fill our lives with the plenty of Egypt, with abundance and distraction and every comfort that keeps us from ever having to be alone with God and our own need. And so, in mercy, God sometimes leads us into the waste against our will. He lets the harvest fail. He lets the well run dry. He allows the barren season, the loss, the stripping, the long stretch when the old consolations are gone and nothing green will grow. We call these times affliction, and they are hard, but we mistake them badly if we read them only as punishment. Often they are courtship. Often the God who could not get our attention in the plenty has led us into the desert precisely so that, with nothing left to shout over, he may at last speak to the heart.

So do not despise your wilderness, and do not rush to escape it. The instinct in a dry season is to claw our way back to the plenty as fast as we can, to refill the life with noise and comfort until the ache is smothered. But that is to flee the very place where God meant to meet you. The soul that will sit still in its desert, that will stop demanding to be led out and start listening for the voice that led it in, discovers that the waste is not empty. It is full of a Presence that the plenty had hidden. The wilderness is loud with silence, and in that silence the tender word comes.

THE VALLEY OF ACHOR

For the promise does not end in the desert. Hear what God says next. I will give her her vineyards from thence, he says, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope. The valley of Achor was a place of shame and judgment, the valley where Achan had been stoned for his sin, its very name meaning trouble. And God takes that valley of trouble and makes it a door of hope. This is his way. The place of your worst trouble, the barren valley you would give anything to leave, he means to turn into a door, an entrance, the very threshold through which hope comes in. What looks like the dead end is the doorway. The desert is not the grave of the soul but its gate.

The prophet promised it, and the wilderness itself will one day answer. I will even make a way in the wilderness, God says through Isaiah, and rivers in the desert. The waste places are not beyond his reach. He who led you in can carve a road out, and can bring water where there was only thirst, in his own time and not before it is finished in you. But the road out runs through the desert, not around it, and the water is given to the thirsty, not to those who fled before they ever grew thirsty enough to cry for it.

GOING WILLINGLY

There is a wisdom, then, in not waiting to be dragged. The soul that understands what the wilderness is for will go into it willingly, will choose the stripped hour and the bare cell and the fast that empties the hands, will make small deserts in an easy life so that the heart does not forget how to hunger for God. This is much of what the solitary life has always been, a voluntary wilderness, a deliberate going out from the plenty to be alone with the Bridegroom, so that he need not send drought to get us there. Better to walk into the desert on our own feet, drawn by love, than to be carried there by loss.

BREAD FOR THE BARREN

The wilderness teaches a lesson the plenty never could, the lesson of daily bread. In the desert Israel could not store the manna; what they hoarded bred worms and stank. Each morning they gathered only that day’s portion and learned to depend on a God who feeds his people one day at a time. The barren season strips our storehouses and teaches the same. We who liked to secure years ahead are reduced to asking, and receiving, our bread for this day only, and in the asking we are brought close to the Giver we had forgotten while the barns were full. Dependence is bitter to the proud and sweet to the poor, and the wilderness makes us poor enough to taste it.

And the desert bread points past itself to a greater. When the Lord was himself led into the wilderness and hungered, he answered the tempter with the desert’s own lesson, that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. And afterward he called himself the bread of life, the true manna come down from heaven, of which the wilderness bread had been only a shadow. The barren place, which seems to hold no food at all, is the very place where the soul learns to feed on him, having nothing else to eat. The hunger that the desert opens in us is not cruelty. It is the emptying that makes room for the only bread that lasts.

So do not measure the wilderness by its emptiness of the things you were used to. It is empty of them on purpose, that your hands, cleared of the old provisions, may be filled with the bread that endures. The soul that will receive its portion daily from God’s hand in the desert is fed more truly than it ever was at the full tables it now misses, and learns in the barren place a dependence it will never wish to unlearn.

HE IS IN IT WITH YOU

Nor are you alone in the waste, though it is the loneliest-feeling of places. When God led Israel through the wilderness he went before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and never once left them to find the way themselves. Moses could say to that generation that the LORD thy God knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness; not merely that he permitted it, but that he knew it, watched it, walked it with them, and counted every step. The desert is not outside his sight. It is a road he himself is leading you down, and he does not lead it from far off.

Remember, too, that a cast-out woman once fled into the wilderness in despair, alone and with a dying son, and it was there, in the waste, that the God who is so easy to forget in the plenty found her and spoke to her, and she gave him a name out of her desert, Thou God seest me. And remember that when the Lord had finished his own forty days in the wilderness, hungry and assailed, the angels came and ministered unto him. God does not abandon his own in the desert. He meets them there. The very solitude that frightens us is the place where he draws near, and the ones who have been led furthest into the waste have often been given the clearest sight of his face.

And whether you came willingly or were led in weeping, the counsel is the same. Do not fill the silence. Do not flee the thirst. Sit in the waste with your God and wait for the voice that speaks not to the crowd but to the heart, the voice that was drowned by the plenty and can be heard at last in the bare and quiet place. He allured you here. He did not bring you into the wilderness to abandon you in it, but to have you to himself, and to say to you, alone, the tender thing he could never get you to hear over the noise of the world. Behold, he says, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.