“But, like Israel, we struggle to understand why God would allow us to wander in a wilderness of lack. While we demand that He answer our prayers with what we want, His reply is to remind us who He is. Every page of Scripture tells us who He is and what He’s done. Wandering is a gift that helps us to remember this” Glenna Marshall, The Promise is His Presence
The wilderness can be a place where we feel lost, out of sorts, confused, or stuck between destinations. Like someone stumbling through a sandstorm and they can’t see beyond their hand, or like someone standing in the middle of a forest where you can’t see a way out , the wilderness can feel disorienting. It can feel like there’s no clear path to move forward. But one of the things that’s clear in every biblical wilderness story is that God has led or placed His people in the wilderness with good purposes in mind.
In the Bible, no one was in the wilderness by accident. God led them there (even though they didn’t know they were being led). God led Moses into the wilderness to meet him at the burning bush. God led Israel into the wilderness in Exodus. He led king David and the prophet Elijah into the wilderness to protect, provide, and prepare them. The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness in the gospels.
Don’t assume that finding yourself in a wilderness means you strayed, got yourself lost, or took a wrong turn. If God’s pattern in the Bible was leading His people into a wilderness so that there He could meet with, teach, train, prepare, provide for, and shape them, it’s unlikely that pattern will suddenly change for us. The wilderness doesn’t mean we’re lost or stuck forever, but that God has brought us here for His good purposes and plans. And now, here in this place where He has our attention, He can lead us toward those purposes and plans.
You’re lost, so you can be found, or so you can find Him. In the desert, God strips away all distractions so we finally will see His glory, goodness, and grace. He caused you to wander into the wilderness so you could worship your way out of the wilderness. God has led you into the desert so you would find an oasis in Him alone.
It’s important to interpret your trials in light of what God has said not interpret what God has said in light of your trials. We not only wrongly assume we stumbled into the desert rather than being led into it, but we can also wrongly believe our experiences in the wilderness must mean God is uninvolved or even against us. We make conclusions based on our experience. We interpret God and His actions based on what we think He’s doing or not doing.
Our judgment, sense of things, and interpretation of circumstances based on what we feel and experience is not an authoritative guide. Emotions and experience can be helpful. If you find yourself in the woods with an angry looking bear lumbering toward you, then that sense that his intentions are not good and you should get to safety are probably trustworthy. Your sense of judgment isn’t entirely useless, but it also isn’t entirely reliable. Which means when you begin to interpret or decipher God and circumstances in a way that seems different than how God’s Word understands or interprets things, that’s when you need to push your subjective “sense” to the side and trust the objective voice of Scripture.
What seems good to us isn’t always the same as what God knows is good for us. The problem is we create boxes to organize what we determine can and cannot be a good thing in our life. When we do this and take some of the things God intends for good and we restrict it into the box that says “not good,” we miss out on a whole lot of good and significant things God has in store for us. Or, when we interpret God and His actions based on our sense of things or what seems good to us, we can lose the real God as we create a god in our image. This god only values what we value or deems good what we deem good and will then only allow what we’ve labeled as “good”, exempting us from any of the trials and circumstances we put the “not good” label on.
We not only miss out then on what God wants to teach us but we miss out on rightly seeing and knowing who God is, which is best learned in the wilderness circumstances He purposefully leads us into. Glenna Marshall writes, “When we make the mistake of equating God’s inherent goodness with what seems good to us, we limit our belief in His ability to be good.” Be careful in permanently labeling events, circumstances, and trials as “good” or “bad” based on your judgment, and then be careful of seeing God’s goodness or unfairness based on your man-made categories
Even though the wilderness might feel disorienting, confusing, and even discouraging, you are not here by accident. God led you here.
We might experience the wilderness from our end as a mystifying, perplexing land where we don’t know what to do next, but our experience is not God’s experience. He’s not perplexed, confused, lost, or disoriented. He knows where He’s leading us and what’s in store for us. The challenges in the wilderness, even the sense of confusion, might not disprove His guiding hand but they might be the very obstacles God wants to take us too so He can also be the One who gets us through. We are here not because God has left us but because He wants to demonstrate His presence. What we see for Israel in their wilderness wanderings proves true in our own lives, that many of the experiences we understand the least and that are the most out of control are the very instruments God uses to grow our faith in Him.
Rather than assuming you’re lost, be on the lookout for how you’re being led. Rather than assuming the wilderness is pointless and aimless, and your one goal is getting out, ask why God has led you here and what He wants you to see, learn, or experience while He has you here.
But we also need to remember that God’s leading is not a GPS voice navigation. In Bible times and today, many of God’s providential workings remain unseen by human eyes. We are led without always knowing it. In the moment, we feel lost or think we’re walking down a path going nowhere, but then eventually, you round a corner and it makes sense why you went down this path or you look back. God’s leading isn’t always evident in the moment. It’s not until we’re out of the wilderness that we recognize how and why God led us through it. It’s not until we’re further on the path that we identify God had us on a path. It’s not until we’re far enough down the road that we can look back and distinguish how God graciously and wisely led us here.
While sometimes we need to be on the lookout for how God is leading us right now, other times we simply have to keep moving forward in faith, trusting that God’s unseen hand is not an absent hand. God is leading and it make take time for us to see it, and even when we see it, we might never fully understand it.
For more on the wilderness, see my book, Your Wilderness Is Not a Waste: God’s Purpose in Suffering and Struggles.
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