Where Are You?
Then the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying, Numbers 1:1 NASB
In the wilderness– ye’dibber’ YHVH el moshe bemidbar. Where did this conversation occur? Bemidbar—in the wilderness. That setting helps us realize something crucial about the journey of the Israelites from Egypt. First, it provides an intimate connection between the “mouth” and the “wilderness.” In Hebrew, these two words are spelled precisely the same way. They are both connected to the root debar, “to speak, declare, converse, command, promise, warn, threaten, sing.” Just about anything vocal is dābar. And something more. Midbar is the wasteland, the place where no human being can survive on his own. Midbar is the place where man discovers he cannot live without the word of the Lord, without dābar in the midbar. But it takes an enormous pressure for men to realize this. God pushes His people to the point of physical and emotional collapse before some of them, not all, recognize they cannot survive, let alone thrive, without His word. But simply hearing the voice of the Lord doesn’t seem to be sufficient. All the people heard God’s voice at Sinai. That didn’t prevent them from disobeying. They were still Egyptian in their worldview, with all the consequent fears and regrets of Egyptians. The downfall of the people in his wilderness was not being deaf to God’s words. The downfall was not trusting what He said. What happens to the people as a whole in the midbar is the infectious disease of distrust. And it spreads to everyone.
“The posture of not trusting, ironically, seems to affect Moses also. In the end, God will accuse him of ‘having no faith in Me, to sanctify Me before the eyes of the Israelites’ (Num. 20:12). An epidemic of skepticism has apparently not spared Moses himself, whom God, at an earlier moment, had praised as uniquely ne’eman—‘faithful in all My household’ (12:7).”[1]
Examining this transition is critically important for us, especially for those of us who no longer hear the voice of the Lord. We survive. We plod from day to day, swallowed up in routines and trivial demands. But inside we wander the wilderness, waiting for a sound from the divine. That sound will never come. Why? Because we have already heard it in the past and now ignore its demand. We want a different word, a new word, a word that doesn’t require so much from us. Or we wait while the howling waste consumes our inner strength. We have succumbed to the epidemic of distrust. There is no cure. There is only return—return to that first word we heard so long ago when we knew what He said and were willing to do it. The only way forward is to go back. The Lord spoke (past tense) into the midbar of our existence. Now we must remember His words—and do them.
Topical Index: midbar, dābar, wilderness, speak, Numbers 1:1
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections of the Book of Numbers, p. xiii.
In my understanding (veiled disclaimer) YHWH resides in the NOW, not in the past, nor the future. Perhaps Moses failure was in attempting to bring Yah into a realm He could not abide. If so, shall we not face a similar fate if we try to go Back To The Future or Forward Through The Past? No offense Skip, but your call to return sounds too clarion, too simplistic and too Christian.
Michael, God seems to say just that (to return)—through the prophet Zechariah (1:3-6); and I believe that word goes forth elsewhere in the Tanakh as well. I’m not sure I’m tracking with your comment.
Oh wow.
Now to reexamine the words spoken long ago, to remember His voice, and to return. He has spoken clearly to me of His love. And He’s shown me clearly that He can provide. This time I must remember, and I must believe, letting go of my propensity to want to control and my questioning of who He is. Maybe instead of demanding more proof, I need to go back and remember and allow that to be enough to believe.
The return for Moses, to the wilderness of Sinai, was the location where God first spoke to him, revealing Himself as well as Moses’ purpose. Now he was instructed to census and set apart the tribe of Levi from the warriors. Set a banner over the tribes under which they would be identified. Here God speaks from within the tent of meeting, the Tabernacle, to Moses. And they, the children of Israel, were obedient in all they were instructed. And Moses, he was so unsure of speaking for God at the first, seems here to be obedient in carrying out his instructions. Assigning duties, I enjoy this part of Numbers for seeing how God organizes.
Why do we distrust God? Is it because He did not tell us true, or is it because all of us hear it, at least initially, through the distortions of paradigms shaped by false beliefs and poor choices?
I think the wilderness – the refining “furnace of affliction” is where we get to examine those distortions: where we, like Israel at Carmel, must depend on the gods of our choice for survival. I think the wilderness only seems barren and horrifying to the extent that those gods – our expectations based on misplaced trust built on wrong beliefs – fail us.
Hard times should be where we take a long hard look at our underlying assumptions, beliefs, habits. Hard times are where deeply hidden “trust issues” rise to the surface where they can be more easily seen. Ask “what am I investing trust in in this place?” and look hard at the answer. The prophets of Baal cut themselves and did other self-harming rituals to appease their god. They repeated actions that did not get results over and over, expecting different results that matched their paradigm. Been there, done that. I had to catch myself in the act, though, before I could see the hidden gods of my misplaced trust. Action reveals where the heart is.
I think we can act in crazy, unsustainable ways as long as we are cradled in support systems that allow us to carry the balance of our choices into the future, or even put the payment off onto others. The wilderness is not where God fails us: I believe it is where He allows the failure of all that is not Him.
There are plenty of springs in the wilderness and manna is promised, too. The shoes don’t wear out and there is God, leading and protecting with a miraculous cloud, but as long as we continue to dance around the altars of failed systems and beliefs, we continue to starve – not because God is not there, but because we are refusing to face the facts; the weight of those curses, put there to make it easier for us to see our misplaced trust and repent. When I turned around, I could see that God had been there all along: it was me who was facing (worship/fearing) the wrong direction.
I think our “trust issues” simply show us where we have been following the wrong shepherd. Look hard at your fears: they contain the clues of your slavery. Who builds the wilderness? I think we do, with wrong choices based on false beliefs. I think we can wander for years because our faces/expectations/heart are still turned back toward Egypt. I now believe it is grace when God steps out of the way and allows us, through the weight of the results of those beliefs and choices, to have the opportunity to re-examine both. We feel we are on trial, but really, Baal (the real engineer of the wilderness of disaster) is the one who is supposed to be in the hot seat – if we would just quit covering for him and trying to light his fire for him, that is. May we ditch him today!
After all, Canaan is never more than a few days’ journey away. The curses may come slow, but the promise of Deut. 28 assures us that the blessings come fast – once we turn around and start heading in the right direction, that is.
Love this laurita
Where am I? Long-term I trust without hesitation. Short-term, I struggle to stay in the present. I worry about making decisions about things I don’t have an answer for and so I struggle. Will YHVH really take care of me? These last few weeks of exploring our fear and trust issues has been helpful for me in moving forward with life as we know it for now.
Mother Teresa had a deep crisis of faith in God for the last 40 years of her life.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1561247/Mother-Teresas-40-year-faith-crisis.html
I think it’s part of maturing in Yehovah.
The older we get, the more He whispers.
How quickly we forget.
We were given His great gift of faith, but our
fearful humanity has a tendency to turn its trust
back to one’s self. Paul spoke of his frustration
and his realization of what he was NOT capable of
doing to bust out of self-trust. “What a wretched man
I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
When our self-trust has a legitimate funeral, the door
to Him re-opens . . . where He awaits.
Then, and only then, does true trust return.
A friend sent me a recording of Paul Harvey from the sixties entitled, “freedom to chains” and As I was listening to his, very articulate, very accurate, portrayal of where our nation was heading, it struck me that the difference between him knowing these things and me knowing these things is a matter of experiential difference. It’s easy to stand removed from a situation and analyze it accurately and yet it’s not the same as standing next to the mud pit, watching it go down. I was reminded of this video in relation to what’s spoken of Moses here in this passage, it’s not that the solution isn’t simple, it’s just not easy. Another example could be Noah, as the days he lived in were also defined by the fact that the popular sport was extreme mudpitting, and just like us, the people they were addressing were not a far removed generation from them but rather, brothers, sisters, cuzzins’, etc. the people that they lived life with and shared life with. And that’s the difficulty, there’s the emotions of connectedness involved. It’s not just pessimism and unbelief that’s being slung from the mudpit, but frustration and antagonism as well that gets thrown in our direction. I can’t imagine the frustration that must have tempted our Lord, yet He gave us the way through. More important than ever are our daily baths through prayer and study, never minding if we feel like it or not, or for that matter, if we feel like we’re being effective in our world. He is. So many admonitions come to mind, but most strongly, “snatching some from the fire….hating even the clothing stained by the flesh.” (but not the people) and something about whoever keeps His commandments, love is being perfected in them. Extreme mudslinging has again become quite popular,again, but, I’ll say this. If the days are short and the nights are terribly long, a new beginning (spring) is right around the corner.
YHWH bless you and keep you……