Out of Range
“He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of a wilderness; He encircled him, He cared for him, He guarded him as the pupil of His eye.” Deuteronomy 32:10 NASB
Desert – Life in the house of God is not what the world imagines. Heaven on earth has very little to do with streets of gold, comfortable couches, jeweled crowns and abundance. We have been sold a tempting but seducing bill of goods. We should have listened more carefully to Yeshua’s announcement, “The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” If Yeshua lived in the Kingdom of heaven while on earth, then how he experienced life with God should be a very clear picture of what we can expect. So ask yourself: “What kind of life did Yeshua enjoy?” That’s the Kingdom of Heaven! Whatever doesn’t fit the picture you just painted about Yeshua probably doesn’t belong in your view either. Heaven is not about possessions, comfort and ease. Heaven is about being in the presence of the Father and completely enjoying Who He is. If your view of heaven is attached to anything else, then you’re not on the pathway that Yeshua traveled.
All of this is clear when we examine one of those beautiful but hidden connections in Hebrew. The word for “desert” (midbar) comes from the word for “word” (dabar). Dabar is a word that draws attention to the act of speaking, not to the content of what is spoken. The expression, “the word of the Lord” focuses on who delivers the message. The Ten Words(what we call the Ten Commandments) do the same. Because it is God who speaks, all creation must listen.
But here is the most interesting fact. God’s act of speaking is intimately connected to the desert (dabar is connected to midbar). Did you ever consider that fact that God’s most important speech (the Ten Words) was delivered in the desert? If you want to hear God, you need to be in a place that is stripped of human sufficiency and self-reliance. God speaks in the waste places because in waste places human ears can finally be attuned to His voice. Heaven on earth is not found in opulent surroundings. You have a hard time hearing when life is comfortable, manageable, and routine. Heaven in the desert is found in stinky mangers, hostile wastelands, the edges of humanity and the places no one wants to be. Isn’t it amazing that our religious heritage makes us think we want to be in Heaven because it will be so easy, but the Bible suggests that being in Heaven will be strenuous work and constant vigilance?
Do you want to hear God? Maybe your version of heaven on earth is so full of self-sufficiency and self-fulfillment that you no longer live in the desert. You can’t hear Him because you have moved away from where He speaks. You’re out of range.
Topical Index: heaven, desert, midbar, word, dabar, Deuteronomy 31:10
I think you will have to turn off all the electronic devices that we use to entertain ourselves before you can hear God. The background noise from my mind is more difficult to deal with than I can manage, and I don’t need more distractions that interfere with my ability to hear God.
Don’t you find it interesting that we NEED the distraction of electronics–everywhere we go. Is there any place where there is true silence anymore?
The rabbis tell us that those Ten Words were spoken THROUGH the assembled multitude; each in his or her own native tongue. Their minds/wills joined the mind/will of YHVH. They thought/spoke like Him, that day. Perhaps they were given a taste of what it feels like to be a completed symbiont with God. At Pentecost – the AD equivalent (on the same day of the year, no less), again people heard that word, repeated by the disciples, in their own tongues. Again, they were invited to rejoin the larger commonwealth of alignment with their Creator.
If YHVH is an action, then He manifests as that action. When we perfect His image in us, His action – His speaking – reproduces itself as His will through us. Our will and His will have merged into a common action. The living stones are behaving (believing and doing) the same way as the words and actions of their Lord, the chief Cornerstone. The image of God, perfected (completed like an electrical current is completed, by obedience and the resulting glory returned, through praise and thanksgiving, to the God whose action it is) in us, is the action (which is obedience) of “every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”. This is the only source of life there is. The thought that life can be found anywhere else I think must be an illusion foisted on our minds by a symbiotic alignment with the mind of sin (death).
Life and love are both actions, after all. Life itself is action: is movement: change. Change is where a new choice is enacted. Choice, then, is the cusp of life. Life can only be in the places where we are free (from sin) again to choose. God’s will in us is God’s life in us. Life – action – IS literally the freedom of choice. Freedom – free will – then, is where we must stay with Paul when he declares “all things are lawful for me, but not all things are expedient”. All choices – to a free man, anyway – are then theoretically possible, but not all of them are going to actually work WITH reality – the whole of things. God’s will happens to be the choices that match up with reality: that work. Obedience is where we choose only those things (love) that work. The freedom salvation returns us to is the freedom to make real choices again that actually work in reality because we have aligned our will with the will of God, instead of just being the parrot/slave of sin, where we have lost that freedom of true choice as well as the freedom to even think our own thoughts.
Where can this life (from the will of God worked in us) be found? Beyond the edges of the death of our own contrariness: our own disobedience. Like the maggots I think sin has convinced us that we ‘are’, we churn out the slime of confirmation bias that makes us comfortable in those choices we thought were true choices, but were actually only choosing our choices away (which is all sin does). The ‘wilderness’ of reality crashing in on our maggot utopia is what dries up the slime and we are left staring at the brand new thought – in this very uncomfortable new place – that life may well actually have to be a yoke job with another Actor besides ourselves, because in reality, you cannot ‘go it’ alone: you have to go with somebody else, but, because the last symbiosis we had (with sin) isn’t working out so well, we need another spiritual reality to line up our wills with.
I think this is a brand new thought for the worshipers of the divinity of self: a thought not possible in the relative ‘comfort’ of our slime we made to ‘confirm’ that self autonomy: the thought that our thoughts/wills might be agreeing with something that does not actually work well in our lives. But isn’t this because we were not created to be maggots, hiding in the bushes of our fear of reality? Weren’t we really created and called to be symbionts with the Lion of Judah, who is the King of the ‘desert’ (which I think is actually reality – the way things really are – on this planet, anyway, right now), where life comes only from God? The desert (to us, anyway) is (because it is a place where our sin no longer enjoys the support systems necessary to prop it up) a place where the Lion’s power is in full force: where grace is unimpeded by the illusions of sin. I think that reality only appears to be a desert to maggots from a maggot’s point of view; from the King’s point of view, it looks like the freedom to move in all directions.
Let us rise from our beds of the sickness of enthrallment to sin – that parasite that paralyzes our will and enslaves us to the thought that we were maggots in the first place (yep, Michael Stanley, I have been thinking). Remember, freedom from sin only looks like a wilderness from a maggot’s point of view. The ‘wilderness’, where the ‘choices’ of maggots don’t work so well, is only a hard place for maggots who are not used to cooperating with heaven, which dominates and redeems problems instead of ‘adapting’ to them like maggots who have no choice. Hey; to lions, the ‘problems’ look like just another opportunity for love to work! May we return (through repentance for thinking we were maggots) to the point of view of the Lion of reality we have been invited to share the mind of, instead.
Thank you! I actually “got” some of that. Your graphic images were helpful. I did not understand Skip at all today. I appreciate both of you very much. Some of this is starting take shape in my thoughts and, hopefully, my actions.
As a little child, I don’t recall what material possessions meaning much other than they meet the need and later they were attached to the memory and later turned into something different. The moments we remember usually are wrapped in emotions that we have carried all these years and that have changed as we change our perspectives. Those things begin to take on a life of their own as we package our emotions into them they represent something very different than what they really were or are. Letting things go becomes hard as now those things we have poured ourselves into we have given them life. We have to pry ourselves away on many different levels. We find comfort in them, dreams in them, hope in them as we can set them before our eyes and see them and they prove themselves as we can touch them and feel them and even taste them they can even speak to us and we hear them and desire them and obey them. But just like the idols they have become, they are worthless and without meaning, if they are “all that there is”, as they are dead objects that have no life made by man and empty…they can and will burn in the fire and be consumed.
Not so with the Kingdom, our Father has given us life, created us and given all things pertaining to life and godliness. We can not see Him with our eyes and yet we see HIm everywhere. We cannot hear Him with our ears but with our spiritual ears we do, we hear from within speaking loud and clear and also soft and in whispers at times, and sometimes we just interpret the different languages in which He speaks in situations and circumstances and accumulated lessons as a whole. Through relationships and other peoples perspectives and interpretations of life and how they have lived it out.
Nothing in this life measures up to the Love of God and nothing can be compared to it, there is nothing like it. Earthly things and life reflect it but rarely does one encounter the burning white hot love reflected so clearly that it consumes the laws of this earth to manifest in jaw-dropping power. We are amazed and should be with the miracles of daily life and the little changes that only He can bring to our hard beings. Carving, molding, melting, forming making us into His image, in the heat of His Love He cuts and we barely feel a thing He is so skilled. Removing all the wood, hay, and stubble, the doss, refining us, making us.
In His arms of Love, in His presence is the fullness of Joy. Joy unspeakable and full of glory. The peace that passes all understanding as we don’t want to be anywhere else and don’t want to be pulled away with the gravity by the flesh and earth. Our minds are fixed on Him so we stay “there” focused on Him even though we aren’t in the full stream of the flow of direct eye to eye contact as in His lap, we are walking and talking and living our lives “in Him”. Nothing can separate us from the Love of God!!!!!!!!! Nothing. Rejoice forever more, nothing can! We can close ourselves into His Love and wrap His robe around us and stand on His feet as a child hiding under the coattails. We can walk where He walks there because we are standing on His feet that are prepared to take the weight as a good Father does. While in His presences we have presents like no other place and he gives us presents ( gifts ) in our present, in the NOW. He is so generous and kind He gives us what we really need and what we want (His Will) and it is done. We actually learn to appreciate every moment connected to the fountainhead of life in the flow of His lifestream of Love. We learn to keep current in the current of His presences and follow Him wherever He goes. We go from strength to strength and length to length of grasping and taking hold and holding on for dear life as He is our life and there isn’t life in any other.
Now that’s the life! That’s what I’m talkin about! How many times have you heard those phrases? Seriously, we can look to all the kingdoms as Yeshua being presented all the kingdoms of the earth with all the pleasures but nothing compared to the Father’s Love and presences, nothing. That temptation could not pull Him away from the truth, the Father’s Love is Better, and it’s the Best Life has to offer and nothing can outshine the brilliance of the eternal value, the source of all things, all that men have ever desired or wanted or could ever hope for are found in Him. I can see Him smiling and laughing encouraging us to come to let us get wrapped up in His robe of righteousness and coat of many colors clothed in favor and love. Sometimes it’s just a time to snuggle up and lay your head on His chest and listen to His heartbeat.
Sharon, I just love this! Share on!
So beautifully written.
Such rich words today. Thank you. I was sitting with the Lord before I read any thing this morning. Allowing every thought to be brought into obedience, at least that was the projection, so that I can hear Him speak. I cherish more and more these early morning hours when the world is still quiet and I have not fully awakened. I told God that I had a few questions. I,too, am in the process of what somebody earlier said was re-learning. Just had a friend of mine find out that she has metastasized breast cancer. Another friend has stage four lung cancer and is in chemo and radiation. So many thoughts and so many questions. Repeatedly bringing myself back to the feet of Jesus. Seeking to hear His voice. Not what somebody told me but what is he telling me? Not the painting of Jesus that somebody else painted but the one that is being painted in my life, through my eyes and through my heart. This walk with Jesus is very personal for all of us and I reflect upon the old song that says “and he walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own. And the joy we share ( he and I) as I tarry there, none other, has ever known !”.
I guess, in so many senses, I am learning about a new God. Not the one that was painted for me. This group is helping immensely in this process. Reflections of God in the writings.
“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!”.
This life has taken me from thinking I had
the world on a string to a place where I was
hanging onto a thread for dear life.
God was patiently waiting, as the wilderness
invited me in to full-time residency. Little did I know
that virtually everyone I knew was living there as well.
Amazingly, I eventually began to hear and see “new”
truths I never knew. Even more amazingly, I began to meet
new acquaintances who were hearing and seeing the same
thing! His Word was being revealed to each of us.
Light flooded in as we collectively shared and exchanged our
ever-expanding experiences that life was NOT in our own hands,
but in His! Skip, you are among them. And I just spent time with
your old college dorm buddy who continues to be my all-time
favorite pastor, and God’s favor to me as a true example of what
His life on earth is to be like. He sends his regards.
Many words surround me, both in the ordinary and in the unseen places of life (I may choose to hear any number of them with the devices most of us now commonly possess). But which will my soul attenuate that I might hear the words of life?
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, both joints and marrow, and able to judge the reflections and thoughts of the heart. (Hebrews 4.12)