Who Is Stirring the Sand?
“Thus says the LORD, ‘The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness.’” Jeremiah 31:2 NASB
Grace– At the edge of the Sahara, the sand moves as if it were alive. It writhes, glittering scales of shifting silicon. The serpent of the desert is there, slithering its way across the dunes, powered by the invisible interplay of heat and cold. At the edge of the Sahara, one look convinces you that this is no place to hunt for treasure.
The wilderness is the place of demons—and the place of the divine. By entering the desert, we volunteer to be stripped of our pretensions of self-sufficiency. We determine to throw ourselves on the God who provides. But what we discover is not what we expected. Grace (hen) is unmerited favor. It is also acceptance, even preference by someone much more powerful than men. If I am going to live in the wilderness, I must find hen. I cannot journey here without encountering surprising benevolence. I am at the end of my abilities and myself. I cannot hold back the serpent in the shifting sand. But God can.
Genesis 6:8 is the paradigm example of grace. God has been in the grace business a very long time. Even in a wilderness of water, grace arrived. Grace is not just the partner of desperation. It is the offspring of faithfulness. It is the child of God’s character. Grace comes to me because God knows my need.
As you wander in the wilderness, turn your sight not toward the serpent in the sand but toward the God who rules over the dunes. It is not the sand that is the enemy here. The enemy is our refusal to see the finger of God touching the earth in the waste places. When your life is filled with shifting sand, God’s finger is touching those dunes. The sand is only the means by which He brings His favor. Are you looking for that surprising benevolence today or do you have sand in your eyes?
Topical Index: wilderness, desert, grace, Jeremiah 31:2
I believe that the wilderness functions as God’s power lesson for dummies. In Acts 17:28, Paul asserts that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being”. The illusion that what we must have to live, from daily bread to grace to the roof over our heads to the breath in our bodies is something that we ‘need’ to ‘find’ (or qualify for) I think is the chief illusion the world runs on. We labor to set up medical and financial and social and religious institutions and devise “doctrines and commandments of men” and politics: we compete in the market and consent to be shoved around by our superiors, thinking that if we don’t do all these things, we won’t be able to live.
On the other hand, I think we can carelessly pass by, so many times, what the liberal hand of God has put in front of us for our life: nature, with it’s sunlight and air and life that we are supposed to be interacting with: other people whom we are supposed to care about and reach out to help, thus releasing God’s love in our own lives. I think we pass by these opportunities for real life because so often we do not recognize where our true power to live comes from. We spend whole days without taking even one deep breath in the thought that God holds us in His care, and wonder why our brains are out of oxygen and our mitochondria have no energy: our breathing never comes out of the shallow, panicky gasps of fight or flight mode stemming from the thought that it is “all up to us”. We eat for addiction or comfort or careless convenience, disregarding the true laws of nutrition or the real provision from nature. We abuse the incredible Maserati machine we came loaded into until it runs out of its vital life force, and then we complain about feeling stressed. We strive for the opinions of others and then wonder why we feel shoved around by them.
And we will probably try to continue to do all this unless or until we can’t: until the wheels fall off the car of the illusion that life comes from somewhere other than the direct command of God: until we find ourselves deep in sand surrounded by snakes in the middle of disfunction. “Oh”, we say; “why isn’t life the way it’s SUPPOSED TO BE?” The question reveals the paradigm.
I think the wilderness is designed to teach us the correct way to phrase the question. Instead of the catch-22 one above (which is both highly accusatory and exclusive of God, by the way), we need to learn to ask new questions: based not on paradigms that exclude God’s providence from the outset, but on the paradigm where we recognize that life simply is not possible anyway without that providence; further, that His providence comes with the condition of obedience. In the wilderness is where we learn that rebellion is futile and illusion is insane. Then we can start in the only starting place that will get us to the finish line – which is obedience – because we realize that, truly, there is no other way for us to “live and move and have our being”. In the wilderness is where we find out why that is true. Let us look hard for that truth in our wildernesses today and set our hearts to obey “every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (including the words that set and continue to run the laws of nature – including the natural laws our own bodies and minds and spirits run on, too) as if our lives depended upon them. Because they actually do.
Depending on God, rather than on the strength
of yourself and the ways of the world, is the
linchpin to a true living relationship with Him.
This can’t be faked and there are no short cuts.
Godly dependence is centered in our spirits,
not in our flesh. It’s where faith lives.
It’s given to man (by God) to push through and past
the sand that fetters the eyes. “But everyone who hears
these words of mine and does not put them into practice
is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.” Matt 7:26