day three- getting through the wilderness

During the forty days of Lent from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday (forty days not counting Sundays), Jayme Thompson and I will post daily devotionals on this blog to help guide you through the season. Lent is an ancient tradition in the church intended to be a time of focusing on the cross. To help us in this pursuit, we are studying the book of Hebrews in a series called, "Journey of Hope". It is appropriate that we use this book during our fast, as the theme of Hebrews is "Fix your eyes on Jesus.

Getting through the Wilderness

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, 2where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. (Luke 4:1)

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)

As the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years, Jesus wandered in the wilderness for forty days. As they suffered of thirst and hunger and a temptation to turn back to Egypt, so too was Jesus tempted and tried by the enemy.

We tend to think of wilderness as rugged forest, untamed land. But in this case it was a desert dry, thirsty land. The wilderness symbolizes both a place where we cannot find satisfaction for our thirst, and a place where God seems absent. The Israelites could not understand why God had led them into a dry barren land and then seemingly left them there to die.

We all know the wilderness, don't we? Perhaps you are in one right now. It is difficult to have faith when it seems that God does not hear you.

Today, remember that you have a God who knows the wilderness first hand. He has been there. He doesn't just know about your thirst and your sense of abandonment and rejection and depression. He KNOWS your thirst. He KNOWS the wilderness. We do not have a high priest who doesn't understand. He has been in the desert. He has been through the temptation. He even knows what it is like to feel abandoned by God! He said "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" (Mark 15:34)

At the end of their time in the desert wilderness, the first Joshua led the Israelites over the Jordan River and into the promised land. At the end of His wandering, the second Joshua (Jesus) was baptized in the Jordan and thus established the beginning of a new age, when all of Abraham's seed could come into the land of promise.

At His baptism, a dove hovered over the water as the Holy Spirit had hovered over the depths at the creation event, thus symbolizing a new creation in Christ.

Jesus went through the desert so that you could come to the river. He went all the way to the cross and took the holocaust in so that you could live with Him in eternity. He took on hell so that you could take on the heavenlies.

Read carefully this quote from John R.W. Stott from his book "The Cross of Christ":

We are not to envisage God on a deck chair, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered Himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today... He cries when we cry....

I myself could never believe in God were it not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the Cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?

I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world.

But each time, after a while I have had to turn away. And in my imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wretched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness.

That is the God for me! He laid aside His immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of His.

There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark - the Cross, which symbolizes divine suffering. The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in such a world as ours.