Wilderness Wonderings

Wilderness Wonderings

Psalms

The Graceful Holiness of Sovereignty

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“He rejected the tent of Joseph;
He did not choose the tribe of Ephraim,
But He chose the tribe of Judah,
Mount Zion, which he loves.
He built His sanctuary like the high heavens,
like the earth, which He has founded forever.
He chose David His servant
and took Him from the sheepfolds;
From following the nursing ewes He brought him
to shepherd Jacob His people,
Israel His inheritance.
With upright heart He shepherded them
and guided them with His skillful hand.” (Psalm 78:67-72)

Throughout Psalm 78, that we have walked through for the last two weeks, we see the father cycling through judgement and grace. Discipline and mercy. Destruction and redemption. Anger and compassion. Do not be mistaken: our sovereign God is not a moody, bi-polar despot. He is a holy God who longs for His children to love Him as He loves them. And He will do whatever it takes to get their attention and draw them under His sheltering wing.

Holiness without grace is tyranny. Grace without holiness is impotent. But holiness and grace, working hand in sovereign hand, by the omniscience of our Abba Father makes all the difference. It is His holiness that demands judgement for our disobedience. It is His grace that redeems us from His judgement through our repentance and faith. As Charles Haddon Spurgeon once wrote: “Grace is the mother and nurse of holiness, and not the apologist of sin.”

The New Testament gospel, the Good News, is that we can be saved from ourselves. Throughout the gospels and the epistles, there is a reverberant theme: Salvation is here! Grace has arrived! And all we have to do to receive it is repent and believe.

Can it really be that simple? Can I really just apologize and “accept Jesus into my heart” and be saved? No. That’s not what repentance and belief mean. It’s not that simple. It’s not enough to be remorseful for your sins; you must repent and turn away from your sin and seek to live your life in accordance with the dictates of God’s word, believing that Jesus paid the price for your sins and His Holy Spirit is living in you to empower you to walk in the light, rather than stumble through the darkness. If the Christian life was as simple as saying “I’m sorry for my sin, but I don’t need transformation.” then you’ve missed the point.

Salvation without transformation is a bogus gospel. Without repentance, your faith will not save you. Faith is more than a casual acknowledgement of the truth. Faith is a deep abiding within the truth. God didn’t choose Judah over Joseph and Ephraim because of any merit that Judah had earned. He chose Judah because of His sovereign choice to be faithful to His covenant. Joseph and Ephraim abandoned the covenant by choosing not to fully participate in the settlement of the Promised Land with the remainder of Israel. But Judah fully participated and God chose to reward that obedience. But it was God’s sovereign choice to do so because of His love for Judah and His remembrance of His covenant with Abraham on Mt. Zion.

It is on the spot of where God initiated that covenant that God ordered His temple to be built, as a commemoration of His faithfulness to always be with His people. He chose David from the tribe of Benjamin to be His king in Israel, because of God’s love for Him, which inspired David to write more than half of the Psalms and shepherd the people of God – in spite of his failures as a husband, king, and man. God chose David to be the shepherd king of His people, knowing that he would be imperfect, but also knowing that he would do so with a humble and repentant heart.

David was not immune to the judgement of God when he sinned. In fact, he was repeated called out for his moral failings and Israel fell into chaos because of it. But once he repented and endured God’s discipline, the kingdom was restored and peace was maintained and the kingdom legacy was passed on to his son, Solomon. Ultimately, David’s repentance gave rise to the Savior as his earthly descendent, in fulfillment of God’s promise to not remove the rod forever from His hand.

We must remember that as believers we are not immune to God’s discipline. In fact, we are even more responsible to obedience to His word for the sake of His kingdom. God will put His reputation on the line for you when you put your complete faith and trust in Him. When you abandon Him and refuse repentance, you cannot expect to experience the fullness of His grace in your life. Judgement is the natural consequence of our sin, but grace is the supernatural prerogative of our sovereign God who is simply waiting for His children to cling to Him.

Enduring Faithfulness

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“He remembered that they were but flesh,
a wind that passes and comes not again.
How often they rebelled against Him in the wilderness
and grieved Him in the desert!
They tested God again and again
and provoked the Holy One of Israel.
They did not remember His power
or the day when He redeemed them from the foe,…
Then He led out His people like sheep
and guided them in the wilderness like a flock.
He led them in safety, so that they were not afraid,
but the sea overwhelmed their enemies.
And He brought them to His holy land,
to the mountain which His right hand had won.
He drove out nations before them;
He apportioned them for a possession
and settled the tribes of Israel in their tents.”
(Psalm 78:39-42, 52-55)

Our flesh, that weak part of our being that is naturally inclined to our selfish appetites, can be a dominant foe. It can control us and enslave us to our subtle lusts and our explicit ambitions. We trust in what we see with our eyes, but have such difficulty trusting what we know in our spirit. We lean on our own understanding, knowing that our depraved thinking leads to a path a destruction. Yet our Abba Father, in spite of our weaknesses, extends His grace.

Even when we defiantly shake our fists to the heavens in rebellion, deferring to our own self-centered desired, He extends His mercy. Even when we forget His faithfulness to His word, He remains faithful to His covenant promises to redeem His children.

We are all sheep led astray by every turn of the wind. We easily lose our way and expose ourselves to the dangers of the wolves that are ever-circling the flock. We so often find ourselves stuck in a ravine of despair, needing His shepherd’s crook to pull us out. We get stuck in the brambles and thorns of a dangerous world as we wander aimlessly following our noses.

And like the Good Shepherd that He is, He leads His sheep through the dry, barren wilderness of this natural life. He safely guides us along the paths of righteousness with His loving hand, in spite of our tendency to wander and look for our own food and drink. He protects us from the enemy and bitterly weeps when He loses one of His flock to the wolves due to our own stubbornness.

And He still calls us His sheep. He paid the price to bring us out of the market and into His promised land. He builds a shelter for us in His temple so that we might rest peacefully in Him. He drives out the opposing forces that seek to destroy His flock, even when we try so earnestly to invite them in.

What was once the barren desert of your life can become a refreshing oasis of comfort. He can and does transform our lives for the sake of His kingdom in accordance with His purposes. He apportions the land before us as He sees fit to advance His purposes. And sometimes that means we lay claim to that which He has repurposed for our good. Many times throughout Scripture, God has used the enemies of His people to provide for His people and fulfill His promises. Many times He uses the enemies of His people to chastise them and bring them to repentance for the sake of His kingdom.

In the end, He always proves faithful to His word. He always proves faithful to His promises. He always proves faithful to those whom He loves.

The Grace of Discipline

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“In spite of all this, they still sinned;
despite His wonders, they did not believe.
So he made their days vanish like a breath,
and their years in terror.
When He killed them, they sought Him;
they repented and sought God earnestly.
They remembered that God was their rock,
the Most High God their redeemer.
But they flattered Him with their mouths;
they lied to Him with their tongues.
Their heart was not steadfast toward Him;
they were not faithful to His covenant.
Yet He, being compassionate,
atoned for their iniquity
and did not destroy them;
He restrained His anger often
and did not stir up all His wrath.”
(Psalm 78:32-38)

Sometimes, the difficulties we face in life, be it personal, familial, generational, or even national, are a direct consequence of the choices we make. Sometimes, our difficulties and struggles are simply the discipline of God upon us for stepping out of line with His covenant and living life with spiritual blinders, ignoring His truth and His ways. He will even at times use non-believers and foreigners to exact His judgement as a form of discipline in order to spur His people to repentance. Yet, in spite of it all, as long as we are on this earth, His judgements are not always fatal or everlasting. God’s discipline could always be far worse than what He doles out because His judgement, while fueled by His holiness, is tempered by His love and compassion for His children.

God Himself would have been well within His rights to kill Adam in accordance with His word on the day of His disobedience. But He had compassion and atoned for Adam’s and Eve’s sin and covered their nakedness as He shed the blood of animals to create a covering for them. He would have been well within His rights to destroy the entire inhabitation of the earth with the flood and wipe out all of human existence, but He had compassion upon His creation and saved a family of seven in order to give humanity a second chance upon exiting the ark. He could have struck down the inhabitants of Babel for their pride and arrogance in trying to reach the heavens by their own hand with their tower, but instead He simply chose to confuse their language and disperse the people apart from one another.

He would have been well within His rights to completely destroy the brothers of Joseph for selling him into slavery and leaving him for dead. Instead he sheltered them in Egypt under the hand of Joseph in order to preserve His covenant. He could have left Israel under the slavery of Egypt, which He allowed for over 400 years. Instead He had compassion upon them and led them out of bondage towards the Promised Land. He could have allowed Israel to die in the wilderness for their faithlessness, but instead He chose to feed them and water them in a dry, barren, lifeless land.

He would have been well within His rights to allow Israel to be destroyed by her enemies because of their idolatry. Instead He chose to allow them to simply be carried off to Babylon in chains for a relatively short time. He could have allowed Jonah to die in the belly of the great fish, but instead He allowed him to sit in the bile for only three days before being vomited upon the beach to deliver His message to Nineveh. He could have allowed Nineveh to simply be destroyed by fire, but He sent a messenger to deliver hope through repentance.

Just like any parent disciplines their child because they love them and want to see them grow into responsible adults in due time, God will discipline His children in order to bring about repentance in their hearts and return them to a proper relationship with Him. And just like any parent rejoices at the repentant heart of their wayward child, so does our Abba rejoice when we run into His compassionate arms and embrace Him.

The Flip Side of the Coin

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“Therefore, when the Lord heard, He was full of wrath;
a fire was kindled against Jacob;
His anger rose against Israel,
Because they did not believe in God
and did not trust His saving power.
Yet He commanded the skies above
and opened the doors of heaven,
And He rained down on them manna to eat
and gave them the grain of heaven.
Man ate of the bread of the angels;
He sent them food in abundance.
He caused the east wind to blow in the heavens,
and by His power He led out the south wind;
He rained meat on them like dust,
winged birds like the sand of the seas;
He let them fall in the midst of their camp,
all around their dwellings.
And they ate and were well filled,
for He gave them what they craved.
But before they had satisfied their craving,
while the food was still in their mouths,
The anger of God rose against them,
and He killed the strongest of them
and laid low the young men of Israel.”
(Psalm 78:21-31)

I can count on one hand the number of sermons in my 30 years as a believer, and 40 years as a regular church attendee, where Psalm 78 was the central focus. Taken at face value, it is a difficult Psalm to process. However, once you get to the heart of the matter and examine the context of each verse you realize very quickly why. It’s not a Psalm that is full of “feel good” theology. It is not a Psalm that is filled with images of soft meadows and flowing streams and dancing children. It is not a Psalm that is intended to fill you with peace, but rather to spur you to holiness.

This Psalm paints a picture of remembrance of the juxtaposition of judgement and mercy. It is a Psalm that fluctuates between God’s great love for His people and His great wrath at their rebellion and ingratitude. It is a Psalm that warns of the dangers of self-sufficiency and urges us to trust the all-sufficiency of His grace. How often do we find ourselves gorging our spiritual bellies on the blessings of God, and then pushing away from the table of grace to run with the world? How often do you find yourself dolling yourself up for Sunday worship only to find yourself rolling in the prodigal’s pigpen on Monday morning? How often do I find myself celebrating my own successes and minimizing my failures on Friday and then falling on my face in false humility of worship on Sunday morning?

Over and over again Israel has taken God’s grace for granted. Undeserving and having earned nothing to warrant God’s favor, He freed them from the slavery of Egypt out of faithfulness to His word to His servant Abraham. As they traveled across a barren wilderness for forty years, he provided rain, daily manna in abundance, eastern winds to cool the day and southern winds to cool the nights. He provided them daily meat in the form of quail as numerous as the grains of sand on the beach. Mind you that quail was not native to the wilderness of Sinai. Yet all the while as they enjoyed the fruits of His grace, they grumbled and complained and expected more. And their ingratitude was their downfall. Their pride was their own destruction. And God’s judgement and holiness came to bear.

We cannot experience the fullness of God’s mercy and grace without recognizing the truth of His holiness and judgement. Mercy, by definition, implies that we deserve a fate far worse than we receive. Grace, by definition, implies we have done nothing to deserve the blessings we do receive. Our sin demands judgement. His holiness demands repentance. The holiness is the flip side of the coin of grace. Judgement is the flip side of the coin of mercy. There is a price to be paid for our sin, and He pays it on our behalf. We cry out for the shekels of our own self-reliance, and then we trample on His shekinah glory, turning our heads and hearts back to the shackles of Egypt that separates us from His eternal promises.

The late Rev. R. C. Sproul was once asked why the punishment of Adam was so severe. And His response was shockingly honest and was met with laughter as if he was joking, but he sternly retorted and corrected the audience in attendance:

This creature from the dirt defied the everlasting, holy God after God has said ‘The day that you shall eat of it, you shall surely die.’ And instead of dying…that day, he lived another day and was clothed in his nakedness by pure grace and had the consequences of a curse supplied for quite some time. But the worse curse would come upon the one who seduced him, whose head would be crushed by the seed of the woman. And the punishment was too severe?! What’s wrong with you people?!

– R.C. Sproul (c 2014)

We must remember who God is. We must remember His holiness. When we truly and humbly confront Him and recognize Him for who He is, we are exposed and recognize who we really are. When we truly recognize His holiness, we can do nothing but fall our face before Him exposed. His holiness exposes our sin. His grace covers our sin. His holiness demands judgement. His mercy takes His judgement upon Himself. We must learn to confront the holiness of God on a daily basis instead of just once in a long while. Until we do, we will never recognize our rightful place at the feet of His throne. Until we do, we will never full appreciate the fullness of His grace.

The Provision of History and Sufficiency of Grace

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“Yet they sinned still more against him,
rebelling against the Most High in the desert.
They tested God in their heart
by demanding the food they craved.
They spoke against God, saying,
‘Can God spread a table in the wilderness?
He struck the rock so that water gushed out
and streams overflowed.
Can he also give bread
or provide meat for his people?’
Therefore, when the Lord heard, he was full of wrath;
a fire was kindled against Jacob;
his anger rose against Israel,
Because they did not believe in God
and did not trust his saving power.” (Psalm 78:17-22)

Have you ever felt taken for granted or taken advantage of? Have you ever felt like your only purpose in life is to be everyone else’s wishing genie? Do you ever find yourself treating others as if they are nothing more than your provider? Do you find yourself in your prayer time treating God the same way, daily bringing Him your list of demands…uh…requests and little more?

Following the escape from Egypt, God has continually demonstrated His faithfulness and provision to His people. He divided the waters of the Red Sea to allow safe passage on dry land. He guided them with a cloud by day and a pillar fire by night as they trekked across the wilderness. He provided fresh, potable water from dry rock, manna for daily bread, and quail for fresh meat. All of these in an area known for its barren, lifeless existence. And yet, it wasn’t enough to endear the people’s hearts to Him.

God’s provisions for us are always for our good, but His provisions are always for His Kingdom purposes. His provisions for Israel, in spite of their rebellious hearts was for the purpose of sustaining them for the journey ahead across the wilderness of Sin to the Promised Land in keeping with His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But every time God provided, it was just enough for the day and just enough to keep them satisfied until the turned their eyes inwards upon themselves instead of looking forward to their destination.

As long as you keep your eyes upon your own desires and your own needs instead of looking forward to God’s Kingdom needs and His purposes, you will never experience the satisfaction of God’s sufficiency in His grace. As long as we treat Him like He is our slave to order about and give us what we feel we want and need in the moment, we will never appreciate His sovereignty and mercy. God owes you nothing. In fact, we deserve full separation from Him because of our sin. However, because of His great love for us, He chooses to love us more than He hates our sin. He chose to pay the price for our sins in order to redeem us from the grave and eternal punishment that we so richly deserve.

And when we treat His grace and His favor with such disdain and take Him for granted, sooner or later that provision will dry up. Sooner or later, His wrath will be poured out in discipline in an effort to draw you into the relationship that He has longed for all this time. When we take His grace for granted, we are saying that we do not believe His word to be sufficient and that His wisdom in not enough to save us. So we tend to bring Him our list of demands that would appease our own selfish conscience because we trust more in our own wisdom than in His word and His saving power.

Humility is the key because when we humble ourselves before our sovereign God, we recognize our place and magnify His. We take ourselves off the throne and recognize that only He has the right to sit upon it. Too often we act like God has us sitting on His throne to keep it warm for Him, when in fact He never leaves it. He is always on His throne and in His holy temple with the whole train of His robe filling the temple with His holiness.

Holiness in us is the power of the Holy Spirit reminding us of who He is and who we are in relation to Him. We would do good to remember that He is the giver and taker of all life. The only thing in Scripture that we are ever called to fear is the Lord and His wrath. And when does His wrath burn the most? When His people misuse, abuse, twist, and manipulate His word for their own twisted purposes in order to take advantage of others and to try to take advantage of Him.

We must view Scripture through the lens of humility, trusting His word to be sufficient to meet our every need. We must examine His word in light of His wisdom rather than our own. As His children, we must learn to trust His provision to be sufficient to meet our needs for His Kingdom purposes to His glory rather than our own. Once we then recognize His sufficiency to provide through the power of His word, then we recognize that He is our sufficiency to look forward to the Promised Land of grace eternal.

The Brotherhood of History

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“The Ephraimites, armed with the bow,
turned back on the day of battle.
They did not keep God’s covenant,
but refused to walk according to his law.
They forgot his works
and the wonders that he had shown them.
In the sight of their fathers he performed wonders
in the land of Egypt, in the fields of Zoan.
He divided the sea and let them pass through it,
and made the waters stand like a heap.
In the daytime he led them with a cloud,
and all the night with a fiery light.
He split rocks in the wilderness
and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep.
He made streams come out of the rock
and caused waters to flow down like rivers.” (Psalm 78:9-16)

One of the codes of honor among our branches of the military is the simple creed that no soldier gets left behind. Sometimes this is easier said than done, when you consider that thousands of US service personnel have still not had their remains returned from the battlefields of Vietnam and North Korea, among others. The creed speaks to the sense of comraderie and brotherhood, united by a patriotic duty and love for country.

Unfortunately, this creed isn’t universal. Even as far back as the conquest of the Holy Land, as Israel began to claim the promise that God had for a home for His chosen people, the tribe of Ephraim, most likely because of fear of the Philistines that inhabited the land as described in Numbers 13. This act of betrayal was not only a slap in the face of their Hebrew brothers, but it was a wanton disregard and doubt in the covenant of God.

By turning their backs on God’s command to pursue the Promised Land, they turned their back on God Himself. Their doubt in the deliverance of God was borne out of the fact that they had forgotten all the miracles and wonders that God had done for them to bring them out of slavery in Egypt. The “fields of Zoan” was the place near the capital of Egypt at the time of their captivity. It was here that they worked the fields to harvest the straw used in the making of bricks for the building of the Egyptian monuments that were in Zoan, also known as Tanis in the Nile Delta.

The had forgotten all the miracles that God had performed to separate them from the pursuing slavers of the Egyptian Pharoah. They had forgotten how he led them day and night through the barren wilderness, providing water from within the rocks that permeated the Wilderness of Zin (Sin). And God didn’t just bring small springs from those rocks, but He brought forth flowing streams and rushing rivers of water. His blessings that He lavished upon His children were abundantly more than they deserved considering their constant complaining through the desert and expressed desire to return to the chains of slavery in Egypt.

The Christian life, especially in the early stages of growth, will often allegorically mimic this historical exodus out of slavery. As we are no longer enslaved to our sin nature, we struggle through the wilderness trying to make sense of this new life that we are called to. Sometimes we want to slide back into our old life thinking it was so much easier, forgetting that grace has set us free from our worldly passions and lusts that were weighing down our lives. But God Himself, through the power of His Holy Spirit continues to guide us and provide us refreshment along the way, in spite of our questions and grumblings.

All too often, however, we find ourselves at a point of decision – do we fight on, stay put, or turn back? In the case of Ephraim, they chose to stay put, paralyzed by fear and doubt, refusing to advance further for the glory of God and His Kingdom in keeping with His covenant promise.

Don’t miss this – they were still considered a part of Israel and a tribe of the covenant, in spite of their disobedience. They did not return to the slavery of Egypt. They did not advance the Kingdom of God in Israel. They simply stopped. Just as the half-tribe of Manasseh decided to stop short of the Promised Land (Joshua 1:12-15). They stopped short of experiencing the full blessings of the covenant, yet remained a part of the brotherhood of Israel.

In the same way, we can fall short of the experiencing the full blessings of the Christian life when we choose to live the bare minimum. It’s not enough to pray a prayer and get baptized. It’s not enough to attend a weekly service and sit on the sidelines. If you are a part of the brotherhood, you are expected as required of the covenant to fight alongside your brothers and sisters in the faith. We are expected to experience life together. We are expected to participate rather than spectate.

So I ask you today to examine yourselves. Are you content to just sit on the sidelines and partake of the benefits of brotherhood without experiencing the joys of fellowship? Or are you willing to take up your spiritual sword (The Word of God) and fight for truth. Are you willing to walk arm-in-arm with your fellow believers as a unified phalanx ready to do spiritual battle for one another? Are you willing to serve your brother who is struggling to feed his family? Are you willing to comfort your sister whose husband has abandoned her with their children? Are you willing to feed the poor, comfort the widows and orphans, teach the ignorant, and strengthen the weak?

That is our mandate. Anything less is settling for selfishness. Anything less is looking out for yourself instead of advancing and strengthening the Kingdom. Anything less is abandonment of the dictates of the covenant. Anything less is wandering in the wilderness of Sin, wondering why you never experience victory living a life without risk. Anything less is sin.

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