In The Wilderness
From the Hosts
The Wilderness was a punishment for the Israelites, but that's not all it was. God had good purposes for His people even there--purposes that are fulfilled in Christ for us as well as for the Israelites.
This Episode Features: A 40-Year Boot Camp; Homeless Former Celebrities; Scrub Brush And Cacti; TikTok To The Glory Of God; The Greater Good; Going To The Moon; and Calvin Was Not A Stoic.
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Last week we talked about liberty and responsibility, and the week before that we talked about Joshua and Caleb and the crisis of faith, or rather the lack of faith that had Israel wandering in the desert for 40 years because they were not willing to trust God to enter the Promised Land.
Today we’re talking about the wilderness and the purpose that God had them wandering for. Was it just to see them suffer, do you think?
Because God is the great masochist and delights when people hurt a lot? No. But speaking of torture and such things, there is a relevant scene from George Orwell’s 1984. If you know the storyline, you know the protagonist, Winston, eventually ends up in the Ministry of Love – translate, torture – where he confronts O’Brien. O’Brien is trying, almost like a patient grandfather it seems, to get him to understand the way that Big Brother, the tyrannical social order, is working.
O’Brien asks him this question. “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.
“Exactly, by making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he’s suffering, how can you be sure that he’s obeying your will and not his own?”
Now, this comes from the far left. This comes from a thoroughly humanistic perspective, but then Orwell himself had sort of given up on humanism and sees where it’s going and has no options. He simply says, “This is the world we’re looking at – a boot stamping on the human face forever.”
Along the way the question becomes, “And those in power, what do they want?” and his answer is, “They want power. They want power to take a human being and smash him down to nothing and bring him back and put themselves wholly into him because they delight in power.”
The problem here, of course, is that man is playing God, and God’s not like that and God by his very nature can’t be like that, and man by his very nature cannot be God. But having said that, there is something in what O’Brien is getting at.
If someone obeys your orders cheerfully, happily, there’s the possibility that they’re not really obeying your orders. You just gave them something to do they happen to enjoy, so they’re tripping along doing exactly what they like. They just found you may be a horrible person, but so are they apparently, because they really enjoy these chores you’re giving them. You’re not controlling them. You’re not conforming them to your will. You’re just giving them a chance to have fun, and if you’re one of these power-obsessed tyrants that Orwell is describing, that’s not enough.
So when O’Brien asks, “How do you assert your power over another man?” once he thinks about it he rightly says from that perspective, “He’s got to be suffering,” because if he’s suffering and obeys you – he could be suffering and not obeying you – but if he’s suffering and obeying you, then he’s obeying you in spite of the pain so you must have him in your pocket, in the palm of your hand. You’re in complete control because even in the midst of the pain, he’s doing this. He’s not doing it because he enjoys it, obviously. He’s doing it because you told him to, and in that these tyrants can feel the relish of their power.
“Touch his body. Take all that he has and he’ll curse you to your face,” Satan says in Job. But the distinction we have to insist on, and Job’s a good place to do it, is that God is not a power-drunk human who uses people because he gets off on pain. He’s not a cosmic masochist.
God loves his children, but the reality of sin is that if all God asks us to do is stuff that we enjoy, that’s really easy, and unfortunately there’s a good part of Christendom, at least at the tail end of the 20th century there was a good deal of Christendom, that basically kept that as a first principle. “Come to Christ and he will give you a wonderful life full of fun things to do. You will know total joy and total peace. He will never ask you to do anything terribly hard, and all of your needs on every level will be met. He will be the best psychotherapist, the best friend, and the best employer that you will ever have, because he’ll make sure that everything is great.”
As we look at the Christ of scripture, that’s not it, and that’s not what Jesus did, either. Jesus didn’t come to earth and live this wonderful sweet life of cotton candy and Pepsi and pizza and someone peeling grapes for him, and then go back to heaven and say, “Go thou and do likewise.”
The reality of sin, the reality of God’s just requirements upon sin, means some hard things. It means first of all the wrath of God against sin. So first of all, is God nice and sweet all the time to those who are his enemies? No. The Bible is full of that. Some people don’t get that. They’ve not read the Bible. They do not know about the anger and the wrath of God.
They do not know, for instance, that God says he hates all the workers of iniquity. “God says that?” Yes, God says that. I believe that’s Psalm 5. Or “Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.” There are many like passages where God describes his wrath in no uncertain terms.
One of my favorites, if you’re supposed to have favorites about God’s wrath, is in Nahum 1, where the prophet describes God like this –
God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth; the Lord revengeth, and is furious; the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies.
The Lord is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.
He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth.
The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein.
Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? his fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him.
The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.
God is angry at sin and at sinners, at his enemies, but for those who trust in his mercies God is gentle and kind. He knows his people and he does not want them ultimately to suffer, as if suffering were an end in itself. “Yeah, go stab yourself with the dagger a few hundred times every day for eternity. I’ll enjoy that and so will you.” God doesn’t do that. God promises complete and ultimate joy, peace, pleasures forevermore at his right hand.
But what we are caught with in the meantime is that although Jesus came and took the wrath of God for his people, we still have the problem that we’re sinners, and God needs to work on that. One of the ways he works on that is to put us in places where he calls us to obedience and the obedience is not fun. He drives our stubbornness and selfishness and rebellion out into the open so that we can see, “God wants me to do A. A hurts. I would rather do B. It’s pretty good and it feels so much better.”
So now we’re left with a choice. Will we obey God, because God is our first priority because his kingdom and his righteousness is what we’re seeking first, because we are to do all things for the glory of God, not for ourselves? Or will we follow self-will? Will we seek our own pleasures, our own happiness, our own peace?
God puts us in this, not because he delights in our suffering, but because given the world he made, this is the reality. We cling to the wrong things. We cling to self. We cling to our own will, our own preferences, our own peace, our own ease, what Francis Schaeffer used to call “personal peace and affluence,” our little bite of the American 21st century pie, and we’re not in a hurry to give any of that up for the sake of the kingdom of God. So God, as he did with Israel, drives us into the wilderness, into boot camp, so that we can learn death to self in very, very practical ways.
I was reading in Deuteronomy today and it was super relevant because Moses is summarizing the past 40 years in the wilderness for the Israelites who have grown up in the wilderness.
And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.
It’s this repeated refrain – that he might humble thee, that he might prove thee, and to do thee good – at the latter end. It’s for the purpose of bringing them to the greater joy.
He set before them a Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, an imitation of Paradise. It was said in Abraham’s day to have been like the garden of the Lord. We all want that, right? But at what cost? It’s a gift from God. It doesn’t cost anything. They didn’t earn it. We have to be very clear about that. But they had to be ready to enjoy it.
There’s a quote from John Piper that goes like this. “The real testing ground of life is the Promised Land of prosperity. The wilderness is the boot camp. The land of milk and honey is where the battle for the heart is finally fought.”
I think you can nuance this. I don’t know that it’s black and white, but he’s onto something. The term ‘boot camp’ shows up a lot when people are discussing the book of Numbers, that 40 years of wandering. We know what boot camp is. It’s where you put soldiers to train and to get them tough for battles. But what John Piper is suggesting here is that if you don’t get ready in boot camp, when you get to the Promised Land and you get to relax and kick back, that’s when all of the idols of the heart begin to push forward.
You begin to say, “My strength and my right arm hath gotten me this land. I earned this. I deserve this. I’m not going to give any of it up because this was hard in coming and we waited a long time. It’s time to sit back and enjoy this.”
The chapter you read in Deuteronomy, Chapter 8, has a good deal there that’s exactly along these lines. If you’re not careful, beware. You’re going to trust yourself and you’re going to forget God. You’re going to forget that God gave you this.
The temptations of the Promised Land, of success and peace and pleasure and happiness, are very great. But at the same time, so are the temptations in boot camp. It’s very easy to give up. “I’m so done with this. I just want out.”
I have friends and relatives who have gone into the service and gone to boot camp within the last several months. To the best of my knowledge they’ve survived and they’re doing well, but I’ve also heard from them some who didn’t do so well. They’re waiting in quarantine in land-sea containers, completely isolated, and at least two took their lives because it was more than they could handle and more than the authorities expected. They haven’t had to run boot camp in the middle of quarantine, and it seems that sometimes the dangers are not what you think they are. Who would have said that being alone will knock more out of you than all that a boot camp sergeant could ever knock out of you?
So both have their challenges – the boot camp of the wilderness, where things are awfully hard, and then crossing the finish line, kicking back and saying, “Got it. Everything’s going to be okay now. Yeah.”
It’s kind of like the celebrities and football players and whatnot who come into a lot of money all at once, and they’ve never had to learn how to make their money work. It’s worse for them than if they’d never made a lot of money because they weren’t prepared to deal with that.
I often see little notes someplace on Google – I don’t have Facebook so I don’t know how I do, but somehow I see some actor or actress from my generation of the ‘50s, ‘60s, or ‘70s and there will be a picture of them. They look horrible and the little teaser will be, “How they lost $30 million dollars” or “Why they’re walking the street with no home.”
They were famous. They were the beautiful people, and now, you’re right, they did not know what to do with millions of dollars oftentimes that God brought providentially. They took it for granted. “It’s going to be here, will always be here, and it’s just here so I can have fun with it.”
Christians very easily can pick up this kind of worldly attitude because we forget the giver. It’s not that the gift isn’t a gift, and not that the gift is not good, and not that the gift can’t be a lot of fun, but we come back to this thing – “Do all for the glory of God.”
I’ve gotten to the point of being really annoyed with the phrase – not because it’s not biblical but because people say it so glibly – “I can do this. Everything to the glory of God.” Yes, you could. Are you? Just because in theory you could be an accountant, a surgeon, a movie star, a football star for the glory of God, yes, in theory that works. Are you, though? Is that really your end here? Is that what you’re seeking and does anybody know it? Because if they don’t, we’ve got a problem.
Glory in scripture actually carries a connotation either of something that shines like light or something that’s heavy and serious. In any case, it involves the acknowledgement that what I’m dealing with, or who I’m dealing with is, as the beatniks would say, “Heavy, man” and serious and something to be taken with your attention and your awe. You can’t glorify God and be quiet about it. That’s a contradiction.
That doesn’t mean you have to say “Praise God” at every word, but someplace at some point you do actually have to tell people, “I’m a Christian and I’m doing this for Jesus,” or again the danger sets in of my own strength and my right hand hath gotten me this victory.
We’ve talked a little bit about Israel, but when Jesus came into the world, his first open battle with darkness was in the wilderness. Just as Israel searched out the land for 40 days and then was sentenced to wilderness journeys for 40 years, Jesus went right into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights with no food. He went into Satan’s territory. He went stalking the devil. He went to find him. The Holy Spirit drove him into the wilderness to find Satan. That doesn’t mean Satan actually got that. Satan probably thought, “Ha! I have him now!”
“He’s fallen into my cunning trap, which I made so enticing with all this scrub brush and cacti.”
So our Lord before us went this way. He went the way of the cross from Day 1. From the moment he was empowered by the Holy Spirit, anointed at his baptism, he immediately went into the wilderness to throw down the gauntlet and take on Satan, and he did it in the worst possible conditions. He’s the second Adam, and yet Adam faced Satan in the garden, in paradise with all kinds of stuff around, all kinds of food, no needs, no wants, no pain, no sorrow.
Jesus is there for 40 days and 40 nights and it’s the wilderness. Water is at a premium. Food he just plain has not eaten and he is weak. He’s a human being. The human body really can’t handle 40 days of fasting normally. He was pushing it. Also, in all three accounts in the gospels it’s clear that Satan had been at him the whole time. It’s just at the end he does kind of the formal, “Here I am. Let’s bring this down to three particular cases.”
It’s easy to say, “Well, Jesus is God; therefore, this was nothing. He just blew it away.” That’s not what the Bible is telling us. It’s telling us that this was a hard thing. Jesus did not waver in his faith, in his reliance on his heavenly father, his absolute love and loyalty to God, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t feel the weight of the temptation.
He, in his humanity, did not know all things. He did not know the future. He did not know the end of his temptation even. He knows he’s dying. He knows that he’s not supposed to. He knows he has a mission. And here’s Satan saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you got this far and you lost it all. Ha ha! Of course, you could come up with some bread here. The voice said something about you being the Son of God. Really? Fine, then save yourself. Save the world. Come up with some bread and carry out this crazy plan that God has for you, because if you don’t, all those people you say you love, they’re going to die. They’re going to go to hell if you don’t pull through this.”
All that Jesus knows is, “Well, that’s not the agenda I have from my dad. My father did not say that. My father did not say, ‘Oh baby, until it gets really tough, until you can’t see a way out, until you don’t know my mind and you’re not sure what’s happening, then do whatever you need to do.’”
So he appeals to the passage that you just read from Deuteronomy 8. “It is written, man shall not live by bread alone.” He doesn’t say man doesn’t live by bread. Man needs bread. Man needs food. But he must also live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He knew what his father had said to him and there was nothing on the agenda about turning stones into bread, so whatever God was going to do, Jesus was going to sit back and watch him do it, whatever it might be.
All of the passages that he quotes to respond to the devil are from Moses telling the Israelites why they were in the wilderness. This is clearly a hearkening back. This is clearly Jesus walking the road that the Israelites walked.
And at far more disadvantage. He doesn’t have the glory cloud hovering over him giving light by night and shade by day.
Or anyone else there helping him, nor could he go smite a rock and get water instantly. He doesn’t get any of that. Yes, he has the power to do miracles, but it’s not on his list of things to do today so that’s not the way out for him. He has to continue through this wilderness experience, the way any of us would do, by believing that God means well for him and for the people he represents, and that God’s got a plan. I don’t need to know it all right now in my humanity to faithfully obey and trust my father.
The second temptation – Luke and Matthew get the different order. Luke follows emphasizing Jesus’ true humanity as the second Adam. He follows the temptation series as he’d experienced it, so lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes. Satan takes Jesus to the top of a mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, so more than simple binoculars were at work here. He’s doing some kind of long-distance tele-magic to show him everything around the world. He says, “All of these I will give you if you fall down and worship me.”
Again we could say, “What kind of temptation is that? First, Satan’s a liar.” This is so. “And secondly, he doesn’t own all the kingdoms of the world.” No, he doesn’t, but he didn’t own the Roman empire either, and yet when we get to the book of Revelation there’s a couple interesting things that the Holy Spirit does say about his relationship to such things.
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
And later on – “And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast.”
Now, this is not a legitimate authority. Satan is not God, and yet somehow on some level Satan was actually the power behind the Roman Empire and behind its persecution of the saints. Also in Chapter 20 we’re told that Satan would one day be bound –
And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more.
So part of what Satan is doing is flat-out deception. He does have, within God’s economy, that permission, that long leash – at least he did – so what Satan is basically saying is, “What if I don’t do any of that? What if I stay away from the Roman emperors, the Roman court, the Roman governors? What if I call back all my guys? We’ll go have a picnic in limbo or something and just leave your Christian guys. We won’t persecute them. We won’t torment them. No crosses. No lions. No arenas. You can go anywhere and preach everything and we’ll just sit back. It’ll be a picnic for your preacher people to just go tell your stuff everywhere. Isn’t it worth it for your people not to suffer?”
Wouldn’t a lot of us be tempted to say, “Well, if I could be sure that you’re telling the truth, that kind of sounds like a good deal.”
Yes. Of course, Jesus looks at the condition – “Just fall down and worship me. In other words, just admit one time that I’m right, and we’re done. I’ll walk away. You claim to be God. You could guarantee that, right? Just give me the one little thing.”
Again, as you said, Jesus’ responsive words were from Deuteronomy with reference to the wilderness – “You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shalt thou serve.”
“I don’t worship other gods. My father is my God, my Lord. It’s his glory I seek.”
“You mean even over all those thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of people who you say you came to die for, your father is more important than them?”
Of course, ultimately, because if he does not honor his father they’re all going to hell anyway, but in the moment your body is weak, your eyes are spinning, and it would be so easy to just lose clarity for a moment and say, “So all these people I love will never have to suffer? You’ll never tempt them? That sounds really good. Wait, what was the condition again?”
Jesus doesn’t go there. He maintains clarity of thought and mind and he doesn’t walk away from Satan. For us, the remedy here actually is pretty simple, it occurs to me. Run! Don’t stand there and let Satan tempt you. We would say to anybody else on the planet, any other Christian, “Get out of there!”
“You don’t. He’s a liar. Just leave him.” But the Holy Spirit had forced the issue, so it’s Jesus’ job to stand there and take it, to feel the full weight of all the temptations we will ever feel, to feel the emotional tug, to feel the sense of alternative. “What if I did this? How would this affect the people I love?”
We see this in stories of martyrs, where some very vicious group of thugs points a gun at a man and says, “Renounce Christ or I’ll shoot you,” and he says, “No,” and they then turn the gun toward his wife. “Renounce Christ or I’ll shoot her.”
To a lot of people that would seem so callous, so cold, so unloving. “You mean you’ll let your family die? You’ll let your children be taken away and raised by who knows what under who knows what circumstances, rather than just say a few words that deny Jesus? He’ll forgive you even if you say them, won’t he? Why not just say them?”
Yes, and of course that is the next temptation. Satan takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and says, “Throw yourself off. Everybody will say ‘Wow!’ and everyone will flock to you and you’re not required to convince them of anything. They’ll see with your eyes. You’ll remove the need for faith.”
“Again, you’re assuming that God will save my life if I do this. This is nowhere in the script. I am nowhere commissioned to do this. I do not know what my father’s reaction would be, and the point is, again, that’s not what he told me to do, so no. You shall not tempt the Lord your God.”
We’re told that Satan left him for a season, and I think sometimes we forget that. This was not the last round. This was the first round. As we go through the gospel stories we see many things, where if we stop and think we’d have to say, “You know, this had to be hard for Jesus.” We get a little sense of it when Peter says, “The cross? No, Lord, this must never be for you!” and Jesus’ eyes go wide. “Get thee behind me, Satan. You savour not the things that be of God, but of man.” He saw through it. It’s the voice of the devil again.
Of course, we end up in Gethsemane and we don’t know what part, if any, Satan had in that, but we know that Jesus struggled. He never doubts his father. He never asks for any road that his father has not decreed. He does ask for clarity. “Have I missed something? If it be your will, may this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will but yours.”
He’s horrified not by the pain. A lot of martyrs have gone through things as painful as what Jesus seems to have gone through, at least in terms of what man could do to him. What God did to him is something else again.
That’s that question that people ask. “What was the cup that Jesus asked to be passed from him, and still was willing to submit to?” It wasn’t the cup of being crucified or of being scourged or of being mocked. It was the cup of God’s wrath being poured on him.
Absolutely, and that wrath was not simply a physical thing, but it was wrath of God. It was his father who had always loved him and rejoiced in him, turning to him his angry face, his total wrath, and pouring it down on him, when Jesus knew in fact he didn’t deserve it – complete alienation from his father, accompanied with all the pain that was going to go with that. He was about to be made sin, a sin offering, all of our sins on him, and God would see him that way.
So he asked the first time, “Can this pass?” The second time, “If this cup may not pass but I drink from it, then your will be done,” and he prays that twice. The third time he says something, the soldiers have come to take him. Peter draws his sword and Jesus simply says, “Peter, the cup that my father gave me to drink, shall I not drink of it?” He’s won through. His humanity never caved to sin, but his humanity had to mature and grow into a greater faithfulness and obedience, and his father gave him time to do that. No sin, no faithlessness, but a maturing process.
The writer of Hebrews comments on this when he says, “Though he were a son, yet learned he obedience by the things he suffered,” so we’re back to this idea that Jesus’ own obedience came in the face of suffering as he embraced the cup and drank it to its dregs and took all of the wrath of God. He learned to obey God because God ought to be obeyed, because God is worthy of being obeyed, because God is love and ought to be loved. God is trustworthy and we ought to trust him.
Jesus experienced all of the steps that led to this, so when he’s on the cross there’s no complaining, there’s no screaming, there’s no griping. There is, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”
And just to show we’re not making this up about the cup being God’s wrath, this is Psalm 75:8 –
For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red; it is full of mixture; and he poureth out of the same: but the dregs thereof, all the wicked of the earth shall wring them out, and drink them.
That’s what Jesus drank, because at that moment legally he was wicked. He was the wicked of the world. He took all of our sin and all of our wickedness on himself so that we don’t have to drink it.
“Then what’s all this about the suffering thing?” Well, the suffering is getting the sin out of us now. We are sinners, and although by regeneration and by the new birth God implants a new nature in us, that thing has to be watered and grown. Just as plants need rain and sunlight and heat, we need changing and altering environments, some of them harsh, some of them very difficult, because we still cling too readily to our sins.
As we follow Jesus and the path that he has christened for us, he’s walked it first, we can do it knowing he has done it first. He knows what it’s like. He’s been there.
For we do not have a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
We have that promise. We have that fellowship with Jesus. We have him as our advocate who will provide the grace we need to get to the end of the race. There’s another metaphor we could have pursued –
Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Running a race is hard. Fighting a battle is hard. Notice all these metaphors the Bible keeps using. They’re all about hard things, but they also presuppose at the end a happy goal, a goal worth reaching, a goal that in our new nature in Christ we want. We want to be like Jesus. We want to see the face of God. We want to be with God’s people. We want the sin out of our life. We want to give up our arrogance and pride and self-righteousness. We want to sing God’s praises forever. We want total beauty and total glory.
So we have on the one hand the finish line, the promises, the land of milk and honey set before us, and in that context we’re asked to follow Jesus, the same way he imitated what had gone before him, except he did it successfully. And because he did it successfully, we can do it successfully. We’ll never do it like he did it, but we still can get where God wants us to be in God’s timing.
I don’t remember where I read this, but it was this really interesting observation about how the people of Israel, all the way through until Sinai, were just as complaining, just as grumbling as they were after Sinai, but every time before Sinai comes God is gracious to them.
He rescues them from the Egyptians. He brings them safely out. And once the law is given to them, people start dying every time there’s disobedience. At the golden calf, people die. At Korah’s rebellion, lots of people die then.
There’s when they go into the Promised Land after they said they wouldn’t.
Yeah, that one was not smart. Every step of the way, the law brings condemnation and death. It is good and just, but we’re not, and it’s only by someone else going into the wilderness on our behalf – whether it’s the literal wilderness that Jesus went into for 40 days, or it’s the figurative wilderness of being under God’s wrath – we can’t handle that. We’re not righteous. We’re not God. We’re not infinite. We can’t even stand that and have there be any merit in it.
So at the end of this, even though the episode is focused on the wilderness, I like to bring it back around and focus on the fact that it’s the gospel where we have hope. The law has its use towards convicting us of our sinfulness, but it can’t save you.
Right, and the purpose of the wilderness is to drive us back to Christ, not to drive us to back to our own resources with “Try harder, be purer, be nicer, be more humble. You’ll get it eventually.” No, we won’t.
Exactly, rather than bowing the knee and trusting Christ, holding onto Christ and dying to self. We keep wanting, “Yeah, it’s hard but I’m tough. I can do this thing.”
By the way, Emily is constantly putting up memes that I discover, and I particularly love the one that says, “When you finally understand God’s plan of redemption.” It’s two guys talking in a car. One of them says, “So in this plan, I do absolutely nothing.”
One of my friends on Twitter posted something that was basically like, “Church is not the day you get marching orders for the week. It’s where you show up to hear God’s message of reconciliation to him.”
Yeah, it’s where God does heart surgery on you through the work of the Holy Spirit, on the basis of Jesus’ death and resurrection. If all we come for is the idea of, “Here are marching orders. Here’s my new list of things I get to do this week,” that can be so crushing and depressing.
There’s a word that I don’t know so I won’t try to say it, but basically it’s when all your nerves are cut. What’s the proper word?
Yeah. How can you look at that? “Okay, you did okay this last week. Level 3, new rules, and these are going to speak even more to your heart.”
Do we have the sound effect? It’s the Gnosticism bell. <ding!> Because it’s always deeper and more esoteric knowledge. Ooo, you’ve figured out Tier 1, but there’s Tier 2 level things you’ve got to do now, and I’m the one who knows it and you’ve got to hear it from me.
It’s reminding me too of Moses’ words about the other nations in Canaan. In the first few chapters of Deuteronomy he’s listing off all of the giants that God drove out before those nations, but the message is not then, “God drives out giants. It’s a thing that he does, so go along with this plan.” It’s, “No, God redeemed you. Don’t you think he’s going to take care of this?”
It’s not based in, “Do what the other nations did to drive out their giants.” It’s God’s covenant love, his grace and his mercy and his particular redemption that we have in Christ.
There’s a danger that has lain across church history of going and trying to find the hard thing, just because.
And we need to be careful there. I can rationalize and I can see a point where you tell, for instance, your child or your employee or your intern, “You need to try something harder than you’ve been doing. Let’s have you do this…” but that’s different from saying, “I will now ascend to a level of Christianity that others have not ascended to, by picking this arbitrary thing that does nothing for God or man. God has not mentioned it or described it, but it will hurt me a lot. And when I’m done being hurt a lot, I will be holier.”
No, you’re probably going to need a hospital, is what’s going to happen here, and you probably won’t be any holier because you just made something up. You can think of the self-flagellation of some of the monks in the early Middle Ages. That didn’t do anything for you.
That’s not what Paul was talking about when he said he brought his body into submission.
No. God takes us to the wilderness and he uses it according to his good pleasure to help us grow and to sanctify us. We don’t need to add sadomasochistic things to prove that we really love God more than other people, or to achieve some kind of super-spiritual holiness. God’s got enough hard things for us in our lives.
I’m sorry, at the very simple level of, “Oh, they’re serving dessert? No, I shouldn’t and so I won’t.”
“So? Really, so? I don’t know where the Bible has any scale or set of values that says ‘If you are of this height, you may not be above this weight or you are in mortal sin.’”
“I’ve included along with my epistle a BMI chart. These are your official moral guidelines for physical wellbeing.”
Yeah. The only thing I know about diets in scripture have to do with doctrines of demons. Now, obviously we want to take care of ourselves, but that’s something that God leaves to us. Emily mentioned this before we started – “Chocolate or vanilla?”
It’s not better. God did not say that. God did not say, “Reject the fun thing because it’s fun, because you know you might be enjoying yourself.”
It’s ice cream, after all. The ice cream is meant by God to bring you joy – well, not everlasting joy, but it’s there to be pleasant for you.
So we have to beware of that. The Bible talks a great deal about dying to self, but that’s not what it means. What it means is that our hearts and lives need to be yielded to Christ so that we want his kingdom, his righteousness, God’s glory. We want to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go around making up things that are painful, or giving up things that are pleasant and good, as a way to sanctification.
Here’s something from Calvin, from his Institutes. He has a goodly section that’s sub-titled, “The Sum of the Christian Life: Self Denial.” From that you could get the idea of, “Oh, that means I should not do anything that makes me feel good or that is fun at all.” This is what Calvin writes –
The great point, then, is, that we are consecrated and dedicated to God, and, therefore, should not henceforth think, speak, design, or act, without a view to his glory.
We are not our own; therefore, neither is our own reason or will to rule our acts and counsels. We are not our own; therefore, let us not make it our end to seek what may be agreeable to our carnal nature. We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and the things that are ours.
If you read that out of context you might say, “Wait, that’s just Stoicism – deny anything good.” That’s not what he’s saying. The emphasis is upon, “Quit making a god out of yourself, and yield to God because it’s better for you. It’s more joyful and happier in the end.”
On the other hand, we are God's; let us, therefore, live and die to him. We are God's; therefore, let his wisdom and will preside over all our actions.
When he says don’t follow your own reason, he’s not saying don’t be reasonable. He’s saying, “Follow God’s reason because it’s better than yours.”
We are God's; to him, then, as the only legitimate end, let every part of our life be directed.
The Heidelberg Catechism picks up on this section when it says our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own, but belong to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ. And the next question in the Catechism is, “And what is necessary for thee, that in this comfort thou mayest live and die happily?”
John Piper in his book Desiring God makes a big deal of this. In the Westminster Confession he alters a word by saying, “The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.” I don’t think it’s necessary because the original says, “One end – to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
The Heidelberg you don’t even have to mess with because it right away says, “This is comfort for your soul, for yourself, in which you will live and die happily.”
Again, I keep using this phrase. This is not some kind of sadomasochism that we’re trying to push on the world. A Christian society should be a happy one. That doesn’t mean there won’t be hard things. It doesn’t mean that God will not try and test us, but overall in the long run we should be a happy people.
Going back on the other side, I wanted to include this quote by Lewis before we end. As Wormwood, the junior demon, is trying to tempt his human patient, he basically is able to announce, “He’s not excited about God anymore! No more pledges of eternal faithfulness. No more jumping up and down and singing out loud when the name of Jesus is mentioned. He’s losing all that!”
Screwtape writes back and says, “Wait, wait, wait. If he’s still obeying and yet he seems to have lost all joy in it, that’s not good. It means he’s learned to obey out of a deep commitment to God, not because…” and we come back here to where we started… “not because it’s fun, not because it’s easy, not because it makes him happy, but because it’s God, because he really loves God and is absolutely committed to God.”
Screwtape writes, “Be not deceived, Wormwood. Our cause, hell’s cause, is never more in danger than when a human no longer desiring but still intending to do our enemy’s will looks around upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
That’s not to say that God leaves us there very often, but does sometimes, to try us, to see what’s in our hearts, so that we know what’s in our heart and so that we can learn that man does not live by bread only, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. We learn to trust our father because he’s worthy of our trust. That’s life in the wilderness.
He is our God through all the vicissitudes and the times when it is joyful and when it isn’t. He is faithful constantly.
Do we have any recommendations to close out? I have two, actually. First, I’m actually doubling down on one of Bryan’s earlier recommendations, Augustine’s City of God. I have had an extremely good education, and I don’t say that to toot my own horn or even to toot Greg’s horn, although he had a big hand in it, but I am just now, in reading Augustine’s City of God, understanding the education that I’ve received. All the pieces are together.
I now understand why I was forced to read about the Romans and the Greeks, because they’re not pleasant, they’re not virtuous, they’re not good, but Augustine – just read City of God, it’s amazing. It’s long and it’s intimidating, but the chapters are very short. You can take small bites out of the elephant and every part of it is worth it. It is incredibly, incredibly rewarding.
I love how well he knows the Romans’ stories so that he can just pick them apart. It’s beautiful.
I’m teaching World Lit this year, so we move from The Iliad to The Aeneid, which quotes The Iliad, to The City of God, which quotes The Aeneid quoting The Iliad. Then we go to Dante, which quotes Augustine quoting…it’s just step by step.
Recommendation: The City of GodAnd of course the kids read whatever the new book is and, “And you know who these people are?”
“Exactly, you’ve read them. We read all of this garbage so that Augustine and Dante and Milton and Shakespeare – you know what in the world they’re talking about.”
Yeah. My second recommendation is along the lines of something we did a couple months ago, where we all recommended reading the Bible, which kind of should go without saying, but because it goes without saying, it bears saying again and again and again. So my second recommendation is prayer.
We were talking with a good friend of mine recently, my friend Caroline. We had kind of lost touch after high school. We grew up in church together. She’s an incredible young woman of faith. She’s a missionary so we reconnected for one reason and another, and we were talking about some things we were praying about at the time, fairly significant career-type decisions, and the Lord did more than we asked or imagined with respect to this thing.
I caught myself thinking, “Oh, of course, because Caroline was praying for us. God listens to Caroline,” which he does, for two reasons. One is that she’s in Christ, as are we, and the other is that she asks. She prays. God ordains that we ask him for good things.
What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?
I really can’t think of anything this week. I’ve been so frazzled with moving stuff.
Yes. Get rid of books you don’t like. You don’t get special brownie points because you held onto a book because it’s a classic, if you didn’t like it.
“But it was hard! It’s a hard book and I should like it because it’s hard.”
I’ll just give the background, since people didn’t hear us talking before the podcast. I got rid of about 40 books that were in my personal library, ahead of moving 2,000 miles across the country. I went through and looked at them and I went, “I didn’t like you. I don’t need to keep you. If I have children, Lord willing, and they are going to be homeschooled, I will buy this book again because it is $2 at any used bookstore. I don’t care about it now.”
Just don’t punish yourself with high culture because you think that it’s the cultural thing to do, to punish yourself with it. That’s my recommendation.
We’re following Augustine’s lead in that, too. He’s like, “The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, they’re really trash.”
I’m going to recommend one that I don’t think that we’ve recommended, and I’m not sure how we’ve missed it, and that would be The Screwtape Letters. If you’ve never read them, that first of all seems hard to believe, but you’re listening to us talk so you obviously have some kind of literary intellectual theological taste, but it’s possible you haven’t, so just a warning. These are letters written by a senior devil to a junior devil.
Yeah, the in-story story. The set-up is that Lewis claims to have discovered letters written from an older devil to a younger devil explaining how to tempt human beings. You say, “Well, that sounds perverse!” In fact, one dear misunderstanding pastor wrote in and complained to Lewis that the advice contained in them seemed positively diabolical.
But what it does is it lets us see from the other side. All the darks are white and all the whites are dark, but in the process we get a good lesson in how human nature works. You don’t even have to believe in the devil for it still to show you, “Yeah, that is how human minds and human nature actually operate, isn’t it?”
It’s a good reminder of our own sins and of the psychological devices that we and all human beings use to try to hide those sins, to get around them, to not deal with them. Most people enjoy them. Every now and then I run into somebody who just absolutely abhors the book and doesn’t get it or would rather get his gospel lesson from a different way, so that’s fine. It’s not inspired.
Yeah, Tolkien didn’t like a lot of things that Lewis did, starting with Narnia. Anyway, that’s C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.
It is excellent, if you get the chance. It’s almost a one-man show. They have Screwtape and a silent part that is his amanuensis, sort of a little goblin that just gives him feedback.
When I was in college I heard one gentleman, whose name I do not remember anymore, but he did a presentation of Screwtape. It was very good, but he would be older than me so it’s probably not related. But it’s the kind of thing that would be obvious to do. It’s worth your time. If you haven’t read The Screwtape Letters, as Bryan says, it’s $3 in any Goodwill bookstore. Keep looking till it shows up.
Recommendation: The Screwtape LettersSounds good. Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a joy. It has not been a burden – a thing that is worthwhile because it is hard. It is worthwhile because it is fun and also worthwhile.
Cheers. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.
If you’d like to send us an email, you can do so at [email protected]. You can check out our show notes at our website at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. You can find a list of all the things that we’ve mentioned – at least most of the things that we’ve mentioned, the things that I catch in my editing process.