SERIES: Exodus: Moses, God’s Man for the Hour
The Desert Experience
SPEAKER: Michael P. Andrus
Introduction: We lived for nearly ten years in Wichita, Kansas. During that decade we made perhaps two dozen trips across western Kansas and through eastern Colorado to the Rocky Mountains. We either took highway 54 through Pratt, Dodge City, Garden City (a place seriously misnamed), Lamar, and Rocky Ford, or we drove north to Salina to pick up I-70 and traveled through Russell, Hays, Oakley, Colby, Goodland (another serious misnomer), and Limon. There’s not a lot to say about western Kansas or eastern Colorado. They do have the world’s largest hand-dug well in Greensburg, the world’s largest prairie dog in Colby, and the world’s largest ball of twine somewhere out there. And there’s Boot Hill in Dodge City, certainly one of the sorriest tourist attractions in the western hemisphere. If you don’t like wheat or heat or tumbleweed there’s not a lot to enjoy other than a lot of nice people. Common weather in the summer is 105 with the wind gusting to 30. In the winter the wind chill beats anything ever experienced here in St. Louis.
So why did we go there every single year, sometimes two or three times a year? Because that was the only way to get from Wichita to the gorgeous beauty, the rushing streams, and the cool, clean air of the Rockies. We didn’t just tolerate western Kansas and eastern Colorado; we almost learned to enjoy it, primarily because driving through it for eight hours heightened our appreciation of the mountains so much.
Now I realize that a few of you who grew up out there may not share my personal evaluation of your homeland. In fact, my wife was born and spent her early years in Hays, Kansas, and she sees something good about the place I’ve never quite been able to understand. I also recognize that those of you from that area may not be able to appreciate the analogy I’m about to make to the desert or the wilderness, but then you are here and not still out there, which must say something.
Deserts and wildernesses are rarely places people go to stay; they are places to pass through. Sitting between Egypt and the Promised Land is the Sinai Peninsula—one huge desert—far more desolate, I must admit, than anything you’ll find in Kansas. We noted last Lord’s Day that following the exhilarating experience of the Crossing of the Red Sea on dry ground, Moses and the Israelites worshiped the God who had demonstrated His grace and power in such a remarkable and unique manner. They did so by singing the profound hymn we examined in Exodus 15. I feel sure that most of the Israelites were truly thankful to God for His deliverance from slavery. They knew the desert lay ahead of them, but I suppose most of them believed that they would cross it in a few short weeks and occupy Canaan before school started in the Fall.
Not so. God had much to teach them that could only be learned in the desert. So instead of leading them on the shortest route from Egypt to Canaan, He led them south on a route that would take considerably more time.
Israel’s desert experience, the time from the Exodus to Kadesh Barnea, was designed by God to prepare them for the Promised Land.
The desert was not optional. It was not a mistake on God’s part. It was not, at least in the beginning, a chastisement for Israel’s sin. It was not “plan B.” It was plan A, designed for the benefit of His people.
The desert was beneficial. It was beneficial in a number of ways.
1. They learned about the character of God. I would have to say that the Israelites did not know God very well after 400 years in Egypt. That’s not God’s fault, it was theirs. They had become terribly apathetic through their prosperous years in Egypt, and then when prosperity turned to slavery they were so numbed by their pain and misfortune that for a long time they still refused to call out to God in humility and repentance. He became almost a stranger to them. Eventually God got their attention, sent them Moses to confront Pharaoh, and finally delivered them by opening the Red Sea. But still the Israelites didn’t know God in the way He desired to be known. He wanted to teach them much about His holiness, His love, His mercy, His faithfulness, His truth—not in the abstract but in concrete situations. The desert gave ample opportunity for God to do this.
Turn with me to Exodus 15:22-27, where we find the very first incident in the desert recorded for us.
Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water. 23 When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.) 24 So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?”
25 Then Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became fit to drink.
There the Lord issued a ruling and instruction for them and put them to the test. 26 He said, “If you listen carefully to the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.”
27 Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.
Can you see God’s character coming through? When they were without water, He provided it. When the water turned out to be bitter, He purified it. When they needed rest, He provided springs and palm trees for them to camp by. I like F. B. Meyer’s words:
“What a God is ours! He overthrows our foes in the sea and disciplines his people in the desert. He leads us over the burning sand, and rests us in luxuriant glades. He permits disappointment at Marah, and surprises us at Elim. He leads us by a cloud; but He speaks to us by a human voice. He counts the number of the stars; but He feeds his flock like a shepherd. He chooses a thundercloud as the canvas on which He paints his promise in rainbow hues. He proves by Marah, and at Elim recruits us.”
Then he says, “There is no desert-march without an Elim at last.”[i]
I don’t know what desert you may be going through this morning, but I believe with all my heart that God has an oasis ahead. How long will it take you? It depends a great deal upon the route you take and the attitude you adopt. The quickest way to get there is the way of faith and obedience.
Marah and Elim were just the beginning of God’s educative process for His people. In chapter 16 when the Israelites found themselves without food, He gave them manna from heaven, and in chapter 17 when they were again without water, He told Moses to strike a rock and water came pouring out. Impossible situations were just disguised opportunities for God to demonstrate His love and faithfulness.
We have seen so far that the desert experience enabled Israel to learn about God. The second major benefit of the desert was that the people might receive revelation from God.
2. They received revelation from God. It was crucial for them to see God in action, protecting them and leading them, but they also needed to see God on paper. That is, they needed to have a corporate knowledge of God and His will that could be passed down from generation to generation. They needed to have laws and statutes that were clear and unambiguous so that anarchy would not prevail in this greatest mass movement of people in history, and so that they would not become absorbed into the pagan culture of Canaan once they arrived in the Promised Land. So, God led them south through the desert to Mt. Sinai, where he had them camp for almost a year and where he gave them not only the Ten Commandments but an entire ethical and legal code to govern them in the future.
Could not God have given them His Law in Egypt before they started or waited until they reached the Promised Land and given it to them there? I think not. In Egypt they were not self-governing and might have scoffed at a legal code which had no authority. When they arrived in Palestine they would be consumed with military and economic problems associated with the defeat of the Canaanites and would not have time to wrestle with constitutional issues. But in the desert they had nothing to do but listen to God and absorb the principles of theocratic government He offered them from Mt. Sinai.
3. They were humbled before God. Earlier in our service I read from Deut. 8. Listen again to these words:
“Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
God’s people are often in need of being humbled. It’s so easy for us to begin to think of our successes as our own accomplishments and to begin to take pride in our careers, our homes, our cars, our families. Sometimes it takes an encounter with the desert before we are willing to acknowledge that “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:17) The desert forces God’s people to look to Him for sustenance and strength, for there is no other source in the desert.
The desert was difficult but not devoid of God’s grace. Our tendency may be to minimize Israel’s suffering in the desert. We must resist doing that. Here’s a pastoral people who had lived for 400 years in the breadbasket of the richest nation on earth, and even while they were slaves toward the end of that period, they never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from. Israel lost all its earthly security when it entered the desert. Water had to be provided miraculously; food had to be provided miraculously; protection from the weather had to be provided miraculously; protection from enemies had to be provided miraculously; guidance had to be provided miraculously.
And before you say, “How could life be any easier than that?”, stop and think about how much you relish doing things for yourself and your family and not having to lean on outside sources. Think about the extent to which you would go before accepting welfare, and then try to translate that into Israel’s resistance to having everything provided for them by God. Then there were emotional difficulties related to the unknowns that lay ahead of them. Probably only a handful of them had ever set foot in Canaan. What would they find there? How would they defeat the powerful tribes who lived there? Would the land be fertile? How would their herds fare?
But despite the enormous difficulties presented by the desert, it was not devoid of God’s grace. In fact, God’s grace can be seen in two principal ways—through the cloud and the pillar of fire—and through God’s appointed man of the hour—Moses.
1. The cloud and the pillar of fire. We first read about them in Exodus 13:21: “By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.”
Just how important were the cloud and the fire? The desert in the Sinai Peninsula can easily reach a temperature of 140 degrees in the day and can dip to 30 degrees at night. You will recall, perhaps, that the greatest logistical problem in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm was providing several gallons of water per day for a half million men scattered over the Arabian desert. It took all the ingenuity of the most technologically advanced nation on earth to meet those requirements. Moses was leading 5 or 6 times as many people, with no desalination plants at his disposal, no helicopters, no water trucks, no refrigeration, no plastic containers, and no cities to use as staging areas.
How could they possibly survive? They couldn’t have survived were it not for the cloud by day. It provided them protection from the relentless sun, and it undoubtedly cooled the temperatures by 40-50 degrees so that the water requirements were nowhere near as high as they might have been. And it may have rained on them periodically, though God was not limited to clouds for rain—He could bring water out of a rock, and He did so on several occasions. The pillar of fire provided warmth at night as well as protection from wild animals and enemy tribes. Furthermore, the cloud and fire did two other things for the Israelites. They were a constant reminder of God’s presence with them, and they provided guidance for them on their journey. Look at Numbers 9:15-23:
“On the day the Tabernacle, the Tent of the Testimony, was set up, the cloud covered it. From the evening till morning the cloud above the tabernacle looked like fire. That is how it continued to be; the cloud covered it, and at night it looked like fire. Whenever the cloud lifted from above the Tent, the Israelites set out; wherever the cloud settled, the Israelites encamped. At the Lord’s command the Israelites set out, and at his command they encamped. As long as the cloud stayed over the tabernacle, they remained in camp. When the cloud remained over the tabernacle a long time, the Israelites obeyed the Lord’s order and did not set out. Sometimes the cloud was over the tabernacle only a few days; at the Lord’s command they would encamp, and then at this command they would set out. Sometimes the cloud stayed only from evening till morning, and when it lifted in the morning, they set out. Whether by day or by night, whenever the cloud lifted, they set out.”
But in addition to the miraculous cloud and pillar of fire God graciously provided them a leader who was up to the difficulties presented by the desert—Moses.
2. Moses, God’s appointed intercessor. One of the most fascinating things about Israel’s wilderness wanderings is the role played by Moses as an intercessor for God’s people. Right here in Exodus 15 we first find him ministering in this capacity as he cries out to the Lord when the people grumble against him saying, “What are we to drink?” But this is only the first of ten recorded times the people turn against God, incur His wrath, and are spared only by the incredible appeals of Moses.
Let me share just one of those examples, one that is familiar to many of you. It is found in Exodus 32 and occurs after Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, only to find the people worshiping a golden calf. God was so angry that he told Moses in verse 9,
“‘I have seen these people, and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.’ But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. ‘O Lord,’ he said, ‘ why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth”? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.”‘ Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.”
Moses was a gift of God’s grace to a people undeserving of someone so patient.
The desert was temporary. God’s design for Israel was that they spend about 18 months in the desert: two months from Egypt to Sinai, a little over eleven months in Sinai, and a few more months to Kadesh Barnea, the gateway to the Promised Land. That’s all. In 1895 Andrew Murray, a renowned man of God, was in England, suffering from a terribly painful back injury. One morning while he was eating breakfast in his room, his hostess told him of a woman downstairs who was in great trouble and wanted to know if he had any advice for her. Andrew Murray handed her a paper on which he had been writing and said, “Just give her this advice I’m writing down for myself. It may be that she’ll find it helpful: I am here (1) by God’s appointment, (2) in His keeping, (3) under His training, (4) for His time.”
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“For His time”—that’s not bad advice. The desert experiences God designs are always temporary. Most are shorter than what God designed for Israel; a few are longer. But all are designed for a purpose, and when that purpose is realized, the desert ends, unless for reasons of unbelief and disobedience, the desert experience must be prolonged. Unfortunately, that’s what happened to Israel, as we see in the second major movement in the desert experience, that it had to be prolonged because of unbelief.
Israel’s desert experience was prolonged because of unbelief.
Some of you will recall from previous Bible study that when Israel arrived at Kadesh-Barnea, God ordered them to send 12 spies into the land to see if it weren’t all He claimed it was. When they returned, they confirmed that it was everything God claimed and more, but instead of seeing God’s power as sufficient to seize the land, 10 of the 12 spies could think only of the giants and grasshoppers they had seen, the former being the inhabitants of the land and the latter being themselves in comparison, and they gave a bad report to the people. The Israelites in turn grumbled against Moses and Aaron and said, “If only we had died in Egypt, or in this desert! We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.” (Numbers 14:1-4).
This time God again responded to Moses’ passionate intercession but with one difference. In Numbers 14:20 we read, “The Lord replied, ‘I have forgiven them, as you asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of the men who saw my glory and the miraculous signs I performed in Egypt and in the desert but who disobeyed me and tested me ten times—not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers.” Only Caleb and Joshua were spared from this disciplinary edict. God did not accomplish this discipline by slaughtering all 600,000 men in a plague; instead, He just extended the time in the desert for 38 more years until all the men over 20 died of natural causes. That means there was an average of about 100 funerals a day when one considers that some of the women and children undoubtedly died as well. This was plan B.
It’s tragic when God’s people reject His will for their lives and must settle for second best, or third best, or sometimes worse. Now I’m not suggesting that for every decision in life we have to make there is a “bull’s-eye” which we must hit, or we will be cursed from here on out. But I am suggesting that when God makes His will clear to us, as He did here to the Israelites, rejection of that will results in negative consequences that we may have to live with the rest of our lives.
Israel’s desert experience is illustrative of the Christian’s walk.
I want you to think of the Crossing of the Red Sea as representing the believer’s conversion. When a person accepts Jesus Christ as his Savior he thereby escapes the slavery of sin and joins the Company of the Committed on their way to Heaven; the Promised Land, I suggest, represents the place of spiritual maturity which God desires all of His children to possess—not perfection but a place of joy, and faith, a place where the fruit of the Spirit are in evidence, a place where sin is confessed immediately and short accounts are kept with God, a place where ministry to others is a priority, and a place where Jesus Christ is Lord.
In between conversion and that place of spiritual maturity is a desert, and it’s there for every single believer. It’s not optional. No one can reach the Promised Land from Egypt without crossing the desert. That’s important—the desert is not an indication that you’re evil or abnormal. In other words, spiritual growth and maturity take time and inevitably involve trial and tribulation.
Secondly, the desert must be seen as beneficial. It gives you a chance to learn about God’s character, particularly His absolute faithfulness. It also gives you a chance to hear and believe His revelation—the Scriptures. Paul spent several years saturating himself with the Old Testament Scriptures before he was ready for ministry. We too need to have time alone with the Word of God. Then the desert also has a way of humbling us before God, an absolutely necessary experience if we are going to be useful vessels in His service.
Thirdly, we need to learn that the desert is difficult but not devoid of God’s grace. God never promised us a rose garden. While many of the difficulties we face in the desert portion of our lives are difficulties of our own making, some are obstacles that God puts in our path or allows to be put there to test our faith. But even in the worst of times, His grace is sufficient. While we do not have a cloud and a pillar of fire to lead us, we do have the Holy Spirit of God who is given not only as our guide, but also as our comforter and friend. God has also given us fellow believers to intercede for us and to disciple us. Your “Moses” may be a parent, or a friend, or a pastor, or a Bible study leader.
Finally, we need to understand that the desert designed by God is temporary. While it is probably of different lengths for different people, I am personally convinced that God never designs it to last 40 years. If you have been in a spiritual desert for decades, it’s probably because of unbelief and sin, not because God designed it that way. It doesn’t take decades to learn to read the Bible, pray, and witness; it doesn’t take decades to begin to demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit; it doesn’t take decades to begin using one’s spiritual gifts.
Conclusion: I was so encouraged to hear Sarah Bergman’s testimony this morning. She came to know Christ last November and in June she was in Romania leading scores of people to Christ and is already planning to use her training as a dietician in career service for Jesus Christ. I think that ought to be more normal than abnormal. Not that Sarah has arrived yet. I’m sure she’d be the first to admit she has much yet to learn. But at least she’s moving in the right direction.
Isn’t it time to stop wandering in the desert and seize your spiritual inheritance? Is there a better time than right now to begin? There’s really nothing mystical about it. We don’t need a vision or a miracle. We just need to believe God and live in obedience to His Word. We just need to surrender our lives to the power and control of His Holy Spirit by faith. You know, most of probably don’t have another 38 years to wait.
DATE: July 14, 1991
Tags:
God’s attributes
Spiritual desert
Humility
Intercession
Unbelief
[i] F. B. Meyer, Moses, 92, 93.