Journey with Jesus #12

Here is the next Bible Study summary - Peace, Linda

Old Testament - Desert 06/18/09

Numbers 14:26-35 tells of the Israelites refusal to enter the land by attack from the south and Yahweh’s displeasure. As a result they have to endure 40 years in the wilderness, and the Promised Land is withheld until that generation had died. This is how the people, in retrospect, made sense of their time of rootless wandering –it was a lesson from God . During those forty years, however, the slaves liberated from Egypt became the people of Yahweh. Yahweh becomes known to them, distinct from other gods - the God who freed them from slavery, a God of justice in whom alone they trusted. The years in the desert became a period of transformation and changed meaning.

Hosea 2:14-23 was written in the 8th century BCE. Here the desert is no longer portrayed as a place of punishment. That time is understood as a time of passionate, first love. Yahweh seeks to recreate the honeymoon time in the desert, a time of intense relationship. God is the lover who is going to lure, tempt and seduce his wayward wife back into this relationship - just as Jesus (“my beloved”) is later impelled to go into the desert after his baptism. In Hosea the result of this allurement is a peace with the natural order, a new fertility and a banishment of weapons. It is the transformation of the Earth from wilderness to paradise.

There is another, darker, association of desert in the Old Testament. In Genesis 4: 10 the life blood of Abel cries out from the ground for justice and revenge. The ground becomes a voice of accusation for Cain. Cain is cursed from the ground – the ground will no longer bear fruit – instead he will become a wanderer in a place where nothing grows. Cain wanders on the earth, finally settling in the land of Nod (which means “wandering”). He lives a nomadic existence in a human desert as a result of his brother’s murder. He forfeits his relationship with God who is “hidden from his face”. Eventually Cain creates the first city in reaction to the intolerable wandering. The city gives a sense of place and meaning, born out of murder and alienation. God places a mark on Cain to stop endless reciprocal killings. Later, in Genesis 4:23-24, his descendant Lamech (seven generations after Cain and a bad guy) describes the relentless multiplication of violence: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged seven fold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” In other words the mark of Cain has only served to redouble violence. And cities remain centers of alienation and violence. The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is another attempt to give meaning to human existence. The Tower will be so tall that it will be visible for miles. It will provide a center of the landscape and so everyone will know their place. Although it is not named as part of a city it is obviously a centerpiece of civilization. It makes a statement “we are important” – like sky scrapers today. The early stories of Genesis describe human alienation, the absence of relationship – the real desert experience inside all of us.

In Isaiah 40 the physical desert is the place that brings us back into relationship with God. It is the way home – something to be desired, a place of hope and regeneration. In 40:1 Second Isaiah begins with the words “Comfort my people”. The desert is a place of consolation. It becomes God’s way of returning his people from exile. The desert is made a highway, a pleasant pathway and a fruitful journey. The desert again becomes the place where meaning is changed – a bad hostile environment transformed into a place of redemption. Isaiah 35 gives this changed meaning of desert. Here it is described as a place of renewed relationship with God and the place from which redemption comes. A place where the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the deaf hear and the lame leap like the deer. The desert is the place where the brokenness, the alienation, the desert within us is transformed and healed. In all four gospels the figure of John the Baptist fulfills this theme, the “voice crying in the wilderness” with which the gospel begins.