How in These Difficult Days Do You Live in Such a Way That You're Stronger Than Before? Here's How.

11,000, 10,000, 12,000, 15,000, 9,000, 10,000, almost 14,000, and today 11,000 plus again...can you guess what those numbers represent?  If you’ve been following the news, you probably have a pretty good guess. Those are the daily coronavirus numbers for the past week in our state.   You don’t want to be in the national headlines for numbers like that.   But now we are.

It’s led my own family to do something unthinkable even a few weeks ago.  Sometime in early August, my wife and son will be moving to Quebec for the first half of the school year.   The Coronavirus is there too, but not near to what we face.  So there at least, my son can have a chance at a sort of normal school experience.  And hopefully, he’ll learn French too.   But I’m not looking forward to their absence nor what my wife will bear as a single parent. 

But, hey, we’re not alone.  Everyone faces challenges in these difficult days.  Some folks started work, and now they have to stop again, and they have bills to pay and food they need to put on their table.    Families are looking at a school year that starts on Zoom rather than a classroom, with all the challenges that entails.   And all of us hoping that at some point, we could leave our homes and have some semblance of normal are realizing those days could be a long time away.   

In other words, you find yourself in a wilderness of sorts, at least how the Bible describes the wilderness.    In the Bible when Jesus goes into the wilderness or the Israelites travel through the wilderness, they’re not going into the woods.  They’re going into the desert.  They’re going into a environment where life becomes much more difficult.  They’re heading into a place where the things you look to sustain your life get harder and harder to find.  And we may not be facing a literal desert. But we are facing a time where much of what we looked to sustain us is drying up. It’s getting harder and harder to find.  

So how do you make it through that wilderness?   How do you go through it so you come out stronger on the other side?   In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Psalm 81

What do you when you find yourself in the wilderness, in the desert so to speak?  How do you make it through?  No, not just that.  How do you come out better rather than bitter?  When you grow weary of the wilderness days, how do you find strength, sustenance, hope?   Here God tells you.  When you find yourself in the wilderness, you look to the rock.  

Now before we get to what that little cryptic phrase means, you may be wondering.  Why am I talking about the wilderness at all?   The word wilderness doesn’t even appear in this psalm.  But trust me, this psalm is telling you about the wilderness.  You can know that because the psalm tells you when to sing it. 

Do you see those words about blowing the trumpet at the new moon, then again at the full moon, about the festal day?  You had only one month in Israel, where you blew the shofar, the horn that signaled a holy day, two times in the same month.  That was at the Festival of the Tabernacles.   And that Festival was all about the wilderness.

For Israelites during this time would set up little tents (tabernacle so to speak) and actually live in them.  Why?  They were remembering.  They were remembering how for forty years as they wandered in the wilderness, they lived in tents like that. So, no Israelite needed to hear the word wilderness to know what the song was about.   

It would be like if I said to you.  As December approaches the end, let us light the candles and sing the songs.  Let us prepare for the coming of the light.   Now, I didn’t mention Christmas or Jesus, but you knew what I was talking about.   And anyone listening would know you sang this song at the one festival that celebrated the wilderness.

But why did God lead the Israelites to remember that?  Hey, let’s take time every year to celebrate forty years wandering in the desert.   It doesn’t sound like such a fun festival to me. 

But in that festival, one that Jewish folks still celebrate, God was making a powerful point.  God was reminding the Israelites, reminding you, you may think you’ve let the desert. But you’re still there.  In fact, this side of heaven, you’ll always be there. 

You see.  In the end, there is one thing you need to know about the desert.  The desert can’t sustain you.   Those Israelites only survived those forty years because God provided for them again and again.   On their own, in that harsh environment, they would have been toast.  And even if you have all the comforts of life this world can give you, God is saying, that won’t ultimately sustain your life either.  Why?   None of that lasts.   It will all fade away.  In the end, everything falls apart.  It’s even a physical law, the second law of thermodynamics.

Think about it like this.  Let’s say, you cook a chicken tonight, and you set it out on the table to cool.   Then you wait a couple of hours.  Well, it’s not going to be so good anymore.  Then you leave it there for a few days.   Now’s it going to be falling apart, stinking a lot.  And let’s say, you leave it there for a few weeks.  Now, that chicken has gotten so gross, it’s a health hazard.   Now, you’re not surprised about that.  That’s what happens.  Things deteriorate.  They fall apart. But when you look at that chicken, you’re looking at your own future.  You’ll fall apart too at some point like that. 

But it goes deeper than that.  Let’s say you get your family right where you want it, where everything’s perfect.  What happens?   Stuff starts falling apart.   You get the perfect job, then what happens.  Some part of it is not so perfect anymore.  Or you get the perfect face or body, trust me, that thing is gonna fall apart too.  

Yet, how often, do you look to something in this world to give the satisfaction, the meaning, the fulfillment you yearn to have?  Yet what happens?  It never lasts.  In the end, it all sort of falls apart.  It may be good, but it can’t provide ultimately what you need.   In other words, you’re still living in the desert.  Everyone is.  You are still living a life, where what you most deeply need, what can never fall apart, only God can provide.  

And times like these, where so much goes wrong, they just make that more clear.  They just help us to see what has always been the case.  What you need most, what you need for a life that is truly life, this world can’t give you.  Only God can.   In the end, this life is a sort of desert.

But in this desert, you can find a rock.  In fact, right in the middle of this song, it sings about that rock.  But again, you won’t see the word.  All you’ll see is God saying.  “I tested you at the waters of Meribah.” 

Now what happened at Meribah?  Two times in that desert place, when the Israelites were dying from thirst, God provided water from a rock.  And if you read in the Bible enough places, you know rocks mean more than that.   You’ll hear phrases like.  God, my rock and my refuge or you hide me in the shelter of the rock.   Or maybe you’ve heard that old gospel song.  Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.

But here’s the point.  You only go running to that rock, when your thirst drives you there.  So, again and again in the Bible, where do people most powerfully encounter God? They encounter God in the desert, in the wilderness.  So, these desert days, if you let them, lead you closer to the rock.  Why?   Only when you feel the heat of the desert, do you know how much you need the shade of the rock   Only when you’re dying of thirst, do you start looking for the water only God can give. 

I love the way the poet W.H. Auden put it.   He wrote:

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it

Until you have looked for it everywhere and foundnowhere That is not a desert.

The garden is right there beside you.  But it’s only the desert that drives you to see it.  

This week as I faced up to my family leaving, I’ve gotten closer to God.  And it’s not because God wasn’t close to me before.  It’s just I sense much I need him in these days, in the days I know that will come.   But God goes further in the psalm than just water.  At the very end, God says, I’ll not only give water.  I’ll give you honey.   I won’t just give you the water you need.  In that desert, I will provide more than you could have imagined.  Out of the most of rocky of times, out of the driest of places, I will bring joy, beauty, even sweetness.

But let’s be clear.  This doesn’t mean the desert isn’t the desert.  God isn’t saying look for the silver lining on every dark cloud.  No, dark clouds are just that dark clouds.  But God is saying if you look to me, out of that dark cloud, I can bring out sweetness. I can bring greater sweetness in you.

But that doesn’t magically happen.  Lots of people go through the desert, and they don’t come out better.  They come out bitter, broken, further away from life than before.   It’s why God pleads here.  O that my people would listen to my voice.   In other words, God is crying out.  Why don’t you come to me? Why don’t you come to the rock? 

But here’s the problem.  No matter how hard you try in the desert, you’ll have times you won’t go.  No, you’ll go somewhere else.  Or you’ll just get bitter and angry and frustrated.   You’ll be tested at the waters of Meribah.  And sometimes you’ll fail, maybe, even a lot of times.  But even then the water will come.  Why?

You see at Meribah, the Israelites failed the test too.  They got angry at God.  It says in most translations, they quarreled with God. But it went deeper.  Basically, they said to God. We want a divorce.  We’re done with you.   And Moses was scared.  He thought. God is going to go after these insolent, ungrateful jerks.   I delivered you out of slavery and you want to divorce me.  Take this, Israelites.  

It looks like it’s going to happen.   God tells Moses to take the rod he carries over to this rock.  And this rod that Moses carries.  God used that rob to deliver plagues in Egypt.  God used that rod to part the Red Sea.  But then God says.   I will go before you and as I do, strike the rock.  In other words, God is saying.  I will take the judgement that belongs to them.  And I will give them the water they need. 

God was saying.   Yes, they failed the test.  They do deserve a divorce from me. But I love them, and I will take the rod so that they may have the water.  And two thousand years later, a follower of Jesus, Paul said this “…that rock was Christ.”

What does that mean for you?   It means no matter how you fail in these desert days, God will not fail you.   It means no matter how many times you wander away, caught up in some mirage of fulfillment, God will not walk away from you.   It means no matter how you fall short in your relationship with God, with others, with yourself, God’s love will never fall short for you.   

And the more you realize that, you more you listen to the one whose love is like a rock, unshakable, unbreakable, the more God will work in you.  God will work in you on the days you pass the test, and on the days you fail it miserably.  And by God’s grace, God will not only bring you the water you need, God will create a sweetness in you that is more than you could have imagined.   You will discover the sweetness of Christ, not just before you, but living in you.  And you will know.  This is not your own doing.  It is the gift of God.