Hope in the Wilderness . . . .

Morning praises:

1. Birdsongs, a symphony to the early morning sunrise.
2. Fresh air filling my lungs.
3. Your Spirit won’t let me go . . .❤️

Your Word to me:

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.
For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun!
Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness,
I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.”
Isaiah 43:18, 19

My response:

As I reflect on God’s encouragement to Isaiah, I am struck that He is promising what I crave: HOPE in the bewildering times we live in.  Each day I am shocked by what I read in the news, thinking to myself, “Surely, we can go no lower!” Yet with every passing news report, I am proved wrong as the once unthinkable becomes commonplace.

The first definition of the word, wilderness, in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary describes what I imagine the forty-years the Israelites experienced: “a tract or region uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings.” They were isolated in the wilderness but God was watching over them.  Ultimately, they made it through the wilderness to the land promised to Israel by God as they learned to follow and trust in Him.

But there’s another side to wilderness I hadn’t considered. Merriam-Webster’s refers to a “situational wilderness”. The illustration given to clarify the meaning is a quote from novelist Norman Mailer that refers to: “those moral wildernesses of civilized life.” Living in a culture that has jettisoned God as our moral compass and embraced this dark new age, we find ourselves mired-down in a nightmarish moral wilderness of our own making–becoming increasingly uncivilized with every passing day.

These words of warning written 2000 years ago (underscoring the fact that there is nothing “new” about the age we live in) by the Apostle Paul, ring truer with every passing day:

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.
People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud,
abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,
without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control,
brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—
having a form of godliness but denying its power.
Have nothing to do with such people.”
II Timothy 3:1-5