A Table in the Wilderness
Far from moving in a straight line, faith’s journey climbs mountains, descends into valleys, and at times even reverses course. Which is why we find ourselves traversing a spiritual wilderness more often than we desire. Still, God is able to set a table in the wilderness.
Beset with challenges, our faith wavers when we feel imprisoned by our circumstances and heaven remains silent.
As I spent time with John the Baptist again in my yearly pilgrimage through the bible, God nourished my soul with a startling truth. John was at home in the wilderness, he preached and lived there. God even prepared a table in the wilderness for him, feeding him with locusts and wild honey.
After years of preparation and living all but alone with God in the wilderness, John gained notoriety with his preaching on the coming Messiah. Everyone spoke far and wide about “the Baptizer” and resorted to the wilderness listening for more and getting baptized.
John spoke bluntly, especially to the religious leaders about their sin, and at length his outspoken ways landed him in prison when he condemned Herod for marrying his brother Philip’s wife. (Luke 3:19-20)
In those days prisoners relied on friends and family to visit and bring them food and necessities. Yet we read in Matthew 4:12-16 his cousin, Jesus, the Messiah he preached, left the area after receiving word of John’s imprisonment.
If you check your biblical maps, Jesus headed in the complete opposite direction.
Knowing Jesus left, John must have felt the impact of a spiritual wilderness, unable even to be comforted by his cousin who he believed was the Messiah. After wrestling with his own doubts, he sends messengers to Jesus asking him outright if He is the Messiah.
In many of my own wildernesses, I wrestled with doubts about what I thought I believed about Jesus; wondering like John, where was Jesus?
When the messengers encountered Jesus with John’s question, instead of a simple “yes or no” answer, He tells them to return to John with a list of fulfilled Messianic prophecies from Isaiah 35:5-6, 61:1.
He exhorts them to tell John what they saw and heard: how the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and to the poor the gospel is preached. Of note, Jesus omits “and the captives are set free”, perhaps a cryptic message to John that he will not be released.
But then Jesus says almost as an afterthought, “Blessed is he who is not offended in me.”
The beatitudes were preached previously in the Sermon on the Mount, which John no doubt heard. Now it seems Jesus is sending one last beatitude to put all the pieces together for John.
Radical at their original preaching, the beatitudes called God’s followers to a lifestyle completely contrary to anything the religious leaders taught. A lifestyle which not easily embraced then or now.
Yet this last beatitude would have been a comfort to John, and indeed anyone who suffers as a result of following Christ.
How often have I “been offended” at God’s choices for my life, or the unpleasant results of living for Him?
When choosing to live for Him, I am deserted by family, or suffer other unjust treatment, do I doubt God or become bitter, questioning Him?
While few of us will be thrown into prison for following Christ, we still suffer in other ways. God’s choices for our lives often involve pain, trials and wilderness travels. Yet even there, He sets a table in the wilderness. Though in our despair God seems distant, He is not a God afar off, He does not say, “I know I have been there too”, He says, “I am here too.”
He sets a table in the wilderness with His Presence, and as we wrestle with the reality of the wilderness, we deepen our faith, reaping the blessing of true intimacy and fellowship.
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