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The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea before they entered the promised land. In the global scheme of their history, it was a relatively short time, a single generation. Yet that history provided the material for an entire book of the Pentateuch, the book of Numbers, whose Hebrew name is “In the wilderness,” after its first word in Hebrew. The wilderness is also the context in which much of the material in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy was given to Moses. As a result, subsequent Old Testament authors looked back on this period of Israel’s history as being of great relevance for their own times and places. The writer of Psalm 95, for instance, warned his hearers against imitating that wilderness generation in testing the Lord (Ps. 95:8–11). Therefore, the Apostle Paul was hardly breaking new ground when he told the Corinthians that Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness “took place as examples for us” (1 Cor. 10:6). So what are the lessons that we should learn from this pivotal period in Israel’s journey?
the lord’s purposes in life’s wilderness
The first lesson from Israel’s time in the wilderness comes from recognizing the fact that it was the Lord Himself who brought the people there. The wilderness through which Israel journeyed was a harsh and unforgiving environment. Food and water were extremely scarce, as were other resources necessary to sustain life. It was certainly not “a land flowing with milk and honey,” as the Lord had described the land of Canaan that He would give His people (Ex. 3:8). Yet journeying through the wilderness was far from the only, or even the obvious, route by which Israel could have traveled from Egypt to the promised land. There was a short, direct coastal road that the Israelites could have taken that would have brought the people into Canaan in the space of mere days or weeks.
Yet the Lord chose not to take Israel that way, “lest the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt” (13:17). The Egyptians had a series of forts along the way that hugged the coastline, and the Philistines who inhabited the coastal plain farther east were formidable warriors. Even though the Lord could easily have overcome these obstacles just as He had parted the Red Sea, He chose instead to lead His people through the Red Sea and out into the wilderness. The wilderness was His good plan for their lives.
In the same way, Israel’s time in the wilderness shows us that the Lord’s wonderful plan for our own lives may include times of profound trial, suffering, and difficulty as well as times of blessing and plenty. The Lord is our Shepherd when He brings us into wild and desolate places in life as well as when He leads us beside still waters and in green pastures (see Ps. 23). These may all be the routes that He has chosen to bring us to our ultimate place of rest.
Specifically, Israel’s experiences in the wilderness revealed to the people their hearts in a way that their experiences of triumph did not. When the Lord parted the Red Sea in front of the Israelites and drowned the Egyptian chariots and horsemen behind them, Israel seemed thoroughly convinced of the Lord’s power to protect them and provide for the nation (Ex. 14). The people were eager to praise the Lord in the aftermath of a victory in which they had not been required to lift a finger against the Egyptians (15:1–21). Yet within three days in the wilderness, when they struggled to find water and then came to Marah, where the only water was too bitter to drink, their hearts were uncovered as they also became bitter against the Lord (vv. 22–24). This was Israel’s first test in the wilderness (v. 25), and the people failed it comprehensively.
The persistent pattern of Israel’s grumbling against the Lord that began at Marah marked out much of the next forty years. The people grumbled about the lack of food (Ex. 16:2–3), the variety of food (Num. 11:4–6), the lack of water (Ex. 17:1–3), and ultimately even the promised land itself (Num. 13–14), after the majority of the spies who had been sent to explore the land brought back a negative report of the viability of an invasion (13:27–29). The Lord’s concern about the Israelites’ changing their minds when they saw warfare and desiring to go back to Egypt was fully justified. An entire generation of Israelites were condemned to die in the wilderness as a result of their unbelief (14:28–30).
It was not until that unbelieving generation was finally replaced by a new, believing generation that progress could be made and the land that God had promised their fathers could be given to them. Indeed, the book of Numbers is structured as the story of two generations: an unbelieving generation that was judged for its sin and died in the wilderness (Num. 1–25), and a second generation of faith that ends the book standing on the verge of entering the land (chs. 26–36).
The second generation’s faith is exemplified in the story of Zelophehad’s daughters, whose account brackets the narrative of the second generation in Numbers 27:1–11 and 36:1–12. Their father died in the wilderness, and it seemed that his line would come to an end with him since he had no sons to inherit his portion in the land of Canaan (27:3). That wouldn’t have bothered most of the first generation of wilderness Israelites, who didn’t believe that there was any serious likelihood of Israel’s inheriting the land. Zelophehad’s daughters, however, not only believed in God’s promise that there would be an inheritance, but they were bold enough to go to Moses and ask that they might join in sharing it. At the Lord’s command, the normal rules of inheritance, by which property went only to sons, were suspended, and these bold young women’s faith received its fitting reward (27:5–11).
Like Zelophehad’s daughters, we as Christians need to trust in God’s promises and pursue full obedience to His Word, whether or not it seems to those around us likely to work out. Faith in God’s faithfulness always receives its fitting reward in due season, and the women’s faith stands as a model for us to emulate. Part of the reason that God brings us into the wilderness is to bring us face-to-face with difficulties that will allow our faith in Him and His promises to be tested and to grow.
the lord’s presence with his people
The second major lesson from the wilderness wanderings was the Lord’s presence dwelling among His people. The Lord had certainly been with His people before the exodus. He was with the patriarchs while they sojourned in Canaan (e.g., Gen. 26:3), and He heard Israel’s groaning in Egypt under Pharaoh’s oppression, which led to His appearing to Moses at the burning bush and sending him to deliver the people from their bondage (Ex. 3:7–10). Yet God’s presence with His people reached a new level in the wilderness. The Lord revealed Himself to Moses in fire and smoke on Mount Sinai, giving the Israelites His law to guide their behavior (chs. 19–24). But He also dwelled with them in a special way in the tabernacle, an ornate tent that He gave detailed instructions for building in the latter half of the book of Exodus (chs. 25–40). In the ancient Near East, the king’s tent would typically be at the heart of the camp as his people went out to war, which is where the tabernacle was located during Israel’s travels. The Lord, the King of Israel, would, as it were, share the people’s sufferings as they wandered throughout the wilderness, going with them as they journeyed, camping where they camped, and moving on when they moved on.
The ark of the covenant, a box covered in gold and topped with cherubim, was situated at the heart of the tabernacle, in the Most Holy Place (see ch. 25). It represented the footstool of the Lord’s invisible throne, which was situated above the cherubim (Ps. 80:1), so that Moses could receive guidance from the Lord at the entrance to the tent whenever it was necessary (Ex. 29:42). The Lord also went ahead of His people in the form of a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, guiding them when to stay longer in the place where they were camping and when to move on to the next location (Num. 9:15–23). In this way, the people had the Lord’s direction and protection on every step of the journey in a way that was radically different from the experience of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This identification of the Lord with the sufferings of His people throughout their wilderness sojourn points forward to His even fuller identification with us in the incarnation. In the prologue to John’s gospel, when John tells us that the Word became flesh and “dwelt” among us, he chooses a verb related to the Greek noun used to describe the tabernacle: Literally, we might say, the Word “tabernacled” among us (John 1:14). Jesus truly is “Immanuel” (God with us; Matt. 1:23), experiencing all the difficulties and sorrows of life in this wilderness world alongside us. Indeed, as Matthew’s gospel makes clear, Jesus personally reprised Israel’s history as a child, going down to Egypt and surviving a king’s genocidal threat to baby boys (Matt. 2:13–15). Having returned from Egypt, Jesus then underwent baptism, a symbolic death and burial that parallels Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea (Matt. 3:13–17; see 1 Cor. 10:2), before going out into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, paralleling Israel’s forty-year wilderness wanderings (Matt. 4:1–11). There in the wilderness, Jesus faced three temptations that matched Israel’s temptations, but whereas Israel failed repeatedly, Jesus perfectly obeyed in His wilderness trial, never grumbling or complaining against the Lord. Instead, He faithfully quoted Scripture to the devil, showing His constant dependence on God’s Word. Jesus rewrote Israel’s story, as it were, replacing the nation’s failure and the judgment of death that it merited with an obedience that merits life for Himself and for all those who are His people.
god’s faithfulness, his forgetfulness, and ordinary days
Numbers 33 is an odd passage, one that you might be tempted to pass by in your daily Bible reading. The reason is obvious: It is simply a list of place-names where the Israelites camped in their wilderness wanderings. Yet it would be a mistake to ignore it. After all, the chapter begins by telling us that the Lord specifically commanded Moses to write down this list of place names for Israel to read (v. 2), so He must have had a good reason for including it in Scripture. What is that purpose, though?
If you look closely at the list of place-names, interesting details start to emerge. Some of the place-names have additional details about what happened there. These turn out to be the places where the Lord intervened to bless His people: Rameses, where the people of Israel went out triumphantly from their captivity (v. 3); Pi-hahiroth, where they crossed the Red Sea (v. 8); Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees to meet their needs (v. 9); and so on. As they read this list of place-names, the Israelites would continually have been reminded of the Lord’s faithfulness to protect them and provide for them in the wilderness. These place-names were “ebenezers,” like the memorial stone that the Israelites erected in 1 Samuel 7:12, perpetual reminders that “till now the Lord has helped us.”
Yet the list also mentions many other places where Israel rebelled against the Lord. It includes Marah and Rephidim, where the Israelites grumbled about the lack of water (Num. 33:8, 14); Kibroth- hattaavah, where they complained about having no meat (v. 16); and so on. There is no mention, however, of any of these sinful grumblings in Numbers 33. If this list were the only record of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, we would never know that the people had sinned. This reminds us of the Lord’s intentional forgetfulness. He does not store up our sins in a book, waiting to throw them back in our faces at an opportune moment; rather, He takes His people’s sins and transgressions and removes them from us as far as the east is from the west (Ps. 103:12). As the psalmist puts it: “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared” (Ps. 130:3–4).
The third category of place-names in the list of Numbers 33 is the locations where, as far as we know, nothing of significance happened; this would include places such as Dophkah and Alush (Num. 33:12–13). These places remind us that life is not simply made up of triumphant experiences of the Lord’s provision and humbling moments of our failure and sin but also includes its share of what we might call “plain-vanilla Tuesdays.” These are the days when we are engaged with the stuff of ordinary life, days that may seem at the time insignificant but that are all part of our journey through the wilderness of life. In Numbers 33, these places, too, are included in the list, making the total number of campgrounds that are recorded forty-two. This is not a random number but represents six times seven, leaving the new generation of Israel on the brink of the seventh seven, the Sabbath rest of life in the promised land. There Israel would experience, in typological form, the blessing that awaits each of us at the end of our journey through this wilderness world: life in the land that God has prepared for us, the land flowing with milk and honey.
Our journey through life is also one that Jesus has triumphantly pioneered ahead of us (Heb. 12:2). In His humanity, Jesus experienced the Lord’s provision of His every need as the Good Shepherd who led Him to green pastures and beside still waters (Ps. 23:2–3). Jesus also found the Lord to be His Good Shepherd in the darkest of valleys in life, guarding Him from all dangers (v. 4). And Jesus has now entered the heavenly banquet prepared for all His people by the Lord, with their cup running over and no need ever to leave (vv. 5–6). That provides us, His people—the present-day “church in the wilderness”—with great assurance for our own individual journeys. Jesus Christ knows the difficulties and challenges that we face and accompanies us through them. More than that, He has triumphed over them all already, and His perfect perseverance is now counted for us in place of our often complaining and whining responses to life’s difficulties. All that is left for us to do is to persevere in faith, trusting in Jesus and looking to Him to provide for all our needs, until He welcomes us into His nearer presence forever.