Exodus 16:1-16 "Glory in the Wilderness" Scott Hoezee

In a couple of weeks I will begin a four-week seminar led by Neal Plantinga in which we will explore how creative reading can inform the writing of sermons. I must be priming myself for that course already in that this morning I opened by mentioning two novels and tonight I am going to do the same thing. So from the world of fiction let me flash two sets of images onto your mental screens.

The first comes from Aldous Huxley's dark futuristic vision in Brave New World. Among other things Huxley imagined that in the future all of society will be massively engineered to avoid all suffering. Hence, the people in this brave new world tend to be placid, unflappable, and seemingly happy yet they cannot survive physically without the adrenalin that gets pumped into our systems when we are afraid or suffering in some measure. So to make up for their lack of normally produced adrenalin, the people of Huxley's future are shown receiving monthly adrenaline injections. Huxley seems to be hinting to his readers that perhaps a suffering-free state of placidness is somehow not just unhealthy but perhaps even sub-human. We need somehow to be able to experience the full range of life, including perhaps those less-than-pleasant times of suffering and pain.

A second image comes from Charles Dickens' classic, Great Expectations. If you have ever read this novel, then you know that you can never forget the bizarre figure of Miss Havisham. Years before Miss Havisham had been jilted on her wedding day--the groom simply never showed up. Ever since, Miss Havisham has shut herself up in a dark house and in the very room where the wedding reception was to have been held. By the time Dickens introduces her into this novel, she is now a very old lady but she still wears her wedding dress, now tattered and smelly and yellowed with age. Her wedding cake still sits on the buffet table, now desiccated, rotten, and rat-eaten. The clock on the wall is stopped at the precise hour and minute when the wedding was to have begun. Miss Havisham is a woman frozen in time, trapped by her suffering and unable to move on.

So here are two sets of literary images that detail two possible responses to the reality of suffering: we can try to avoid suffering altogether, pretend it's not real, and so lead a lifelong pursuit toward a pain-free existence of bliss. Or we can become so walloped by our pains and sufferings and disappointments in life as to become trapped by them. Probably we all know people who fit one of these two categories.

True, we don't really know anyone who has been engineered to be placid as in Huxley's novel nor do we know anyone who is actually as weird as Miss Havisham. But I'd wager that if we devoted some thought to it, most of us could think of someone we know who has never shed a tear in our presence, who is always sunny-side-up, whose response to even a terrible event in his or her life is always and ever along the lines of, "I'm fine! Don't worry about me!" Then again, we may also know someone who gnaws on an unhappy past event like a dog with a bone. If you spend more than three minutes talking to so-and-so, you will all-but certainly hear about how rotten life has been and about the way he got cheated out of something back in 1966 and he's never been the same since.

Denial and despair. But are those the only two possible reactions to the fact that life, each person's life, contains a fair share of hard knocks, letdowns, disappointments, and flat-out tragedies? Is there a third way to respond to suffering? Exodus 16 is an early biblical hint that there is such a third way: it is the way of growth, of maturity, of trusting in God even when (and maybe especially when) the bottom drops out. And it is the way of just possibly finding a deeper and stronger faith in God as a result. Let's explore for a little while tonight how and why Exodus 16 may be able to teach us something along these lines.

Last week we saw Israel singing and dancing by the shores of the Red Sea and then enjoying a mini-stretch of Paradise in a pretty place called Elim. But the march toward redemption could not stop there. A trek through the wilderness has to come first and no sooner does this journey begin and we find in Exodus 16 a nearly reverse portrait of the celebration and joy of the previous chapter. Sounds of timbrel, singing, and dancing have been replaced with sounds of muttering, grumbling, and the shuffling of sandaled feet through scorching sand. The result, once again, is some historical revisionism on the part of the people. Once more Egypt looms on the horizon of their imaginations and transforms itself into a kind of deluxe resort. The hunger in their bellies tricks their minds into remembering nothing about Egypt except steak dinners, fresh vegetables, and rich desserts.

So they complain to Moses, who tells the people that really they are complaining directly to Yahweh himself, and so they'd best watch their step. And indeed, Yahweh hears the people but curiously enough does not speak a harsh word here. True, God says that he will yet find a way to test the people in order to probe just how deeply their trust in him really runs. But at this early stage in Israel's desert wanderings God does not seem to blame the people for being hungry for some good food. Later on in Numbers 11 the picture will be different. By that time the people should have learned more trust and so then when they complain about a lack of food, it is God who gets fed up. You may recall that in Numbers 11 God will say things like, "You want meat to eat!? Fine! I'll give you meat and you will eat it and eat it and eat it until it comes out of your noses!" God then rains down birds on the camp but while the people are still chewing, God wipes out thousands of them.

But not here. Moses shows just a bit of frustration, anger, and pique, but not God. God knows the wilderness is a place of death. As we have noted so often before, in the Bible the wilderness usually gets described through the very same Hebrew phrase used to describe the pre-creation void and chaos in Genesis 1:1. When God's good creation fell into evil through the sin of Adam and Eve, a measure of chaos crept back onto the scene. Some of those good creation barriers that God set into place to protect and nurture human life eroded. Nowhere in the Old Testament (or the New Testament for that matter) can this return of chaos be more clearly seen than in the desert wastes. The wilderness was the place where the devil ran wild, where demons howled, where human life was threatened from every quarter.

The wilderness was a place of death. It was also the path the Israelites needed to take toward life in the Promised Land, but as commentator Terrence Fretheim has written, in the heat of the desert there would be many occasions when the very hope of the Promised Land would shimmer like no more than a desert mirage even as the people's faith would erode like the shifting sands while their dreams tattered along with their tents in the scorching desert winds. Why in the world would God redeem his people from Egypt only to cast them out into such a miserable and dangerous place? As John Timmer once wrote, the wilderness is the exact opposite of how we live our lives most days. Most of the time we are able to control our climate: we have thermostats, furnaces, storm windows, central air, refrigerators, and fresh drinking water from the tap. But the wilderness is the opposite: you do not control the climate, the climate controls you!

Not surprisingly, the people complain. This was not what they signed on for. This did not look like the "Promised Land" travel brochure that Moses and Aaron had shown to the people back in Egypt. They were tired, hot, thirsty, and hungry. They needed to know if it was possible that God was with them in this dreadful place, and on this occasion God seems only-too-happy to comply by showering the people with provisions.

But in the midst of all that, in Exodus 16:10, we encounter what may well be one of the most startling and vivid verses in the whole Bible. It is a verse that should be written in large letters upon each one of our hearts. For the people of Israel are hurting, they are hungry, they are no doubt afraid. Their suffering is getting bad enough that a good many, maybe even most of the people, have swivelled around and turned back toward the west, back toward Egypt, back toward what had been, for better or worse, their home. So what happens in verse 10? The Lord God himself gently takes the people by the shoulders and turns them around, away from the west, away from Egypt, and eastward toward the harsh and terrible wilderness. But what do the people see when they look toward this place of death? They see "the glory of the Lord!"

Just let this image sink in a moment. They looked into the hard times of life and that is where they saw God! They were not to look for God back in Egypt. They could not yet see far enough actually to glimpse any Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. That was truly a long ways off yet. Life after the Red Sea and after the mini-paradise of Elim was maybe not going to be everything it was cracked up to be. Yet when peering toward the place of death, they saw glory.

They would see this glory in the wilderness new every morning through the wondrous gift of the manna. God would feed his people bread from heaven even though they themselves were not in heaven but in a kind of living hell on earth. For some reason the wilderness would be the cradle in which God would nourish and nurture his people toward a greater maturity. But why? Why bring the people here? Why did God show his glory in the wilderness? Perhaps to foster dependence and trust. In the hard times of life, all our normal supports get knocked out from underneath us. If the people were going to go on, it would be only and ever because the Lord was with them. That's why they couldn't stockpile the manna. Think of it this way: if your retirement portfolio is fat and rich and full and in fine fiscal shape, how much time to you devote to praying about such a thing? If your pantry, cupboards, fridge, and freezer are as well-stocked as probably most all of ours are, you may not know just what you will have for dinner tonight but you will not spend any time in prayer to God asking that you will eat at all.

In the wilderness God showed his glory to Israel morning by morning so that there would ideally never be a day when anyone had cause to doubt why he or she was alive, why he or she had something to eat. We tend to think of the manna as only a gift. But you should have noticed that when manna is first introduced in this chapter, God at least sees it mostly as also a test. Sometimes in human interactions you may hear about what is called a "co-dependent relationship." In human terms this is usually a very unhealthy thing. A wife, for instance, may purposely allow her husband to stay addicted to something because she likes the fact that it makes him depend on her. She keeps him needy because she needs to be needed by him.

In human terms that's pretty unhealthy. But in terms of our relationship to God, we have a different problem: we are needy, we are dependent on him, but we tend to forget. We like to puff ourselves up as "self-made individuals" and we even treat this as a plus, not a minus. Finding ways to recall the truth of our relationship with God, and of our utter dependence on him, is not just being healthy but being spiritually well-oriented to reality.

Nobody wants to suffer in life. Only sick masochists actively pursue hurts and pains. All things being equal, the Lord God did not create us to suffer, either. God did not launch Adam and Eve into Eden with the promise of hunger and want. But in the post-Eden world, sickness, want, hunger, loss, and death are realities. That is not good news but there is some good news, some comfort to be found in the thought that those things do not by definition force God to abandon anyone. Indeed, it may well be that in the times of suffering, through the things in life that pain us, we find an ever-greater dependence on God getting fostered in our hearts.

None of us purposely moves out into the wilderness. But sometimes we get cast out into it anyway and the question then becomes, "Now what? Will I just deny this pain and act like it is no big deal? Will I get trapped in this pain and so curdle into a lifelong paralysis of faith and a deep bitterness? Or in and through my understandable laments and weeping will I nonetheless look for the glory of the Lord that may just be revealed to me even here, in this hellish place of death and sorrow?"

I am not trying to be simplistic in setting the matter in these terms. I myself am no stoic, no saintly hero who finds it easy to look for God when I'm hurting, and I'm not above thinking dark and grim and very unspiritual thoughts when in scorching places. When someone says something to me along the lines of, "God is building more character in you through this," my first response may well be, "Well then, O Lord, I'll be content with less character, thank you very much!" And let me be honest enough to admit that I've not been through the kind of deep wilderness valleys through which some of you have passed in your lives (and in which some of you may be even right this very moment). So please don't read me as being trite tonight. There are no pat answers, no easy solutions, no quick escape routes out of the desert wastes where we sometimes find ourselves.

All I can say is that to those who are willing to look hard and long into the wilderness places, there is that possibility of seeing the glory of the Lord even so. Because remember what happened, first thing, to the one called Jesus. If crossing through the Red Sea was, as we said two weeks ago, Israel's "baptism," then we can remember the baptism of also Jesus in the Jordan River at the hands of John the Baptist. Do you recall the vivid and utterly startling way the Gospel of Mark presents the scene to us? Jesus goes down into the waters of baptism, comes up out of the river only to have the Holy Spirit descend on him like a dove. But then, as I said once in another sermon, that dove suddenly transmogrifies into a kind of raptor bird with sharp and strong talons. Immediately, Mark tells us, instantly upon being baptized, the Holy Spirit of God hurled Jesus into the wilderness for forty days of temptation and danger. Immediately, just like for Israel. Very often after baptism come wilderness trials.

Jesus has been to the wilderness and so he is still there, in that terrible place, when we arrive there, too. It is still a disorienting place. The demons still howl into our ears there and we may well discover all kinds of reasons to question our faith, wish for a change, or just generally to turn back westward, back toward "Egypt," whatever "Egypt" may be for you. But the Spirit of God turns us eastward, toward the suffering, and may in the end somehow and against all odds reveal to us the glory of the Lord, of the Lord Jesus himself, of the One who was, oddly enough, glorified on a cross (of all places!). We don't need to deny the reality of hurts in life. We don't need to let suffering have the last word on everything. But if by the grace of God we can discover the love of Jesus made the more vivid to us even in the wilderness, then we may yet find a reason to give glory to God as he leads us along to that better country that is the kingdom of heaven. Amen.