In The Wilderness: Welcome to the Wilderness

Join me. We're going to read from Numbers chapters one and two, and you could follow the first part in your bulletin, but chapter two is not in your bulletin. It's just on the screen. So if you'll join me with Numbers 1:1-3, then 45-46, and then 2:1-2 and verse 17. Let's join our voices and read God's word.

The Lord spoke to Moses in the tent of meeting in the wilderness of Sinai on the first day of the second month of the second year after Israel's departure from the land of Egypt. Take a census of the entire Israelite community by their clans and their ancestral families, counting the names of every male one by one. 603,550. The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron. The Israelites are to camp under their respective banners beside the flags of their ancestral families. They are to camp around the tent of meeting at a distance from a tent of meeting is to move out in the middle of the camps. They are to move out in the same direction. Each with his.

— Numbers 1:1-3, 45-46; 2:1-2, 17

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Numbers, everybody's favorite book of the Bible, right? You know, as part of my secret recipe for 2023 to grow our church into a megachurch by preaching Numbers. Right? No, to be real, Numbers is the rocks. Numbers is the rocks on which so many Bible reading plans die. If you make it through Leviticus and you get into Numbers, it kills a lot of resolutions to read straight through the Bible in a year. And it's because it's a hard book. It begins with a census, it ends with a census. It's got the title itself is not very appealing unless you're an accountant, right? Numbers. It's story after story of faithless Israelites. It's about history. Americans hate history. Henry Ford famously said, "All of history is bunk." And a couple of pundits have said, Americans only learn our history when we go to war with somebody. That's when we learn world history. There's so many things up against it. So why in the world would we begin this year studying Numbers? I mean, this is not going to turn our church into a megachurch. So why would we do this? It's filled with all these lists of people and it's history, and it's filled with unfaithful Israelites. Why?

I have three answers for you this morning.

First, Jesus loved the book of Numbers. It's one of the most quoted Old Testament books in the New Testament. And in a lot of senses, it's referred to so much that you can't really understand all that Jesus was up to if you don't understand the book of Numbers. So many important stories come back to play in Jesus' ministry.

Second, we're told in the New Testament that this was written for you. In fact, the way this is described, it's almost like this comes into your inbox with your name attached to it. This is what Paul says:

Our fathers were all under the cloud. They passed through the sea. They were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food. They drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a rock which followed them. That rock was Christ.

— 1 Corinthians 10:1-4

This is a book that's all about Jesus. It's a place where, surprisingly, we meet Jesus over and over and over again. We're going to see that throughout this book. But then he goes on and says this:

These things all happened to them as an example for us. They were written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the ages have come.

— 1 Corinthians 10:11

Do you understand what he's saying with that? He's saying, this is a book that's for you and it's a book that's about Jesus. This means that this ought to catch our attention. This is far from being like a musty, dusty old book of history. This is a book that is incredibly relevant.

My third reason is why I think we need Numbers. We need Numbers for right now. I can't think of a more relevant book to my life right now or to our lives as a church than this book. I'll tell you why in a few minutes.

The Wilderness

Here's my outline for this morning. Three points: the tool of the wilderness, the design of the camp, and the happy camper. Let's look at this together.

Maybe one thing that would help us actually dig into this book is to reclaim the original title of this book. Numbers is not the original title of this book. Numbers is a title we get from the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament that came down centuries later. And that's why it appears in your Bible that way. But the original title came from the first three words of the book: In the Wilderness. That's how it appears in Hebrew Bibles.

In the wilderness—and that tells us so much of what this book is about. Wilderness is a huge theme of the Bible. God seems to love to take people into the wilderness and I want you to think about this with me. The Israelites had already by this point spent over a year in the wilderness. We know later in the Bible, David flees into the wilderness fearful for his life from Saul. Jesus goes into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights.

But when we think of wilderness, of course, we think of a lot of your campers. You think of the North Carolina Mountains—that's our wilderness, right? So you think of tents and you think of stoves and cooking over a fire, you think of roughing it, you think of sleeping bags and s'mores and all the things, maybe more mosquitoes and poison ivy. Is that some of y'all? The indoorsy types among us? So we think of North Carolina wilderness, but we really need to stretch ourselves to understand what this wilderness is.

Midbar is the word in Hebrew for wilderness. We're going to come back to that over and over again. And it refers to another kind of wilderness altogether. In fact, the word midbar is also the word for desert. Here's a picture: in the book of Numbers, the people of Israel go through three different deserts or wilderness areas—the Wilderness of Sinai, the Wilderness of Paran, and the Wilderness of Sin. Now Sin is not a place, it's just the name of the place. It's not an English word, but I'm intentionally using the word wilderness here to distinguish it from what we think of as a desert, even though those words are interchangeable.

Because when we think of desert, we think sand dunes and camels. This is a place filled with rock walls and what's called a wadi, filled with wadis. Wadis are little canyons that are carved out by creeks. And most of the year, those are dry canyons. But during the rainy season, those become places for flash floods, and that's why they get carved out like this.

Now for ten, eleven months out of the year, this is what this looks like. But during the rainy season, rain doesn't fall here—it falls up in the Judean countryside and then the water rushes down through the Sinai Peninsula, Desert of Paran, Desert of Sin, and it can become a place therefore in the bottom that has vegetation in it. And especially during the rainy season, it can look like this. It can be green, but only for a couple months out of the year. It can be a place where wildlife come. This is the desert. Welcome to the desert. This is where we're spending our season.

The Nature of Biblical Wilderness

In the Bible, a wilderness is a place that we can't dwell in. It's a dry place. It's a harsh place. It's a barren land. It's a place where death is always around the corner. It's a place where you need a guide. Shepherds then, shepherds now, still graze flocks in this area. And it doesn't look like what we think of as pasture land. But there is stuff there for animals to eat—they're not big trees. There's bushes, there's broom trees, there are acacia bushes. This is a dry and barren place for God that God takes his people.

So I want you to think about this this morning because the book of Numbers is much more than an extended camping trip. You know, camping is fun for a couple days. It's not so fun for forty years. That's called being a Bedouin. That's living in the desert. That's living in the wilderness. That's a life of refugee status in a tent, right? That's the life of what we see in the book of Numbers.

The Environmental Impact

Now I want you to think about the impact, the environmental impact of this camping trip. You know, in 1969, famously Woodstock occurred in Upstate New York on a big farm. Lots of people showed up. In fact, half a million people showed up for three days to camp on this farm in Upstate New York. And the result of this—half a million, the size of Raleigh—camping for three days. I mean, talk about environmental impact. That land was devastated by that camp. And they've worked really hard at Woodstock to kind of renew this and try to make it work and turn it into a concert venue since. But the impact, the environmental impact of half a million people—that's incredible.

Now we read here, do you remember the number we read? Six hundred and three hundred thousand people—and that's just the fighting men of Israel. That's not including women and children, the elderly, the weak, the sick. Biblical scholars estimate 2,000,000 people. Can you imagine the environmental impact of that many people being in that place?

I want to think with you this morning: What is it that the people of Israel had, or what did they not have when they were in the wilderness? What's not provided for them? What's not possible for them? What will they not get there?

I'm going to get this from another pastor who said this and I think this is really helpful. They didn't have efficiency. They didn't have efficiency. Now I love efficiency.

I love having a list of to-do items that I check off while feeling productive, feel like I'm getting stuff done today. Anybody with me? People of God in the wilderness have everything but efficiency. When we experience camping with our nylon tents and our gas stoves, it's inefficient. Stuff doesn't work. It rains, things don't go as planned. But can you imagine what we just saw? Nothing is easy in this wilderness. Did you see a lot of firewood? What do people cook over? What do they burn in places where there's no firewood? Do you know? Animal dung, right? Poop. That's what they cook over.

I want you to think about families in our church, families who have little babies. They love disposable diapers. Some people use cloth diapers, you get a service and all that, but disposable diapers—why? Because it's easy. We have six kids, there's probably a landfill out there named after my family. But think about changing diapers and cleaning diapers in a desert. Efficiency? I don't think so.

What else do the people of Israel not get in the wilderness? They don't get a timeline. When you're a kid, I can pretty much guarantee what all of us did with families in the car. We asked the same two things: "Are we there yet? How much longer?" Because we always want to know how much longer. What does God not give this people? He doesn't give them an agenda, an itinerary, a timeline. I know some of y'all can't handle going to a half-day seminar without a detailed itinerary. You want to know what's happening. God gives his people nothing—none of it.

Can you imagine? I want you to picture again a family with little kids, a mom with little kids. She's like, "You know, I can do anything for two weeks. I can go through anything for six weeks. But a limitless timeline? No itinerary, no details." What is God in the world up to in the wilderness?

The Wilderness as God's Tool

The wilderness is always a tool. We see this in scripture. Wilderness is a tool that God uses for His people, and He uses it for two reasons. I want to take these one from the language and then one from looking at the books of the Bible.

What is God up to in the language? One answer is found in the word for wilderness: midbar. Biblical Hebrew is a very economical language. They didn't have tons of easily accessible paper and pens and computers. So they were very economical with the way they wrote their language. All words in Hebrew are made up of three consonants. Vowel signs were only added centuries later. A particular cluster of consonants can mean lots of different things depending on the vowels that are attached to it and any beginning prefixes that are added to it. So they were very efficient in their writing.

Biblical Hebrew has about 6,000 words in the whole vocabulary. The American English Dictionary has 170,000 words. Most Americans use 45,000 words. So what they did was make a lot go a long way with their language.

So a lot of these words are deeply connected. The word dabar (D-B-R) means "word." In fact, the Ten Commandments are the Ten Dabars, the Ten Words from God. The word for wilderness comes from this: midbar. Do you hear that D-B-R in there? But all these other words are closely related. For example, dibber is to speak. A shepherd is modbir—a shepherd uses their voice to lead the sheep. Dobir is the word for pasture. Divir means sheepfold. Do you see how all these are connected?

What's the big point? Why does this matter? What it means is this: the wilderness is a tool that God is using with His people to teach them to listen for his word. To listen for his voice above all the other voices, above all the confusion, in a place where you don't know where to go or what's going on—to hear his voice. Wilderness is a place where God takes His people so they learn to listen to Him.

This is why Jesus, when He'd been into the wilderness being tempted by the devil, quotes Deuteronomy. He says:

Man doesn't live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God — Deuteronomy

Jesus listened to the voice of his Father. See, Numbers—I'm thinking about this—is living in between promise and fulfillment. God had brought his people out of Egypt and given them this promise: "I'm gonna bring you into this land. I'm gonna give you this land flowing with milk and honey." It's a long journey. It's a long, meandering journey, and it takes a long time.

And so they're living in this in-between in the desert, in between what God has promised them and it coming to pass. I want you to try to imagine this. Can you imagine having to live in a time and a place where it's confusing how to trust God? What would it be like to be a people who are having a hard time trusting that God is out for your good? Can you imagine what it'd be like to be people who don't know what God is up to? Or to be people who don't seem to—it seems like God's leading us to a dead end?

We have to use our imagination, because the scripture is so relevant to our lives right now. We're struggling. Are we struggling to trust God? Yes. This is where we are.

The Structure of Scripture

The second purpose of the wilderness—the second purpose that God's up to in here—is something we learn by looking at the structure of the Bible itself. The first five books of the Bible are the books of Moses. They're called often the Pentateuch, which means five books. These are meant to function kind of like a sandwich.

So on either end, here's Genesis—that's the bread on one side. And we got Deuteronomy, that's the other bread of the sandwich. You got Leviticus in the middle, that's the meat. And then you got two layers of condiments, that's the cheese and the mayo and the tomatoes and all the good stuff. Those are on either side and those are Exodus and Numbers.

The way that the Hebrews thought, they loved when things mirrored or matched—it helped them to remember and helped them to make sense. The reason they set up the Pentateuch like this is to help us understand how to read it. Leviticus is kind the key to the whole thing. It tells us how God is at work in the world and what it means to have a close relationship with a Holy God.

Genesis and Deuteronomy tell us the beginning of the world, the beginning of a nation. But here's what's in these other two parts, the condiment section. Exodus and Numbers mirror one another. In fact, they're meant to be read together.

Exodus is the story of God rescuing His people from Egypt. Numbers begins with them in the desert and goes into the promised land. It's a story that closely mirrors what's happening in Exodus except it goes the other way. Instead of God taking His people out of Egypt, Numbers is him taking Egypt out of his people. Their love for Egypt. They're looking backward and saying, "Surely that was better. That was the way things should have been like we had all the food we wanted back there." They're looking backward over and over in this book and saying, "What about that?" God's like, "I am teaching you to listen to my voice and to trust my provision." This is what God's up to. This is what God's always up to.

God's Purpose in the Wilderness

By this point in the sermon, I hope you've tuned in enough to know that wilderness is not just a place. It's also a metaphor. Something God uses over and over in our lives.

So what is God up to in the wilderness of our lives? Two things: teaching us to listen to his voice and taking Egypt out of us—love of this world, love of the comforts of this world, love of the things we think we need to make life work.

So I want to pause and ask you to think about your last time in the wilderness. Maybe that's something you're going through right now. Maybe some real hardship that you're walking through right now. But I can tell you a time not so recently where the whole world went through the wilderness. I want you to think about March 2020. I want you to think back to those six months after the beginning of the pandemic.

In fact, you could actually go back and reread your journals, go back and reread your social media posts or the things you liked during that time. How did you do? How did you do with trusting God when you didn't know what was going on? How did you do with not knowing when there's no timeline that's been given? How did you do when things are confusing and you're overwhelmed and you're filled with fear? How did you do in the wilderness? Where was your heart in the wilderness?

You know, I have a guarantee for you. 2020 will not be the only wilderness you walk through. I can guarantee that for every person in this room. May not be a worldwide pandemic again.

But the reality is God always uses the tool in the lives of his people. He is always up to good. It's actually a gift from the Lord when He takes us to the wilderness. It's a time where He shows us what's inside of us really. God taking His people in the wilderness is never to help God see what's inside of us. He already knows. It's to help us see what's inside of us, what we trust in, what we depend on, what we're listening to. It's a place where the love of the comforts and securities of Egypt can fall away.

The Design of the Camp

Two more points and really brief. The second point is the design of the camp. Now one of the most important details of this part of Numbers is the structure of the encampment of the people of Israel. I want to show you this. This is what their tents would have looked like—modern Bedouin tents in Israel and in the Sinai Peninsula today. This is probably very much what their tents looked like.

But what's interesting is we began this chapter, chapter one, with a census of Israel and they counted all the people, all the men of fighting age—six hundred and three thousand, right? That was a large group of people who were men of fighting age. They didn't count the rest of the people because this was a count of how many people we have if we need to fight. But what's fascinating is the way that Israel encamped was not a military camp.

We see a military camp in Deuteronomy chapter 23. If you had a military camp, what would you do? Put all the soldiers out in front and everybody else behind, right? All the people who couldn't fight are behind or maybe in the middle. But this is what the camp of the Israelites looked like, and I want to describe this for you.

The colored boxes all around the perimeter are the 12 tribes of Israel. The blue rectangles in the middle are all the people who were in charge of handling the holy things of God. And in the middle is the tabernacle. I want you to remember this: they didn't put the fighting men on the outside. They put the whole camp on the outside. Then they put the priests, the leaders, and the Levites who handle the things of the tabernacle—God's mobile temple. And then they put the mobile temple, the tabernacle, in the middle.

This tells us something really important. First, it tells us that God is holy. God is holy. The people can't just go to God directly. They can't access God directly. In fact, there's a little blue buffer zone around them to protect them from God. God is so holy and other and above that rushing into God's tabernacle, rushing into God's presence would destroy them because God is holy, holy, holy.

Second, it shows us this though: God wants his tent in the middle of all the tents. God wants to be in the center of the gathering. God's not on a hillside above them sort of overseeing everything, making sure everything's alright. God's tent is in the middle. Now think about this. This tent is way taller than any other tent, and there's smoke going up from it all the time. So in other words, this would be the first thing you saw when you came out of your tent in the morning. It'd be the last thing that you saw when you went to bed at night. It'd be the thing that you saw when you got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. This big tent in the middle.

God wants to be with. God wants to be with and among. And the last thing I want you to notice is in the name. The book of Numbers refers to the tabernacle not as the tabernacle. It's called the tent of meeting. What does that mean? What is God communicating? It's not the tent of "y'all are too dirty, I don't want to be near you." It's not the tent of "get away from me, you sinners." It's "I want to be with you and I want to meet you. I want a relationship. I want communication. I want connection." God wants meetings. Do you hear this?

The little sermon I'm giving from the structure of the tent is a three-part paradox: God is holy. God is with. God wants relationship. He's accessible. You see what God's up to? Let me just spell it out real clear.

They're in the wilderness, a bunch of sinners. And we're going to see how much they're sinners throughout this book. But God is recreating Eden in the wilderness. This is Eden two point zero. Remember Eden? God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. Access, relationship, holy, holy, holy, and yet with them. This is what God's up to in the wilderness. He's recreating Eden two point zero. This time, not with perfect sinless people, but with sinners. This is a place where God wants to meet them and walk with them and know them.

So this means two things. Let me just spell this out super clear. If you're a Christian, if you're not a Christian, let me talk to you first. If you're not a Christian, I've got to warn you. There's another desert coming in your life. There's another time of wilderness. That's what life in this world is like.

We come into it, we come out of it. But we're all going to face wilderness again—whether it's a 2020 pandemic wilderness or just hardship. And the reality is if you don't have God in the middle of your camp, your life, you are lost in the world. You may have a pretty good compass. You may feel like I'm a really good judge of character and I have a lot of joy. I have a lot of good things in my life. But the reality is your map is broken and you are lost.

This is what all philosophy ends up telling us apart from Christ: life is meaningless and absurd. This is what the book of Ecclesiastes tells us apart from God—life is meaningless and absurd and you're lost. And I don't want to leave you without hope.

The hope of this whole book is that God wants a relationship and God wants to give you life and bring you into a good and fulfilling and hopeful place. But He will only do so if you let Him be the center of the camp. He's not going to be a trailer. He's not going to be an add-on or an accessory in your life. God is gracious to sinners. He loves making a way when there's no way. Our church is filled with people like that, right? We know who we are. And yet God is gracious and He wants to do this in your life. Would you let Him? Would you let Him be your shepherd?

For those of you who already are Christians, maybe even long-term Christians, I want to ask you this: What has God been up to? What if the Christian life, what if God's intention was not just Eden 2.0, but Eden 3.0? God not just with us in a camp, but God inside of us.

Christ in you, the hope of glory — Colossians

The very spirit of God dwelling in you. Do you know this? Are you even aware of this—that your body is a temple of the living God? That our church is a living house, a living house that God is building. This is us.

The Happy Camper

This is my last point that I really want to encourage you in this morning: the happy camper. Now, I know that's a kind of sarcastic phrase. A comedian, Jim Gaffigan in particular, has seized on this one. He has a stand-up bit on the happy camper. He calls himself indoorsy. Maybe some of you identify with that. He hates camping. He says: "My wife always brings up camping as her tradition in her family. He says, 'Hey, it was a tradition in everybody's family until we invented a house.' My parents never took me camping and you know why? Because they love me. Right? People say, 'It'll get you closer to nature.' I would like to keep the relationship professional, thank you very much. If it's so great outside, why are all the bugs trying to get in my house?"

Happy camper. Does anybody ever—has anyone ever really been a happy camper? Whenever you use that term, we're being sarcastic. He is not a happy camper. Why don't we just call them a camper?

Now, I say that tongue in cheek because there was one who was a happy camper. And I know that sounds kind of saccharine and sarcastic and glib, but here's my point. We just celebrated Christmas—the incarnation, the coming in flesh of God in the person of Jesus Christ. And in John chapter one, it says Jesus came, the one full of grace and truth, and dwelled among us, and the word in Greek is He tabernacled among us. He set up his tent right among sinners. Why did he do that? John tells us: for the joy, for his own joy. It's his great joy to do so.

After that, he's baptized. When he grows up, he's baptized in the Jordan River—baptism for sinners, one he never needed, identifying himself, being cleansed like we need to be cleansed. And then he goes where? Come on, class, where does he go after his baptism? Straight into the wilderness forty days, forty nights being tempted by the devil.

Yet he—unlike what we're going to read the rest of this book—when he's tested, He's faithful. He listens to the voice of His Father. He's obedient. He passes the test that Israel never could pass. In our place. And then at His resurrection, He pours out His life-giving spirit. In the book of Acts, we read this at Pentecost: He pours out His life-giving spirit into us so that we might be Eden 3.0. And why? So that we might become happy campers. We might become trees in the desert. Trees planted by streams of living water.

Is that too sarcastic to say? I want you to remember who this Jesus is. We're told He is a man of sorrows. He is acquainted with grief. He knows all the trails in the desert. He knows what it's like to walk all the dark pathways. He did so himself. And so can we trust Him as we walk our dark pathways, as we shed our tears, as we're confused and trying to figure out what God's up to? Can we trust that God wants to make Eden 3.0 in us?

I want to close with the Psalm that we use as a call to worship. Would you find your bulletin?

Find your bulletin, Psalm 84. We began our service with this Psalm, and it's a Psalm about a group of people who were on their way out of the valley, out of the desert, out of the wilderness up to Jerusalem—Jerusalem seated high up in the hills.

Happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Bakkah, Bakkah in Hebrew means weeping. They make it a source of spring water. Those tears become a place of life and vegetation. Even autumn rain will cover it with blessings. They go from strength to strength. Each appears before God in Zion. Better a day in your courts than a thousand anywhere else. I'd rather stand at the threshold of the house of my God and live in the tents of wicked people. For the Lord our God, listen to this. The Lord our God is a sun and a shield. The Lord grants favor and honor. He does not withhold the good from those who live with integrity. Happy is the one who trusts in you, Lord of armies. — Psalm 84

I have no idea what 2023 will hold for us. But the Lord is ahead of us. He's in our midst, and he can make water in the desert. He can make life in a place of wilderness and barrenness. He longs to do this in the lives of his people. Can we trust him? Will we trust him?

Prayer

Let's go to the Lord together in prayer. Father, we thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. And we are disoriented, confused people, and we have such a hard time trusting you. Lord, we thank you that you already know the way because you are the way.

Father, we pray this morning. I pray for anyone who doesn't know you, that they would offer themselves to you this morning. I pray for those who do know you but have struggled. Lord, we pray that you would be our sun and our shield today. Father, do this in us for your glory and for our joy. We pray in Christ's name, amen.

I'm going to invite you to stand in response to God's word and sing back to him the truth that we've just said.