Chapter One

If you are like me, the narrative of the wilderness wandering is so familiar that you have not stopped to ask, Was there a redeeming reason to the wilderness itself? Yes, it’s that place after Egypt and before “the land flowing with milk and honey.”  But surely, it’s more than a stop-gap along the way to the real living. And if the parched, hot, seemingly lifeless wilderness figures prominently in the book of Numbers it has to mean something about our relationship with God. Because all of scripture has something to tell us about our relationship with God.

The entire story of God’s deliverance of the Israelites is inextricably tied up with this midbar, Hebrew for wilderness. The ancient children of God were delivered from slavery in Egypt to…something. What was it? I’d like you to at least consider that their deliverance from slavery was for the purpose of going into the wilderness itself. But why? I wanted to know what this wilderness motif meant to the ancients, to see if it shed light on what might be going on.

I first looked at the Hebrew root letters of midbar and compared those roots to other words that share the same root, which can help unpack the first word’s meaning. The root of midbar is davar/dabar. Dabar as a root has a variety of meanings but it is also the word for word or speak, but it more literally means to order or arrange words. Hebrew word scholar Jeff Benner says the word midbar means a place existing in a perfectly arranged order, harmony, and balance. That’s not what any of us would think of when we ponder the English word wilderness, is it? Could it be that in placing Israel in this particular environment, the Holy One was teaching them balance, order and harmony in some way? Certainly, balance, order, and harmony are not characteristics easily nurtured to grow amid the mud-pits of enslaved brickmaking in Egypt. Or our consumer-driven, productivity oriented modern, western cultures. If we’re paying attention, our own culture systematically shuns order, harmony and balance of life in favor of do more, be more, no matter the personal cost or the cost to those around you.

The same root, dabar, can mean “oracle”, “the place of speaking”, “inner sanctuary,” “a dry, uninhabited land”, “a pasture where sheep go to feed” or words spoken from the heart (inner place) of God.[1] Can you see how the idea of midbar appears related to God’s Word? His voice is heard in this environment we call the wilderness.  Those understandings change things, don’t they? Perhaps you and I needn’t be afraid when God invites us with Him into the wilderness. Maybe, just maybe, there are lessons to be had there that can only be gotten through a wilderness wandering. My curiosity was piqued having now seen the linguistic hints that the wilderness was its own intentional destination that includes God.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but of these 40 years of wandering, I used to think of it as God’s “time out” for the misbehaving Israelites. “Ok, go to the naughty corner and think about what you just did.” I wonder if initially at least, that’s what the Hebrews thought they were getting into, as well. In the ANE literature, wilderness brought to ancient mind images of wasteland and aloneness, fearful things to be avoided, not unlike what we today might think of the word. That sounds like a naughty corner to me. Here are additional ANE motifs of the wilderness that the ancients believed.

• In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the wilderness is a place of no water, light, air or joy. 
• Babylon-Assyrian mythology associates the “mistress of the desert” (the sister of Tammuz) with the netherworld.
• In Ugaritic myth, the desert or the netherworld is the natural habitation of Mot, the antagonist who can reduce the fertile earth to a place of waste and chaos. 
• In the ANE, the wilderness is seen as a fearful and abandoned place. [2]

This is not where you’d want to end up, not where you would intentionally go to if given the choice, not what you’d want your god to send you to, alone. The more time I spend with God and the more I learn about Him from the Bible set back into its original ancient cultures, the more convinced I am that He is not the kind of parent that gives us a “time out” to a lonely and scary place by ourself; rather He gives a “time in” for misbehavior and course correction. Have you heard of the difference between a time-out and a time-in?

The traditional time out is when a child is told to go to a chair, a room, a spot, or face a wall, alone for a determined amount of time. Often this involves a parent withholding attention and ignoring cries or requests from the child during the banishment. The goal is to shape behavior and reduce or eliminate misbehavior. The time-out is a punitive deterrent; its apparent effectiveness is because children are biologically wired to desire to be with the parent or caregiver; being away from them is desired less than the “naughty” behavior is desired. This only works, ironically, in parent-child dynamics where a secure attachment has already formed, but the time-out is actually very unhelpful for growing or sustaining secure attachment, according to the research on bonding between parents and children.[3] A child needs their caregiver to be there with them in the hard moments, helping them regulate their emotions and making sense of their upside-down world. According to trauma expert Gabor Mate, and others, what causes relational trauma in a person (child or adult) isn’t merely the troubling event itself; it’s being left alone (or perceiving one is all alone) with the distressing event or big feelings brought up by the event.[4] Time and time again, God shows us in the scriptures the ways that He’s with us in our hard moments.

A time-in[5] by contrast, preserves the connection between parent/caregiver and the child even in the middle of an offending action by the child. With a time-in, the child is not left relationally alone. The time-in is an opportunity for each to lovingly connect with one another first, and only after the connection then address whatever change needs to be made. The goal with a time-in is to maintain the proximity and care from the stronger partner/caregiver/parent to the child, in the midst of correction. Here, the child is not sent away, instead, parent and child are together while the parent helps soothe and regulate the child. The time-in is an incentive for the child to stay close, to rely on the stronger partner for his or her needs, not be sent away to deal alone with strong feelings. This strategy changes behavior for the long term because the motivation to do better is tied up in love and wanting to be near the safe-feeling stronger partner (not motivated by the fear of losing them). Again, this strategy assumes a secure attachment is being formed between the two.

God is the God of time in. I want you to see this. God was in the wilderness with the Israelites.

“Go and proclaim in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the LORD,

“I remember concerning you the devotion of your youth,

The love of your betrothals, Your following after Me

in the wilderness, Through a land not sown”.

Jeremiah 2:2:

“Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way

 in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order

 to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep

 his commands”.

Deuteronomy 8:2

What was the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night but tangible representations that God was there?

“By day the LORD went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud

 to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give

 them light, so that they could travel by day or night.”

Exodus 13:21

And He is with you in your wilderness, whatever that currently means for you, which we’ll explore in a bit.  Know that you are not alone. The wilderness, that place of anxiety and chaos, is not devoid of God’s presence; within it, He brings balance, order, and harmony to even (maybe especially?) our wayward ways through a Godly type of time-in. The wilderness is where we learn to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you.’ Why? Because the wilderness strips us of the “all these things” we think we need to flourish; it strips us of the powers we’ve relied on instead of relying on God that the world tells us we need (false gods, to use the language of scripture) to get at the heart of what it is that truly sustains us – Immanuel: God with us. The wilderness brings out a thirst for communion, (and by that, I mean relationship) with the one true God, expressed as a longing for something to fill us. Those internal caverns we all have scream to be filled, and if we don’t know the answer is more of God, we’ll go “lookin’ for love in all the wrong places” to quote the Johnny Lee country song. So intense is this feeling of longing in me, that I often numb myself to it, by distractions I readily find in the land of abundance and competing gods. The ancient imagery names the living waters only He can provide. If you’ve ever been hiking on a hot day and forget your water bottle, this isn’t merely poetic imagery, is it? It’s in the wilderness that we cry as did David:

You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land where there is no water.

Psalm 63:1

But we don’t always know what we need is more of God filling us. And so, we’ve got to be taken (dragged and kicking, maybe?) to the place where all of our self- derived safety nets fail, in order for us to cry out for the Real. Until we’ve experienced it first hand, we won’t truly know that Yeshua does indeed meet each of us at His well of living waters, as He did for that unnamed woman in the book of John.[6] (If we haven’t experienced the Presence yet, we go by faith in “it is written” until our own experiences come to life.) Note well that the woman at the well didn’t have her act together first before the water was offered. She was rescued not because of already doing life well, but because of her need.  Being positioned in the wilderness to bring out our true needs is mercy, because truthfully, how many of us would willingly set aside what we’ve been holding on to for survival? If my musty, old parachute I’ve been dragging around just in case I’m ever going sky-diving (which, by the way I would never do; this is a horrible analogy for me personally) is the life-line I’ve been counting on all these years, I’m not going to willingly hand it over when I’m in that airplane ready to jump. Of course, I don’t know the rats infested the parachute and it has holes. Someone’s going to have to take it away first, to give me an opportunity to reach for the thing that actually saves. That’s the wilderness for you. That’s God’s with-ness mercy.

And when we’re talking about survival, surely that’s not just physical life. How about belonging, value, worth, honor, love, financial security, social status?  Yea though I walk through the valley isn’t what we think we’d ever purposely walk into of our own choosing, which is why God has to position us there. In the wilderness. “I will be your God and you will be my people”  [7] is God-speak for I am with you in this. In the wilderness is where we get to experience God making good on that promise.

I think back to how so many kids in my generation (growing up in the 70’s) were taught to swim, getting thrown in to the water to show that, yeah, in time, you’ll make it. Or how I was taught, with my dad waiting in the pool as he implored me to jump in, alone. (Which I was never able to do.) No, our heavenly Daddy goes all the way in with us, through Yeshua, God in the flesh. Our God is with us as we leap together into the water holding hands (to continue this swimming metaphor.) Yeshua knows the wilderness, He’s knows what’s at stake.

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted

by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God,

tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written:

‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes

from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city

and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.

“If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:

“ ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands,

so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed

him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.

“All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down

and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan!

For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

Matthew 4:1-11

Notice it was Yeshua’s reliance “It is written” that met every temptation. Yeshua promised us the comforter (the Spirit of God) to come to us to teach us all things and help us remember. (Matthew 14:26) Yeshua is well acquainted with life in the wilderness, with its tests and trials and lessons, with its many choices to choose that which doesn’t ultimately save, which makes Him your ideal partner. Jump with Him!

Liminal Space

Let’s add to our growing understanding of the purpose of the wilderness. The wilderness is a type of liminal space. Have you ever heard of liminal space? It comes from the Latin word līmen, meaning a threshold. When you stand in the entryway to a building, neither inside nor outside, that’s liminal space. Mandy Bayton writes, “A liminal space is a transitional space, where we are leaving something behind that feels comfortable and safe while not really knowing what lies ahead. It’s that space where we feel as if we are on the threshold between what is behind and what is in front. [8] That doesn’t sound so appealing to me, how about you?

Liminal space was originally studied as the middle part of a rite of passage. Societies develop rituals to mark the movement from one stage to the next like childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, or from singleness to married.[9] Liminal spaces have three stages: separation or a break from the past is the first stage. Ouch, that sounds painful and disorienting. Reentering society with a new identity is the third stage. This sounds intriguing to me, depending on what the new identity is. In the middle is a stage of transition where you are no longer who you were but you are not yet what you will be. That doesn’t sound appealing to me in the least! This middle stage, the liminal space, is that existence between the old and the new that can be represented by the wilderness.  Rabbi Johnathan Sacks wrote: “The desert – a no-man’s-land with no settled populations, no cities, no civilizational order – is the place where Jacob’s descendants, alone with God, cast off one identity and assume another. We now begin to understand the significance of midbar, “wilderness,” in the spiritual life of Israel. It was the place where they experienced with an intensity they had never felt before nor would they easily again, the unmediated closeness of God which bound them to Him and to one another.”[10]

That last part sounds cozy to the uninitiated: the unmediated closeness of God which bound them to Him and to one another. Sign me up for that please. It sounds good until I remember that our infinite God is a powerhouse and His intensity of goodness contrasts sharply with my own sins and shortcomings. There are some other parts there that I don’t like so much: the transition to getting there, in that space of increased closeness with God. There’s something unsettling to the human psyche about transitions, it upsets our equilibrium, knocks us off balance and gets us scrambling for a safety bar. We autistics feel this more intensely than the neurotypical population, where for us, the world is just an incredibly confusing and overwhelming place to begin with, thus our intense need for sameness and predictability is adaptive, practical. It’s not simply that change is upsetting, it’s that any deviation from what has been our norm will feel like the ground is being opened up from under us and we’re heading for a sky fall. (I think my sky diving analogy from before is appropriate after all?) This disorientation is felt in the extreme for us autistics, but all people can get thrown off balance in these liminal spaces where you are no longer who you were but you are not yet what you will be.

Imagine walking down a long dark corridor alone, to get from that one safe room that you’re familiar with to another room where you do not know what to expect. Except, instead of moving room to room, you are moving from an identity you’ve had all your life to a new identity that you’re not even sure you fully understand. Or want to have, if you’re being honest. (This might shed more light on what Abram would have felt when God asked Him to give up all that he knew, to follow God.[11]

The wilderness shaped the Israelites’ identity away from the familiar identity (enslaved people dependent on the myriad gods of Egypt who had just been proved worthless) to sons and daughters of the unseen God of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with a mission to accomplish with God. From no autonomy and the brick-making identity of worth-based-on-productivity to being part of a greater mission co-laboring with God to repair the world, being conduits of God-blessing to the world. That’s a stunning change in identity! Imagine it, no longer who they once were (and even bondage that is familiar is often preferred to the unknown) but not yet what they would be. That in-between stage can feel intensely disorienting and unsafe. It’s in the in-between that we’ll hold on tighter to our gods, our distractions, in order to stop the intense emotions. Look, I get it, transitions of all kinds, not just existential ones of this magnitude send me to a place of agony. I struggle going from being dry pre-shower, to wet in the shower, and back to dry again. I get that lost feeling when I have to stop a project I’m working on (or even if I’m reading for pleasure) when someone interrupts me.  My default setting is to resist transitions, liminal spaces, and change of any sort with the fierceness of a toddler who was denied ice cream before dinner. I am one of the loudest complainers on the road to the Promised Land.

I’ll bet you can think of times in your life where you were in a space that fits these definitions of the wilderness. Maybe you are in a liminal space now? Let me tell you something. While we exist in liminal space it can feel as if the next thing, that new identity or stage of growth we’re promised, is never going to happen. But remember - delay doesn't mean denial, it means wait.

“Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength”

 Isaiah 40:31

The Hebrew root for the word wait is qawa. It means “I wait, look for or hope with eager expectation.”[12] This carries with it a contentedness, equanimity, an inner peace despite what’s happening around. At the center of a hurricane is the eye, which is said to typically develop when winds reach around 74 miles per hour. The eye of a hurricane is relatively calm, usually sunny with a light breeze of about 10-15 miles per hour. The eye of a hurricane is a calm place of waiting where chaos is circling all around but not affecting you. The Hebrew word for wait is not that toe-tapping or finger drumming impatient waiting that’s often coupled with the anxiety that goes along with having your desires not met, or not yet met. To adopt this posture of qawa, of restful waiting, we must go against our culture of commodity- seeking and striving, driven by the pursuit of more. Waiting, in that worldview, is seen as weakness, nothing of value in the wake of do, do, do and productivity seeking. Sounds like ancient Egypt, doesn’t it? Make more bricks!

This waiting in the wilderness comes after God’s deliverance of Israel from pharaoh’s anxiety system, where in the wilderness, God’s provision of manna points to the truth that we’re under a new leadership now. No longer is it the corrupt power systems of pharaoh; we have God who gives us restfulness to counter the restless anxiety of pharaoh’s system.[13] To wait in the Hebraic sense of the word is quite active. The thing about this kind of waiting is that it is tied in with an expectancy – a hope. A deep knowing that God is active in my life; that God has a plan for growth in my spiritual life, even if I, looking for perfection, can’t see the little progresses happening. It’s a deep knowing of the resurrection power of Yeshua, who ushered in the start of new creation, to culminate where all things are eventually set right.

What are you hoping for? How long are you willing to wait in the in-between before you give up on God to answer and seek elsewhere? Are you needing new strength for the road ahead, which looks so scary? Remember to wait for the LORD, and let Him give you the strength. What might prevent you from waiting on Him? Have you ever considered that your areas of striving are symptomatic of your need for God? There is a space in each of us that needs to be filled and its non-filling is excruciating. For me, it’s been striving for acceptance, ‘normalcy’ where I’ve felt ‘different’. Throughout my life, I’ve looked in many places for this deepest need to be met, so cavernous is the empty space in need of filling. So painful, so lonely it’s felt, that I scrambled to fill it with this or that, alternately numbing against the pain. I hardly could fathom that the feelings of empty that needs filling were actually God wooing me to join Him. Just because the emotions are intense doesn’t mean those feelings are not of God.

It didn’t occur to me until recently that living in these feelings is part of what ‘waiting on God’ means. To allow the Empty to be, is to invite God, or maybe more accurately put, to receive His presence; to not reject God in favor of something else just to fill the space and end the agony. But what if the Empty is really homesickness for God? I really believe that He wants to fill those empty places, that He created them for this union. They’re empty because He’s about to show up and He won’t show up in a room that’s already filled with other things. (The heart of idolatry is filling up on something other than Who we’re made for). No, we won’t be able to fit in the entirety of the Infinite within us. But the more we allow the space to grow while we wait for the infilling, the more of Him we’ll have because of the stretching that results from the waiting.

As finite creatures, how will we ever fit within us more of our infinite God? If my current capacity is too small to receive more of the magnificence of God, what I need is an enlarging of those places within me that are designed to “hold” the Presence of God. Anyone who’s accidently put your special hang-to-dry only wool sweater in the dryer will get the picture here. You have to really stretch the fabric to bring it (in this case back to its intended size) to the size you need. There’s something about the wilderness wait that God has for us that enlarges our souls to carry more of Him. Our capacity shows up in our longing for Him, and it is painful. You’re not doing something wrong if you experience an inner burning of longing and even sadness during your wilderness journey. Kelly Deutsch, in her book “Spiritual Wanderlust: The Field Guide to Deep Desire” writes “Waiting causes our desires to grow, which causes our pain to grow, but for the sake of an even greater gift. Of course, it’s going to ache if he’s got an infinity’s worth of glory to give us. To make space for it all, he stretches us. He plucks out our hoarder’s stash – all the stuff we’ve been clinging to.”[14] The plucking hurts, doesn’t it?

Instead of seeing the Empty as a bad thing, I try to reframe it as anticipation of Divine union about to happen. He’s worth the wait. I want to be faithful and not fill the in-between space with anything else. Because these in-between places of all kinds, even the more mundane ones, cause me such personal anguish, I’m so intrigued with the idea that the Hebrews get delivered directly to this threshold of in between. On purpose. Do you find it sometimes satisfying to judge the Israelites in the wilderness? "Why did it take so long for them to trust God? Why did they grumble and complain so much?" Then I invite you to put yourself in that story, or better yet, open the pages of your own wilderness stories. Yes, the Israelites had a lot to learn about the liminal space, God’s incubator for nurturing their true identity as His beloved image bearers, who are loved before they even heard a word of Torah at Sinai. So do you and I have a lot to learn about our identity as the beloved of God before we ever do anything “worthy.” They had to trust that He was right there with them in their growing pains. So do I. So do you.

Liminal space changes us like no other space. When God brought the Hebrews into the wilderness, He did so to give them opportunities to practice what they learned intellectually at the Mountain, when everything was glorious in the shadow of God’s intense presence there. But the beauty of the Mountain isn’t what reshapes and re-forms them from enslavement to the world’s system to be the accurate reflections of His character in the world. It’s the in-between, the stretching, the waiting. So, what do you and I do in our in-between? We, too, put into practice the principles of Kingdom living that before, were only theoretical, something we learned about in this great Bible of ours that we’ve taken to head and heart, but maybe not embodied the principles yet, in the doing. Look for examples of God’s union with His beloved children in Israel’s story of the wilderness “it is written”. Notice their pain, their longing, His fulfilling after the wait. Look for signs, however subtle seeming they can be, of His invitation for union with you in your own story as you continue to unfold the image bearer that He created and calls you to be.

[1] Hebrew Word Study: Revealing the Heart of God, by Chaim BenTorah, page 212, 213

[2] Thanks to Rico Cortes of Wisdom in Torah Ministries for this understanding. https://wisdomintorah.com/

[3] Schore, A. N. (2000). Attachment and the regulation of the right brain. Attachment & Human Development, 2(1), 23-47

[4] Maté, G. (2023). The myth of normal. Random House UK.

[5] Clarke, J. I. (1999). Time-in: When time-out doesn’t work. Parenting Press.

[6] John 4:1-42

[7] Genesis 17:7; Exodus 6:7; Ezekiel 34:24; Ezekiel 36:28; Jeremiah 7:23; Jeremiah 30:2

[8] https://www.christiantoday.com/article/how-to-live-in-the-tension-and-grace-of-the-liminal-space/129256.htm

[9] https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/bamidbar/liminal-space/#_ftn1

[10] https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/bamidbar/liminal-space/#_ftn1

[11] See my volume one in this series on Genesis, chapter 3: “Lech Lecha, Get Up And Go” for more insight on what was at stake with Abram leaving his homeland.

[12] https://skipmoen.com/2003/01/wait-2/

[13] Brueggemann, W. (2017). Sabbath as resistance: Saying no to the culture of now. Westminster John Knox Press.

[14] Deutsch, K. (2019). Spiritual wanderlust: The Field Guide to Deep Desire, p.92, 94.