By Pastor Stephen Hess –
“This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through, my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me, from heaven’s open door, and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.” Many will recognize those lyrics from the old Christian song called “This World is Not My Home.” Those words remind us of the Biblical truth that the Christian life is a journey toward our eternal home in the Kingdom of Heaven.
One of the Biblical images for this journey is the story of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. After four hundred years of slavery, God rescued his people and led them out of Egypt by the hand of his servant Moses. As God’s people left Egypt, their hearts were filled not only with excitement and faith, but also awe at witnessing the powerful acts of God’s deliverance. But it would be many years before they would reach the land that God had promised in Canaan. Because of their disobedience, God punished them by forcing them to wander in the wilderness for forty years. As a result, an entire generation spent most of their years living between Egypt and Canaan—between God’s past acts of deliverance and his future promises of rest.
Much like the Israelites, God’s people today live in the “wilderness.” Each Christian can look back and see how God worked in their life to bring them out of the slavery of their sin (Egypt) to faith. We can also look forward to the promise of heaven (Canaan) and that place that Christ has already prepared for those who love him. But most of our lives are spent between Egypt and Canaan. We live between God’s past acts of deliverance and his future promises of rest.
Living in the wilderness can be difficult. One of the most difficult things about living in the wilderness is that there are constant reminders of the gap between our future hope and our present reality. God promises us a future filled with eternal life, eternal joy, and eternal peace. Yet our present is often filled with brokenness, pain, and suffering. Many people respond to this gap with either denial or despair. Some try to deny the pain of the present by covering it up with the false medicines of this broken world (money, drugs, sex, entertainment). Others wind up in despair by allowing the present darkness to eclipse any view of a future hope.
But there is a better way to live in the wilderness. As Theologian Alister McGrath notes, the journey of faith through the wilderness is sustained by two things: remembering and anticipating. McGrath writes, “The Christian is invited to remember and anticipate. The past and the future break into our present life of faith, enfolding it as an alpine valley is embraced by the mountains on either side. In the past, we remember the great act of redemption in which God delivered us from sin, death, and despair through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And in the future, we anticipate the final entry into the New Jerusalem, to be with God forever and luxuriate in his holy, kindly, and caring presence.”
What sustains us in the present is remembering with gratitude what God has already done for us and looking forward with confident expectation to what he will do. As we do this, we can be encouraged that God walks beside us on our journey, and he will guard our going out and our coming in from this time forth and forevermore (Psalm 121:8).