Pure Joy

After the Israelites were redeemed from their Egyptian slave masters, they began the journey to the land God had promised them. God led them through the scenic route instead of the direct one to avoid the collapse of their redemption in the face of challenges in Philistia. Two months into their journey, they went blind. Their expectations failed their faith. In the midst of the hunger that befell them in the desert, they longed to return to Egypt (in death, no less), where they had “sat around pots of meat and ate all the food [they] wanted” (Exod. 16:3). They desired death. They desired chains. They would trade their freedom for a pot of meat. Like Esau exchanged his birthright for a bowl of bean soup (Gen. 25), Israel would trade their promise, their destiny, for a warm meal.

This was not the first challenge Israel encountered after their redemption from slavery, and it certainly would not be the last. As they walked, they faced hunger, thirst, fatigue, battles, intimidating armies, unrest, impatience, death, and despair throughout their forty-year journey. A few times, their path to the promise could have been shorter, quicker, and easier. Each time, they were detoured and had to go the long way. The hard way. How long would this go on? How long must they fight and persist and suffer before they could be restored to the land he promised them?

Those questions sound all too familiar. How much longer must I fight for my marriage before it can be restored? How much longer should I pray for this child? How long do I need to pray for this healing before you will restore my body? How many more times should I petition for this desire of my hungry heart before I give up—before I trade this faith-filled dream for a pot of meat?

Hindsight sees perfectly. We can say we never would have acted the way the Israelites did after they were heroically redeemed and that we would have been so grateful to be free of our chains and on our way to the promised land, we would have sucked it up, dealt with our hunger, and not allowed our expectations to blind us. But in our present hunger, we lose faith of our own. In our discomfort, we discredit God. We become negotiators, willing to trade God’s best for a situation fix and willing to settle, to stop short of our true restoration because we think restoration means happiness, comfort, and fulfilled desire. We think restoration is something we will ultimately encounter if we could just enter the promised land.

We and the Israelites could not have been more wrong. In our shortsighted perspective, the fulfilled promise represents restoration, but the gnarled wilderness doesn’t. Yet, it was in the wilderness that God called Israel into holiness. Because he demanded perfection? Because he had unreal expectations? No. God called Israel into holiness so that he could walk among them. In his own perfection, God cannot coexist with darkness. God commanded obedience from Israel so he could bring them back into his presence. Restoration.

It was in the blazing wilderness that a sword once saved my life and that God brought me back—back to nothing I had ever known, to what only he had known was there the whole time. “God often leads us according to the needs of our heart, not always according to its desires.”[i] He called me into holiness in the middle of a forest on fire that looked nothing like restoration. He called out to my heart and it answered. Because it was his all along.

I revealed earlier that expectations are killers. I should mention now that I have met a few good ones. Faith, for example, is an expectation that God will perform as he promised. Trust is an expectation that God is good no matter what happens. Hope is an expectation that God has something greater for us than we could imagine for ourselves.

We get sidetracked and blinded when our expectations are in things other than God. We expect restoration of things that never made us who we are. Our health never made us who we are. Our perfect marriages and families never made us who we are. Our successful careers never made us who we are. “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph. 1:4).

Holy and blameless. That’s what was in our store before the storm came and the fear-filled preppers obliterated our inventory. Holy and blameless before the years added tears and varnish to our original beauty. Before those who promised to restore us burned us and caused more damage than they should have. Holy and blameless before we believed the lie and ate the fruit and fell from the grace of a good God who loved us with literally the whole world.

Like a gemstone plucked from a rocky crevice, what we see of our raw lives seems un-glorious, unexciting, ugly even. The process to restore the gemstone is harsh, but it is designed to get to the heart of the rough, rocky exterior, to bring out the sheer glory of what exists inside. As the wild-dreaming prophet Ezekiel shared with the exiled Israelites, God’s intention with his chosen is, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:25). In a rough, rocky life, God has promised to restore within us the gemstone of his creation: our hearts that reflect, in technicolor, his true glory.

[i] Wayne Stiles, “Why God Makes You Go the Long Way,” in Wayne Stiles Blog. https://waynestiles.com/blog/the-long-way.