We Cannot Escape the Destiny of the Cross

In the wilderness, we learn to give up our illusion of a God that will make life easy for us, a God that will do what we want Him to do, and a God of our own liking and making. A famous writer once wrote, “It is the cross that helps us arrive at that position. If God can allow His Son to be stretched out on a piece of wood and left to hang there until He dies, then we cannot escape the reality and destiny of the cross.” Ultimately, it is the cross that sustains us in the wilderness that continues to give us faith and hope. When we gaze upon it, we see not only death and abandonment, but that the Lord Jesus who endured the cross was not allowed to remain there. And so like Jesus, we will not be abandoned, that we may also see the Land of the living.

The spiritual wilderness feels differently for different people—for some, it is a place of intense and devastating loss; for others it is associated with feelings of emptiness, weariness and listlessness. The experience can last for days or for years. For some the experience leads to a permanent loss of faith; they simply give up the fight. Since Scripture teaches that all genuine believers “overcome”, it can therefore be assumed that those who permanently abandon the faith were simply never genuinely saved in the first place; this is the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. For many believers the wilderness forces a change of faith, and a re-framing and re-defining of what Christianity really means to them. Some emerge out of the desert with their faith in tact, but with a renewed sense of energy. Others stay in the church, but remain in some kind of low-grade wilderness for the rest of their lives, believing that a deep nourishing faith is either a false expectation or simply beyond their reach.

One very helpful thing to do when you find yourself in the desert is to “accept the fact” that you are in the desert. Obviously, if you’re in a desert, the acknowledgement of that fact can be a huge relief and can give you a sense of peace even in the midst of it. Accepting that you are in a desert also means accepting that this is a place you might be for a good period of time, so looking for some quick exit is not an option. We need to move fully through our deserts, facing whatever it is we need to face. It can be helpful to identify what kind of desert we are in, and if possible, why we are there—that can help give us some handles to the kind of process that’s needed to move forward.

Another thing to know is that God is in the desert with us. He has not abandoned us. He is not just on the other side of the desert waiting for us to get through it. He is right there in the midst of it all. Though that might be difficult to accept or believe, we need to at least hold it as a strong possibility as we move through the desert.

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