In the prologue to John’s gospel, when John tells us that the Word became flesh and “dwelt” among us, he chooses a verb related to the Greek noun used to describe the tabernacle: Literally, we might say, the Word “tabernacled” among us (John 1:14). Jesus truly is “Immanuel” (God with us; Matt. 1:23), experiencing all the difficulties and sorrows of life in this wilderness world alongside us.

The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea before they entered the promised land. In the global scheme of their history, it was a relatively short time, a single generation. Yet that history provided the material for an entire book of the Pentateuch, the book of Numbers, whose Hebrew name is “In the wilderness,” after its first word in Hebrew. The wilderness is also the context in which much of the material in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy was given to Moses. As a result, subsequent Old Testament authors looked back on this period of Israel’s history as being of great relevance for their own times and places. The writer of Psalm 95, for instance, warned his hearers against imitating that wilderness generation in testing the Lord (Ps. 95:8–11). Therefore, the Apostle Paul was hardly breaking new ground when he told the Corinthians that Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness “took place as examples for us” (1 Cor. 10:6). So what are the lessons that we should learn from this pivotal period in Israel’s journey?

The Lord’s Purposes in Life’s Wilderness

The first lesson from Israel’s time in the wilderness comes from recognizing the fact that it was the Lord Himself who brought the people there. The wilderness through which Israel journeyed was a harsh and unforgiving environment. Food and water were extremely scarce, as were other resources necessary to sustain life. It was certainly not “a land flowing with milk and honey,” as the Lord had described the land of Canaan that He would give His people (Ex. 3:8). Yet journeying through the wilderness was far from the only, or even the obvious, route by which Israel could have traveled from Egypt to the promised land. There was a short, direct coastal road that the Israelites could have taken that would have brought the people into Canaan in the space of mere days or weeks.

Yet the Lord chose not to take Israel that way, “lest the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt” (13:17). The Egyptians had a series of forts along the way that hugged the coastline, and the Philistines who inhabited the coastal plain farther east were formidable warriors. Even though the Lord could easily have overcome these obstacles just as He had parted the Red Sea, He chose instead to lead His people through the Red Sea and out into the wilderness. The wilderness was His good plan for their lives.

In the same way, Israel’s time in the wilderness shows us that the Lord’s wonderful plan for our own lives may include times of profound trial, suffering, and difficulty as well as times of blessing and plenty. The Lord is our Shepherd when He brings us into wild and desolate places in life as well as when He leads us beside still waters and in green pastures (see Ps. 23). These may all be the routes that He has chosen to bring us to our ultimate place of rest.

Specifically, Israel’s experiences in the wilderness revealed to the people their hearts in a way that their experiences of triumph did not. When the Lord parted the Red Sea in front of the Israelites and drowned the Egyptian chariots and horsemen behind them, Israel seemed thoroughly convinced of the Lord’s power to protect them and provide for the nation (Ex. 14). The people were eager to praise the Lord in the aftermath of a victory in which they had not been required to lift a finger against the Egyptians (15:1–21). Yet within three days in the wilderness, when they struggled to find water and then came to Marah, where the only water was too bitter to drink, their hearts were uncovered as they also became bitter against the Lord (vv. 22–24). This was Israel’s first test in the wilderness (v. 25), and the people failed it comprehensively.

The persistent pattern of Israel’s grumbling against the Lord that began at Marah marked out much of the next forty years. The people grumbled about the lack of food (Ex. 16:2–3), the variety of food (Num. 11:4–6), the lack of water (Ex. 17:1–3), and ultimately even the promised land itself (Num. 13–14), after the majority of the spies who had been sent to explore the land brought back a negative report of the viability of an invasion (13:27–29). The Lord’s concern about the Israelites’ changing their minds when they saw warfare and desiring to go back to Egypt was fully justified. An entire generation of Israelites were condemned to die in the wilderness as a result of their unbelief (14:28–30).

It was not until that unbelieving generation was finally replaced by a new, believing generation that progress could be made and the land that God had promised their fathers could be given to them. Indeed, the book of Numbers is structured as the story of two generations: an unbelieving generation that was judged for its sin and died in the wilderness (Num. 1–25), and a second generation of faith that ends the book standing on the verge of entering the land (chs. 26–36).

The second generation’s faith is exemplified in the story of Zelophehad’s daughters, whose account brackets the narrative of the second generation in Numbers 27:1–11 and 36:1–12. Their father died in the wilderness, and it seemed that his line would come to an end with him since he had no sons to inherit his portion in the land of Canaan (27:3). That wouldn’t have bothered most of the first generation of wilderness Israelites, who didn’t believe that there was any serious likelihood of Israel’s inheriting the land. Zelophehad’s daughters, however, not only believed in God’s promise that there would be an inheritance, but they were bold enough to go to Moses and ask that they might join in sharing it. At the Lord’s command, the normal rules of inheritance, by which property went only to sons, were suspended, and these bold young women’s faith received its fitting reward (27:5–11).

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