One of the great things about being a Christian is that “I” becomes “We.” By this I mean that God does not leave me in my solipsistic, narcissistic aloneness, but instead calls me to be one of — just one of — his people. John tells us, “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
On the other hand, perhaps every Christian, and almost certainly every Christian who has a strong desire to serve God, will go through what we might call a “desert” or “wilderness” experience. Here we find the aloneness of following God. There is no human help; no consolation or source of strength apart from God.
Throughout the Bible we see people going through this experience. Abraham was called away from his place and his people to go where God told him to go. Jacob fled from Esau and met God in the wilderness, and then on his return in his great anxiety he went off alone and wrestled with God and won a blessing. Joseph was sold into slavery and taken by a desert caravan into the wilderness, finally emerging after many trials to save his family — and with it God’s plan for the salvation of humanity.
David fled from Saul into the wilderness, where he learned to trust God so much he was willing to spare Saul’s life rather than take his kingdom by shedding blood. Elijah fled into the wilderness where he heard a still small voice (not a hurricane…). He found out that he was not alone, but that there were seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Ba-al.
In a climax we find Jesus himself, who was driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. There, at his last physical extremity, he was tempted with everything the tempter had to offer. But he refused it all for the sake of his Father.
Then there is Paul, who spent a decade in the Arabian desert and, from what we can tell, was taken into Paradise and given incredible visions while there. And finally John, exiled to the isle of Patmos, saw the glory of Jesus and the revelation of the fulfillment of God’s plan for salvation.
When I think of my own life I recall that when I became a Christian I immediately came out of my nerdy loner shell. Suddenly I had friends! People I liked and who liked me! No sooner did I start to revel in this newfound extroversion than God “drove me into the wilderness” of Redwood City. All of my wonderful new Christian brothers and sisters were suddenly at a distance. Letters, bus trips and surprise visits were no substitute for being there (this was before the day of cell-phones, unlimited long-distance calls, and Skype).
The song “Alone Again, Naturally” might have been written just for me. And yet God was doing something. Through all the suffering and yearning I was changed in a manner invisible to me but not to others. I was told by two different people that I had “become a much nicer person.” And at that point I became painfully aware what the wilderness experience was for. Because I was not — and to be honest, am still not — fit for human society.
But God is faithful. He takes upon himself the task of perfecting us. “I love you, and that’s what I’m getting myself into,” goes the Relient-K song. And he, in the person of his Spirit who dwells in us, groans with us.
Why the wilderness? Why the loneliness and pain? Why was I ripped from all the joy of fellowship I was starting to experience as a new Christian, and deposited just far enough away to make it possible but difficult to return?
The answer, painful though it may be, is simple. We must be disconnected from everything that will destroy us. And the tool God uses to do that is death. Death disconnects.
Jesus tells us that if we want to follow him, we must deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. The cross, of course, is the instrument of death. Not a clean, painless death, but a slow, torturous death where you feel everything. And Jesus tells us to take up our own cross — by which he means go with the process. Cooperate with what God is doing even when it hurts to our very core.
Because it is our very core that God must reach and change. In C. S. Lewis’s book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis describes the “de-dragonification” of Eustace Scrubb. Eustace’s greed had turned him (literally) into a dragon. This had caused him to see himself as he was on the inside, and he began to change. But he was still a dragon. Finally he had met Aslan who offered help him by “undressing” him. But Eustace thought he could do it himself. He scrubbed off his skin in reptile fashion but found out that under that outer skin was another skin just like it. He did this several times with identical results.
Aslan told him that Eustace could not scrub off his own dragon skin; Aslan would have to do it for him. And it would hurt.
Eustace himself describes the experience like this:
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.
As I write this I find tears going down my face. Because de-dragonification is not a one-time thing. We have to take up our cross daily. We have to die to ourselves as Jesus died. That means the loss of every earthly desire. Everything in us that can die must die. And the only consolation is to know that if we try to hang on to our lives we will lose them anyway, but if we lose them for Christ’s sake, we will gain them to eternity.
We go into the wilderness to die, but we find that, because of the resurrection of Christ, there is life after the wilderness. It is a different kind of life, one where the visible things of this life take on a ghostly, insubstantial quality, and the things of eternity become more real. And this is as it should be, for “the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” We die to the things that are seen so we can live eternally.
But I can’t leave it here. Because there is hope. The pain of the wilderness is temporary — a “momentary light affliction” that works for us “an eternal weight of glory.” And even in the midst of this affliction we find that “the love of God is poured out in our hearts.” We are accompanied in the wilderness by God himself. His Spirit lives in us, groans with us, and intercedes for us. We go into the wilderness to be alone, but we find that we are not alone; God is there.