The desert is a metaphor for a place where life is unsustainable and there is no fruit. It is a place where you get valleys of dry bones and the deer gasps for water. Bear this in mind when you consider this headline analysis of Isaiah’s take on desert life.
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It is uniquely a place where God’s glory rather than ours is seen. God intentionally creates desert conditions in order to get his people’s attention long enough for sustained interaction. That may be why none of the big revivals of the twentieth century have brought about transformation in our part of the world.
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The desert is not in essence infertile, it just lacks the conditions for productivity
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The desert requires preparation for God’s amazing activity. (Desert living requires big thinking without the promise of results just round the corner—expectation of outpouring is no alternative to long term sustainable faithfulness.) That is why the desert needs to sing and desert workers have to sing to blocked up wells.
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God’s plan is for those who are the lost, the least and the missing to experience the transforming benefits of change in the climate
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God operates autonomously in the desert. We love to quote God’s plan to do a new thing but—be honest—if he only sends his Spirit where there is a group of people faithfully seeking him, that’s hardly a new thing.
Getting back to our core idea: if God has an interest in bringing about climatic change in arid regions even more than those where there is already a degree of fertility what might a spiritual desert look like?
In Kimpton, a little village just outside Harpenden, Herts., there are a number of underground wells, that had been inactive for a very long time (at least decades), but one day, after some persistent and sustained heavy rain, those wells had been reactivated and flooded most of the village, to the utter surprise of the villagers!
Comment by Frieder Kreschnak — Thursday, 10 July, 2008 @ 10:35 am