Page 68 - The Remnant Bride

The Wilderness

I t was not God’s intention for the children of Israel to spend a whole generation in the
wilderness. The wilderness was not to be their destination. However, the wilderness was

an integral and important part of their journey. Going through the wilderness was not
optional. Even so, the Bride must go through the wilderness. She is not to abide there

forever, but she is to profit by her wilderness experience.
Having just come out of bondage, Israel needed to acquire a new mindset. No longer

slaves to their Egyptian masters, the Israelites had to shed a slave mentality. It was
necessary for someone to take charge of their lives. They had two obvious choices. They

could rule their own lives, or they could submit to God, receiving Him as their head and
their Lord.

The saint of God has the same two choices. Having been delivered from bondage (the
bondage of sin), the saint can choose to rule his own life, attempting to please God in his

own strength, being led by his own reason, or he can submit to the Lordship of Christ.
As we saw with Peter, reliance upon self is inadequate to lead us to the destination

God has for us. It also was inadequate to lead the Israelites into the promised land. The ten
unfaithful spies and the mass of the people were walking in their own strength. Having

spied out the land, they determined whether they were adequate in their own strength to
go in and possess it. The answer was a resounding ““No!”

Numbers 13:32-33

"The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its
inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also

we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became
like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight."

It may seem incredible to us that Israel thought that they were going to have to

conquer and possess the land of their inheritance by their own strength. After all, they had
seen clearly that it was God who had brought them out of Egypt. It was God who visited the

ten plagues upon Egypt. It was God who opened up the Red Sea allowing Israel to cross over
and who then closed the sea, destroying the armies of Pharaoh.