The Wilderness Speaks

There’s something strange about how God works with His people. He doesn’t lead them from mountaintop to mountaintop. He leads them from Egypt to the desert. He calls them out of bondage and then, instead of directly into a land flowing with milk and honey, He walks them straight into sand and silence. That’s not a mistake. It’s a pattern.

And Yeshua? Same path. Immediately after being baptized and hearing the voice of His Father declare, “This is My beloved Son,” the Spirit doesn’t lead Him to the synagogue or the city gates. The Spirit leads Him into the wilderness. The exact same wilderness. Dry, cracked, and empty on purpose. Why? Because it’s never been about the dryness. It’s been about what happens there.

The Hebrew word for wilderness is midbar. It comes from the root dabar, which means word or to speak. Right in the middle of the barren place is the very thing we think we’re missing: the word of God. The midbar is not where God is silent. It’s where He finally has your full attention. The wilderness is the place of dabar—where He speaks clearly, intimately, and personally. It's never the absence of His presence; it’s the stripping away of everything else so you can finally hear Him.

Israel wasn’t ready for the Promised Land the moment they left Egypt. They had the location of freedom but not the heart of it. They still thought like slaves. They still talked like slaves. They still trusted in what they could see. So God led them by way of the midbar—not to punish them but to transform them.

In Deuteronomy 8:2, Moses tells them, “Remember all the way which the Lord your God led you in the wilderness these forty years, to humble you, to test you, to know what was in your heart.” That phrase “to know what was in your heart” isn’t because God didn’t already know—it’s so they could see it. Deserts are where we finally find out what’s really in us. Not what we post, not what we pretend, but what actually comes out when the water runs out and the manna hasn’t shown up yet.

Even the provision God gives in the wilderness is daily. Manna came with the morning dew and vanished with the heat of the sun. You couldn’t store it. You couldn’t hoard it. Why? Because wilderness provision is always connected to relationship. He was teaching them to trust Him one day at a time. He was removing the Egypt from their souls even after He’d removed their bodies from its borders.

Yeshua walked into that same midbar—not with a full pantry but with an empty stomach. He fasted for forty days. And then, at His physically weakest point, the enemy came. “If You are the Son of God…” Notice the test wasn’t about hunger. It was about identity. Satan always challenges what God just said. “If You are...”—right after God had just said, “You are My beloved Son.”

Yeshua answered each temptation not with opinion but with Scripture, quoting from the very book that described Israel’s own wilderness journey: Deuteronomy. He spoke the word (dabar) from within the midbar. Because He is the Word made flesh. And He was showing us how to overcome in dry seasons: not by proving ourselves, but by anchoring ourselves in who God says we are and what God already spoke.

What looks like barrenness is often the very place God is bringing forth life. Hosea 2:14 says, “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.” That word “allure” isn’t a word of punishment—it’s the language of romance. God draws His bride into the wilderness to whisper what she wouldn’t be able to hear in the noise of the city.

The wilderness is where the fire falls, like it did for Elijah. It’s where the glory shows up, like it did for Moses. It’s where the voice of the Lord comes, like it did for John the Baptist. It's where we decrease so that He might increase. It’s not the place of death; it’s the place of becoming.

And if you’re walking through your own wilderness season right now, maybe dry and wondering why He’s silent—maybe He’s not silent at all. Maybe He’s speaking, but everything else had to be stripped away so you’d lean in and hear it.

So don’t despise the desert. Don’t waste the wilderness. Because it’s in the midbar—in the silence, in the testing, in the stretching—that the dabar comes. And once you’ve heard it, you never walk the same.

 

 

 image done by chatgpt at my direction