Awe in the Wilderness
When was the last time you felt a sense of awe? If you're like me, I suspect it's been a while. We live in a world that trivializes the divine and flattens the extraordinary. We fabricate a transcendence without God.
But in Acts 2:43 the early Christians "kept feeling a sense of awe" (NASB). They were witnessing firsthand the presence and acts of God in their midst. By the way, the Greek word used here for "awe" is "fear". Not the cringing fear of punishment but the amazement mingled with no little sense of dread.
So, check out this hymn sung by a choir from India. I get chills every time I listen to it:
Maybe awe for you is when rereading a passage of Scripture comes to life in your heart as never before. Perhaps it's an answer to a prayer you've been praying for decades. God becomes especially present in our lives, and we feel a sense of awe.
In addition to these, I experience awe in the wilderness. Ever since I was a little boy, I've longed for wild places. There weren't many of them in northern Illinois where I grew up, just corn and soybean fields. Even then I would find pockets of wild places carved out of the agricultural monotony.
When I became a Christian during my freshman year in college, I appreciated the wild creation even more. It says in Luke 5:16 that "Jesus often went to the wilderness to pray". If Jesus went into the wilderness to better focus on his Father, how much more should I! I appreciate all the wild places I've been and hope to experience more. Ask me sometime to show you the video clip of the Alaskan brown bear encounter I had last year!
King David loved wild places too. In his book Leap Over a Wall, Eugene Peterson describes David's experience in En-Gedi (1 Samuel 24), a desert wilderness with cliffs springing up 2,000 feet from the shore of the Dead Sea. He's once again fleeing from the pursuit of King Saul, who is intent on killing him. But the "years that David spent in the wilderness were some of the best years of his life" (p.72).
Peterson points out that in a wilderness, we're no longer in control. We're forced to be attentive, alert. Wilderness can be frightening and dangerous. I really don't fear much when hiking in Oregon. There's nothing that can kill me in the Three Sisters Wilderness. But when I'm in grizzly bear country, every snap of a branch and every blind corner keeps me on edge. There's a tension between the wild beauty and potential danger.
But God is in the wilderness with us. In the previous chapter (1 Samuel 23), verse 14b says in the NIV, "day after day Saul searched for him (David), but God did not give David into his hands". We should experience a heightened awe of God in the wilderness despite the dangers and the beauty.
Finally, Peterson writes about a circumstantial wilderness. We may never enter a physical wilderness, but everything familiar can be stripped away in our present life. Relationships fail, finances erode, health vanishes. We feel alone. We cry out to God in this wilderness. But it's the stripping away of the familiar that brings us closer to, and more reliant on, God. Peterson writes: "In the wilderness years, as David was dealing with God, a sense of the sacred developed in him. ...The wilderness taught David to see beauty everywhere" (p.77).
Whether we enter wilderness voluntarily or circumstantially, we can expand our sense of awe and wonder in a God who is there with us.