If you were to pinpoint the sin—the bad habit or hang-up, if you prefer—that is costing you the most, what would it be? I’ve begun to suspect that the truest answer for most of us is one that rarely crosses our minds.
I’ve been reading recently about the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness. If there’s one instance of things going wrong that we remember from this period, it’s probably the occasion when the Israelites melt their jewelry into a golden calf and then worship it while Moses is out of town. This is the sort of ‘sexy’ sin people have always loved to talk about. It’s dramatic and flashy and scandalous. It makes great TV. Conveniently, it also feels ridiculous enough that we can’t imagine ourselves doing anything similar, which makes it safe to roll our eyes over it.
But the story that Bible actually tells about Israel’s catastrophic misbehavior over this forty year period and God’s frustration with it begins and ends with a much more subtle problem. From the start, the journey out of Egypt turns out to be more challenging than the people expect. Almost immediately they begin complaining about the food and longing for the slavery they left behind, which somehow seems easier—or least more predictable—than the road into unknown freedom. God is drawing them out of Egypt, out of terrible oppression, and they are fighting their own rescue.
Later, having crossed the desert, the people stand on the border of the promised land. They are on the cusp of the better future, on the verge of receiving the lavish inheritance that God has been preparing for them. And they get scared and refuse to go in and actually possess it. God is drawing them toward Canaan, toward a place of abundance, and they are declining their own inheritance.
It is, I think, a strange and revealing story. What really messes Israel up throughout the wilderness years—and causes so much pathos for God—is a refusal to receive, a failure to welcome and embrace the gifts God holds out. And this is caused by a more fundamental refusal to trust in God’s essential goodness. Time and time again through the wilderness years, it is this doubt about God’s care and generosity that blocks Israel’s path to greater freedom and purpose and peace and abundance. They could have arrived earlier, saved so much sweat and tears, but they decline the gift, refusing to even open it.
There are many kinds of sins we’ve been told by Christian teaching to watch out for. Greed. Pride. Selfishness. Deceit. Unforgiveness. Sexual sins. But I’ve begun to suspect the sin that’s costing me most, much like Israel, is a refusal to trust sufficiently in God’s goodness. This refusal keeps me clinging to Egypt when I should be walking out. It leaves me still wandering in the wilderness many years after I could have entered a new land full of promise.
Perhaps all our lives, like biblical Israel’s, would be radically different if we dared to believe that the one who daily calls and leads us does so to bring us from slavery to freedom and from wilderness to home. If we truly believed that every step had this trajectory, this destiny, this relentless commitment to our flourishing behind it, we would rush fearlessly forward.
These are questions worth asking regularly: How might I currently be resisting my own rescue? How might I be delaying or declining the movement into promise by refusing to believe that God is truly as generous as Jesus claims? One thing I know: I don’t want to spend my whole life in the wilderness—or worse yet, captivity—because I wasn’t willing to trust that God desires my good and knows what direction it lies.
