“Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions’’. Genesis 15:12-14

At the moment I am writing this message, some Christians are going through incredible challenges that I liken to wilderness, because things are not going well in their lives. Some almost fail in everything they undertake. In such circumstances, the most difficult thing believers do is to answer questions like “what led me into this situation?”

Once that question is asked, more often than not our most common answer is ‘sin’. Indeed, in Jeremiah 25, we learned that the Israelites’ sins were so much that God decided to punish them by delivering them into the hands of their enemies in a 70-years’ slavery. However, according to the Bible, God's Will could also possibly lead us into the wilderness.

Indeed, in the book of Genesis 15:12-14, we see a sovereign God deciding to send his people into captivity. God made a promise to Abram and nothing before or after the passage shows that this promise is related to sin. It was simply the will of God and Abram could do nothing about it. Then, for no reason related to sins, Israelites stayed in slavery for over 400 years.

One of God’s servants most familiar with the wilderness is David as he had several experiences in the wilderness. While David's second experience into the wilderness (2 Samuel 15) may be the result of his own sin (2 Samuel 12:9-12), his first experience in the wilderness had nothing to do with sin (1 Samuel 19) but consistence with God's Agenda as king David committed no sin against Saul or God when Saul pushed him into the wilderness.

For many of us, other names of our wildernesses are succession of failures, long-time sickness, and abandonment by friends or brothers, delay to find the life partner for a blessed wedding, delay in experiencing the joy of being father or mother, etc. If your wilderness is sin-driven, please confess them; otherwise, persevere because there is a great reward ahead. Israelites left Egypt with an unconventional reward; a similar reward for David who became king after his wilderness experience.

May God help us to identify what led us into the wilderness so we could know the best attitude to adopt in those difficult moments.