A family road trip starts with dreams of Disneyland but quickly devolves into complaints, blame, and chaos. Moses faced something far harder: leading a people from slavery to freedom, only to watch them reject the promised land itself and wander forty years in the desert. The heart, Deuteronomy 30 suggests, is the real problem—and no change of scenery will fix it.
Could you have heaven with no sickness, every friend you ever loved, every pleasure you ever tasted—and still be satisfied if God were not there? At Sinai in Exodus 19, Israel, just out of slavery, receives the law and a portable tent meant to keep God at the center of camp. The question that will follow them through the wilderness is the one that follows everyone: the garden, or its God?
When we struggle to translate from one language to another, we’re painfully reminded of the problems coming from the Tower of Babel. But do we remember the temptation of that situation, one that plays to our own ambitions still today?
It is easy to want Jesus for the healing, peace, and confidence he gives while keeping the rest of life safely under our control. In Matthew 8, however, the One who heals the sick also tells would-be disciples that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. What does it mean to follow him rather than merely watch?
We love to DIY it, and those efforts can look impressive on the surface—but surface polish gives false confidence. Isaiah 1:30 warns that a life cut off from God withers like an oak without water. The question is whether we are still building kingdoms that burn, or rooting ourselves in the One who lasts.
Whatever looks triumphant—the people and things we hold out as the absolute measure of concrete, dependable success—still meets death that tramples it. Isaiah warns that rebels and sinners will together be shattered, and those who forsake the Lord will perish. What then are we going to hold onto?
How does a people God has blessed so richly turn their backs on him? Isaiah 1 opens with God’s lament over Jerusalem—once full of justice, now a harlot filled with murderers—and brings the question home for Lent: when he looks at you, does he lament?
We tend to assume God works through the right people, in the right places, with the right credentials. Isaiah 44–45 is genuinely jarring to our assumptions: the Lord names a pagan, idol-worshiping foreign king as the one who will restore His people to their land.
Solomon, Rehoboam, and Jeroboam all treated God’s promises like something they could improve on or control on their own terms only to encounter the pavement courtesy of the black ice of sin. Our efforts end like that, but God’s faithfulness outlasts our failures.
When God’s holiness draws near, our first instinct is often to back away—to put some distance between ourselves and the One whose law shows us how unholy we are. That’s exactly what Israel does in Exodus 20 after hearing the Ten Commandments: they tremble at the mountain and tell Moses, “You speak to us… but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”