CAMPING: GOD'S WILDERNESS PRINCIPLE
Numbers 33:8 They left Pi-Hahiroth, crossed the Red Sea, then walked three days into the wilderness of Etham and camped at Marah.
When we are distilled down to our most basic composition, for the most part, I think we fall neatly into one of two distinct categories… campers and non-campers. I’m not trying to be contentious, there’s certainly no judgement, no denunciation whatsoever regarding the category you find yourself in, but I believe you are either drawn to spending your hard-earned vacation time contending with all the realities of living alfresco… or you’re not. At this point, I need to confess that I am a camper; my wife however… not so much, and our marriage has always had to navigate the persistent, albeit courteously restrained friction caused by this unequal yoking - often culminating in my reminder to her that, despite claiming she wasn’t aware of my fondness for camping when we got married, she certainly knew exactly where I was living when we met.
Regardless of which category you find yourself in, I think camping can provide us with a unique and fascinating opportunity to observe the hard-wiring of humanity at work. In Gen. 1:27, one of God’s foundational commands to Adam and Eve is to ‘subdue’ the earth; to bring it under their management, dominion and subjugation. Again in Gen. 2:15 we find God placing Adam in the garden with the explicit purpose of ‘cultivating and keeping’ it; to develop it and keep charge over it. It’s by God’s intentional design that humans are programmed with an inherent desire to subdue and cultivate the world around them. Like everything else, the motivations and execution of our cultivating work has been corrupted by sin, nevertheless the deep impulse hard-wired by God remains.
Now, what in the world does this all have to do with camping? Well… even for those of us who are drawn to leave the creature comforts of civilized life behind, the desire to establish a level of arrangement and structure, orderliness and development persists. We ‘cultivate and keep’ our camping site as we set up our tents, tarps, make-shift kitchens and solar lights. In fact, every campsite tells the same story – a tent peg left in the grass, a piece of rope tied around a tree, a crude trench in the dirt to divert the rain, a table and benches made from stumps and logs… these are all relics from campers past that spent their brief time working to make that site just a little more comfortable, a little better organized, a little more secure… a little more like home.
Numbers 33 provides us with Israel’s extensive camping itinerary as they made their way through the wilderness from one site to another; setting up, tearing down, moving on, setting up, tearing down, moving on... We can quickly appreciate the important ‘camping’ principle that God was instituting into the wilderness experience He designed for His people. Israel would have naturally had the inherent inclination to settle down and commit themselves to developing, arranging and cultivating the wilderness into a home. But God’s camping principle, His constant leading from site to site to site, compelled the existence of His people to be a transitory and nomadic one, as they were forced to leave their misplaced pegs behind and move on to the next site.
God’s camping principle fostered a deep longing and angst in the heart of His people; a yearning for a home of permanence and security that a transient life in the perilous wilderness could never offer, in order to press upon them that the wilderness was NOT their home… it was just THE WAY home. There’s always the temptation for us to set roots into the trappings of this world; to acquire, develop and desperately hang on to the comforts and securities this world offers in the effort to feel more at home here. It’s easy for us to become distracted with cultivating a sense of permanence in our wilderness, but as the old song goes, ‘This world is not our home, we’re just passing through.’ Like Israel, we too move through this life as campers; we too are constant sojourners and exiles in the wilderness that God has led us into… moving steadily closer to the eternal home that awaits.
Hebrews 11:13-16 These people died having faith. They didn’t receive the things that God had promised them, but they saw them from a distance and rejoiced, living as exiles and pilgrims with no permanent home on earth. Those who say such things make it clear that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking about the country that they had left, they could have easily found a way to go back. But instead, it was a better country they longed for, a heavenly country, which is why God is not ashamed to be called their God; For He has prepared a city for them.
