The exodus of the people of Israel and their journey through the Sinai desert is one of the greatest survival stories of all time. More than two million people wandering through a land of sand and barren rock, homeless, looking for the land of abundance, a place to call home. When will life be good again?

There were no real sources of food in that desert. Water was about as scarce as it is on the surface of the moon. A “barren wilderness — a land of deserts and pits, a land of drought and death, where no one lives or even travels” (Jeremiah 2:6 NLT).

This is more than a moment in Jewish history. It is recorded for us as one of the great analogies of human experience, our journey from bondage to freedom, from barrenness to the promised land. Ultimately, it is the precursor to our journey of salvation, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God.

It is a story about the Primal Drive for Life — where will we take our thirst?

This is the choice, the test. Always has been, always will be.

This Primal Drive for Life was so compelling it caused thousands of those rescued slaves to mount a rebellion to go back to bondage in Egypt just to have their familiar ways back. Sobering.

“The heavens are shocked at such a thing
and shrink back in horror and dismay,”
says the lord.
“For my people have done two evil things:
They have abandoned me—
the fountain of living water.
And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns
that can hold no water at all!” (Jeremiah 2:12-13 NLT)

The great alarm the Scriptures are sounding is that our longing for life to be good again will be the battleground for our heart. How you shepherd this precious longing, and if you shepherd it at all, will determine your fate in this life and in the life to come.

We must lovingly shepherd our famished thirst back to the source of life.

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