Shadow and Light:
Persistent Preparation

Week 2 Devotional: Peace

By Rev. Rachel N. Klompmaker, Lake Fellow

Scripture passage: Matthew 3:1-12

You would have to do a lot of planning and preparation to safely spend time in the wilderness. You would be particularly vulnerable there in ways that we spend most of our time trying to avoid. Things lurk there around corners, in the dark, in the shadows. You would trade what we call ‘creature comforts’ for just plain creatures.

The wilderness around Judea in the New Testament was not a safe place, and you would do your best to avoid being there after dark. We read accounts of robbers and thieves leaving a man for dead on the side of the road, Roman soldiers forcing Jewish citizens to carry their stuff for a mile or more, and exiled people possessed by demons or plagued with unclean skin conditions needing to make their home there.

But John the Baptist is in the wilderness proclaiming to those who are there with him that the places of shadow where bad things happen—the hills, the valleys, the uneven ground, the rough places—will become places of light and safety in the presence of Jesus Christ, the Light of the World, the one through whom the kingdom of heaven has now come near.

John’s use of Isaiah’s words to bring comfort to a shadowed people (Isaiah 40:1-5) reminds us that the wilderness has not always been a place of fear: Read the story of Hagar in Genesis 17 and 21. Though she was an Egyptian slave running into the wilderness to escape the abuse of her masters Sarai and Abram, El-Roi, the God Who Sees, met her there and reminded her not to be afraid.

Shepherd Moses had “led his flock beyond the wilderness” (Genesis 3) and there God, the Great I AM, met him in a bush that wouldn’t burn up.

It was in the wilderness that God promised to hear the cries of the Israelites and lead them out of Egypt and then, once freed from slavery, the wilderness became the place where God shaped Israel and trained them to be a blessing to the nations. And though eventually they wandered in that wilderness for forty years, never were they without the illuminating and protective presence of God in the form of a pillar of cloud and fire.

Throughout all time and space, God has chosen revelation in the shadows of the wilderness, whether that be literally in Scripture or figuratively in our own lives. Do you have a story of light in the midst of shadow? How or where have you witnessed God breaking in to make a rough place smooth? May God give us eyes to see the light of Christ this season.