Welcome to Bible Project Podcast.

We are studying the theme of the wilderness and the story of the Bible.

It's a place where humans can't really live in and of themselves and their own resources.

And that makes it a place that is dangerous and hostile.

And the opposite of God's good purposes for human flourishing.

The wilderness, as a setting, teaches us about the fragility of all of life.

The wilderness provides a really important insight that to be a creature is to be on the precipice of life and death all the time.

My moment-by-moment existence is being sustained by someone who has resources greater than I do.

God planted a garden in the wilderness, and it's sustained by his life,

and he puts Adam and Eve there to enjoy it and learn to live by God's life.

When humans are exiled from the garden, it's because they were deceived.

And then they foolishly went against God's wisdom and command.

In that sense, their exile from the garden is self-caused.

God's the one enforcing it, but they're the ones who brought it on themselves by not trusting God's provision.

Today we go outside of the Garden of Eden, and we consider three more stories of how people end up in the wilderness.

We'll look at the story of Cain, who murders his brother and is banished deeper into the wilderness.

We'll look at how Abraham and Sarah,

God's chosen couple, tragically becomes the snake that drives a single mother out into the

wilderness. And we'll look at how Moses, the man God chose to rescue Israel from slavery,

how he also murders a man and has to flee into the wilderness. These stories are closely tied together because they want us to meditate on how people end up

in wilderness environments. And then what God does when he discovers that people are dying

in the wilderness, he sees and he hears, and what seems like game over, from our point of view, is never game over from God's point of view.

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