Blessed are you O Lord, King of the universe

"Blessed are you O Lord, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth."

It is easy to grasp this blessing in a place in the world where life is supported in abundance, it is more powerful when you see God bringing forth what is required in the midst of a desert.

We recited this ancient Hebrew blessing this morning while standing on the shores of the Dead Sea. Yesterday we got to experience the richness of the Judean mountains. The air was cool, the flowers were blooming, the scenery was very green. Today we embarked into the heart of the Judean desert. Such a short drive from each other, but such incredibly different landscapes.

During our morning devotion, Terry made a comment that helps to characterize the learnings of the day. He said, "God has always used the deserts to build faith by stripping away the obstructions." Both today and tomorrow will be spent in the desert, a landscape that is as unforgiving as it is majestic.

The Dead Sea has no life in it. But not only can the water not support life, anything that is placed in the water will rot. I have never seen such a vast area of beautiful water with no boats floating on the surface. Seeing the mountains rise from behind the still waters with no obstruction at all within the sea was a sight I will never forget.

The desert that borders the Dead Sea didn't seem to yield much more of a chance for life than the Sea itself.

Our first stop was a mountain top fortress known as Masada. This fortress stood atop a flat portion of a mountain and it seemed from the ground that there would be no way to get up to it. And in fact, this was the point. Herod the Great had the fortress constructed out of fear. In the decades prior to the birth of Christ, Herod had risen to power and was allowed to rule the Jewish people as a King under the Roman authorities, in large part because of how he had shown his loyalty to the Romans above the Jewish people. Herod was an ally of Marc Antony and when Marc Antony was defeated by Octavian (Augustus) Herod pledged his loyalty to the new consolidated leader of the Roman Empire. Octavian allowed Herod to remain in power, but he let Herod know that it may not be permanent. Herod was brilliant. He was called Herod the Great for a reason. His mind for economics, construction, engineering, was unmatched. But he was also an egomaniac and was paranoid. He had Masada constructed out of that paranoia. He was rightly worried both about both the Romans and the Jewish people eventually wanting to bring him down.

Masada was Herods way of having a refuge if he needed it. We had to take a cable car to get up to the fortress. The watchtowers looked out at the only major fresh water source, which was over a days walk away. The engineering in the fortress was 400 years ahead of its time, it was incredible to see that in the midst of a desert that gets two inches of rain a year, Herod built a lavish palace which included a sauna and a cooling bath. It was hard to even comprehend what the people would have had to endure to construct and operate this place. Thousands of slaves must have died in the effort. We got a sense in the desert environment for the grit people must have had. In fact, even the food itself seemed to have more grit at that time. We learned about a specific type of peach that was used at the fortress that would last a month in a storage room in the desert heat (my peaches don't last two weeks in the refrigerator).

We will talk about Herod more in this blog in the coming days, but one of the biggest takeaways of the Masada experience is that it helped us understand the political, military, economic, and geographic environment that was in place at the time that Christ was born. With Masada, Herod was trying to show that he could dominate nature. I now understand more why he felt he could dominate his own destiny by ordering the death of all children who could have been Christ. But you can't dominate the will of God, no matter how powerful you think you are. God has bent the most incredible figures of this world to his will time and time again, people like Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus the Great, Herod is no different.

From Masada, we headed over to learn about the Bedouin culture. And obviously, the first thing you MUST do when learning about the Bedouin culture is ride a camel. We didn't get a lot of biblical lessons out of the camel riding but I have to say it was incredible. One of the pastors on the trip attempted to show everyone how difficult it is to fit a camel through the eye of a needle in order to teach a lesson on Matthew 19:24, but the camels were not thrilled with this exercise. From the camel riding experience, we sat inside a tent and listened to a lesson on Bedouin culture. From a biblical perspective, seeing how these people lived in tents, welcomed their guests, and were free from many worldly obstructions helped us to imagine the world in the time of the patriarchs. The way of life we got to observe today would have been very similar to how Abraham, Job and others of that era lived.

Terry taught us a lesson where we looked at how the descendants of Cain had worked to develop some of the world's best cities. We can look back on the Old Testament and think of Babel, Nineveh, and Babylon. Or we can look into the New Testament and think of Rome. These cities are symbols throughout the Bible of people getting together and being oppressive. It is very easy to contrast the cities of history and present with the desert environment. In the desert, Terry taught that our faith can be stripped of obstructions. Whereas cities offer the opportunity for many obstructions. Cities may offer us the opportunities to make other aspects of the world our God. And part of our responsibility as Christians is to go out into the cities in which we live, be faithful, and work to redeem our cities to make them a more Godly place.

Next we travelled to Tel Arad. This was another fortress, although much smaller than we saw in the morning at Masada. Tel Arad was one of three fortresses along a long line that helped to set a boundary along the southern section of Israel. A boundary that could represent a bit of a dividing line geographically and spiritually between the early kingdom of Israel (think around the time of David and Solomon) and the Egyptians. There were a couple of very interesting things about this fortress. First, this fortress was set up next to an early Canaanite city. This city is the only city that has been discovered from the early Canaanite period (around 5,000 years ago) that had a wall. It was incredible to see the wall and city structure standing to this day. The second interesting aspect of this fortress is that there was a small temple built inside of it. Within this temple, there has also been evidence discovered of idol worshipping. This temple was one of the places that was destroyed during the time of Hezekiah as he was ridding the Kingdom of false idols and places of pagan worship.

This was the perfect setting for Terry's final lesson of the day. He taught us about "henotheism". Henotheism is when you believe there is one God among many. So people would not deny the existence of many Gods, but think you should worship your one main God. This may sound foreign to us, but it is actually much more familiar than we may think. Most of the Israelites didn't stop believing in our God in the Old Testament times, they simply over time assimilated with cultures surrounding them and tended to add other Gods into the mix, even if they considered those other Gods smaller and subservient to the one true God. Christians who fall away from their faith today normally don't become atheists or polytheists. We don't see many Christians completely denying the existence of God or converting to Hinduism as an example. But we do see so many Christians assimilate into the surrounding cultures and start to pick up other subservient Gods. We allow things like pride, fame, money, success, our children, and relative status to become our Gods.

The same temptation that the Jewish people had as they were worshipping cultural idols at Tel Arad is what we as Christians experience today. The only difference is that we have many more avenues for that temptation to force itself into our lives. The people of Israel would have had to walk miles at a time to deal with this temptation, we have an instant avenue for it with a click of a mouse or with a touch of a screen within our hands.

The desert builds faith by stripping away the obstructions. We all need to be mindful of the obstructions in our lives and how often we let them erode our faith. Desert experiences, although very difficult, can be incredibly helpful to strengthen our faith.

We ended the day by taking a very cold swim in the Dead Sea! In a body of water that contains no life, we sure tried to liven it up!