Day 02 - Wilderness: Masada, Bedouin Hospitality, Camel Ride, Tel Arad, Dead Sea

Scripture uses concrete language to describe God. It relates the character and nature of God to things you can touch and see, not just stuff you have to imagine. And, though we have read about fortresses and ‘know’ what they are like, there is something special about climbing (or riding a cable car) past 1300-foot vertical cliffs to really get the true sense of what it means that God is our ‘rock and fortress and deliverer… the rock in whom we take refuge.’ (Psalm 18)

We were up early and on the bus before 8am to be among the first to head to the top of Masada, where Herod the Great had built a fortress, perhaps as a luxurious vacation retreat, or perhaps (and more likely) as a place to escape to if his power was ever threatened. Herod’s fortress and refuge was a literal rock in the desert. How great it was to be reminded as we looked out from this beautiful site that our hope is not a literal rock, but the God who made them!

As we explored the ruins at Masada, we also saw how God’s people (a small contingent of Jewish rebels) had taken refuge there when Caesar’s armies came to destroy Jerusalem in 70 CE. It was Caesar’s pride and thirst for power that caused him to spend 4 years and many lives laying siege to destroy these holdouts. 

We also visited the ruins of the ancient city Arad, perhaps the first place where the Jewish people encountered Canaanite culture. It was here they learned to build permanent homes, but also here that they learned the wicked ways of idol worship and ungodly sacrifices. It was only after King Josiah had rediscovered the Word of God that there was repentance and the idols and temple were destroyed. To commemorate, we wrote some of the things that have become sorts of idols to us on small clay pots and crushed them to dust right there at Arad, just as Josiah had done. 

This theme of sin and repentance had permeated the day: from Herod’s sin of pride, and Caesar’s lust for power, to our own. And, in the bus on the way back to our hotel on the shore of the Dead Sea, we sang, “ My sin—oh the bliss of this glorious thought—my sin, not in part, but the whole…

Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”