If you are like me, then your life has brought you through at least one significant wilderness – a very challenging situation that lasts for a while and requires some spiritual strength to get through it. That wilderness is a significant challenge and burden but also an opportunity for growth and perhaps even an invitation to a better state of mind, heart, faith, and trust. The more that you learn about that kind of wilderness, the more important and pervasive it seems.

Recently, I’ve been listening to Tim Mackie and Jon Collins from The Bible Project explore this very theme in their latest podcast series on The Wilderness. If you haven’t encountered their work before, these two have a wonderful way of making biblical themes both educational and entertaining through their videos, podcasts, and classes. Their wilderness series has opened my eyes to patterns I’d never noticed before.

What they’ve helped me see is that the biblical midbar (wilderness) is more than just a harsh place – it’s a developing theological concept that threads through the entire biblical story. It begins as the primordial chaos from which God carves the Eden oasis. When humanity falls, we return to this hostile default state. But here’s what struck me: the wilderness becomes both a place of exile that we enter through our own folly (think of Adam, or Hagar) and also a divine crucible – what they call the “harder way” that God intentionally uses to form his people in radical trust.

Consider Israel’s 40-year journey in the wilderness. As revealed in Deuteronomy 8, this was a nissah (a test) that stripped away any illusion of self-sufficiency. Have you ever been in a place where all your usual supports were removed? Where you had to face the truth of your total dependence on something beyond yourself? That’s the wilderness working on you, revealing that we need God’s “word” for life itself.

The story continues with David becoming the first person to truly pass this wilderness test, setting the stage for the prophets who would “remix” the wilderness as a metaphor for exile. And then – wonderfully – it all culminates in Jesus, who first identifies with his failed people in the wilderness baptism, then passes the 40-day test where Adam and Israel had failed. Having proven his perfect dependence, Jesus does something remarkable: he becomes the new shepherd who brings the garden’s abundance (bread, healing) into the wilderness itself. He begins its transformation – a reality we, his followers, now inhabit as we journey through this “in-between” age toward the new creation.

As I sat with these ideas, something clicked for me. You know how Jesus constantly talks about the upside-down nature of God’s Kingdom? How worldly values like power, wealth, and self-reliance get flipped, while weakness, humility, and service are lifted up?

Tim and Jon don’t explicitly connect the wilderness to Jesus’ upside-down kingdom, but I can’t help wondering: What if God’s Kingdom is actually much more Wilderness than Garden? What if that’s part of the radical reversal Jesus is inviting us into?

Let me share what I mean. Genesis tells us that the world was wilderness until God created the garden – an oasis of peace, abundance, and blessing within the wild places. Most likely, it was a purely natural setting. The garden and its inhabitants were the culmination of God’s improvements upon the wilderness.

But here’s where it gets interesting (and maybe a bit uncomfortable): The God-improved world should have been sufficient, but we humans weren’t satisfied. We wanted to be like God, having knowledge of good and bad. Why? Perhaps – and stay with me here – we wanted to make our own improvements to the wilderness and the garden.

If you look at human history, doesn’t it seem like one long story of relentlessly pursuing our own improvements? We’ve had challenges and setbacks, sure, but we keep pushing forward with our projects. And now, thousands (or millions) of years later, we have essentially overimproved the world.

Think about it like this: in software development terms, we’ve added so many features and patches and “improvements” that we’ve created bloat. The system is becoming unstable. The earth itself is struggling under the weight of our enhancements.

This makes me wonder: As the Son of God, might Jesus have known where humanity was headed? Would he have seen that our incessant desire for comfort, convenience, excitement, and prosperity would eventually tax the earth so much that it would literally start to die? If so, then perhaps Jesus was advocating for a wilderness lifestyle not just for personal humility and radical trust in God, but to literally save the earth.

Now, let me take you on what might seem like a strange journey, but I promise it connects back.

We typically think of wilderness as a barren, challenging place – the desert, the tundra. But what if God’s understanding of wilderness is much broader and more fundamental?

Consider outer space. It’s the ultimate wilderness, isn’t it? Beyond our planetary biosphere, no living thing can survive on its own. The lack of water, the near vacuum, the extreme cold (unless you’re right next to a star) – individually and collectively, these make life without extreme protection impossible. There are no friendly animals out there, but there are plenty of dangers: galactic cosmic rays, micrometeoroids, and – though rarely encountered – black holes that would do absolutely horrifying things to any traveler.

And yet, here’s our Earth, happily spinning within this extreme wilderness, remarkably protected. Think about all the shields we have: – The magnetosphere (created by moving molten iron in Earth’s core) protects us from cosmic rays and solar winds that would otherwise strip away our atmosphere – The ozone layer (made of O₃ gas) absorbs most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation – Our atmosphere keeps us from the vacuum and extreme temperatures of space, allowing water to exist as liquid – Clouds and ice formations reflect just the right amount of sunlight to keep Earth habitable.

Here’s the thought that keeps coming back to me: What if the entire Earth is the true Eden?

Sit with that for a moment. What if we are playing out the story of the Fall right now, in real-time? The forbidden fruit that opened our eyes to “human improvements” seems to be leading us toward the ruin of our garden planet.

And there’s a haunting parallel: When human beings were cast out of Eden, they were sent east. If we ever have to leave Earth – if our overimprovements finally make it uninhabitable – our rockets will travel east across the sky (that’s the orbital mechanics of it: Why Are Space Rockets Launched Eastward? Rocket Science). We’ll use Earth’s rotation one last time before entering the ultimate wilderness.

But here’s where I find hope, even in this sobering vision. If Jesus showed us that the wilderness can be transformed – that bread can multiply in the desert, that healing can happen in the wasteland – then perhaps our task isn’t to escape the wilderness we’re creating, but to learn from it.

Maybe the wilderness experiences in our personal lives – those challenging seasons that strip away our self-sufficiency – are preparing us for something larger. They’re teaching us the radical trust and dependence we’ll need to heal our relationship with creation itself.

What if embracing a simpler, wilderness-minded lifestyle isn’t about deprivation but about rediscovering what’s truly sufficient? What if every small act of choosing less – less consumption, less comfort, less control – is a step toward the transformation Jesus began?

The wilderness, it turns out, isn’t just a place we pass through. It’s a teacher, a test, and perhaps even a gift. It shows us who we really are when all our additions and improvements are stripped away. And in that vulnerable space, we might just find the path back to the garden – not through our own clever improvements, but through the humble way of trust that Jesus walked before us.

So I invite you to consider: Where is the wilderness in your life right now? And what might it be trying to teach you about dependence, about sufficiency, about the upside-down values of God’s Kingdom?

Perhaps together, as we learn to embrace the wilderness rather than constantly trying to improve our way out of it, we can begin to see the transformation that’s possible – both in our own hearts and in the world we’ve been given to tend.

Open your mind to the wilderness teaching. Open your heart to its difficult grace. And open your arms to a simpler way that might just save us all.