How did God let this happen? 

1st September
If you are asking, how did God let this happen? Here’s an alternative take on what’s going on in desert times when God seems to testing us. God’s testing is an affirmation, not a judgement. A small extract from something bigger I’m refining for future release.

Mt. 4:1. Testing times can be a sign of God’s approval.

"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil."

Jesus has gone through an experience of divine affirmation, hearing his Father's praise and experiencing the Holy Spirit's special blessing as he rises out of the waters of the Jordan. We often envisage discipleship as an upward trend of building on triumph after another and so we might expect this to lead to another positive epiphany.

He is led by the Holy Spirit, but not to glorious triumph but straight into trials and testing times.
This mixture of mountains and valleys is the way that God works with us. Once he sees that we are coping and affirms us, he often takes us into uncharted and troubled territory to build up our spiritual muscles.

We hope to be spared the amount of trial, testing, conflict and suffering that Jesus knew, but cannot expect life following Jesus to be plain sailing.
So comes one of my favourite verses in all of scripture because it confronts the false triumphalism that afflicts and stops some people from growing in their discipleship.

We all hope to led by the Spirit, but into the wilderness? Surely the inheritance of the saints is constant blessing and climbing ever higher up the mountain of divine revelation. Jesus is not only led by the Spirit into the wilderness but is also to be tempted and tested by the devil.

There are some Christians who are always discontented, restlessly searching for the next new thing or intense spiritual experience, they never seem to, stay with anything for very long. What they fail to understand is that we are not blessed just so that we can wallow in self-indulgent emotionalism. When we do have times of blessing, it is so we can be a blessing to other people. Nothing makes us more empathetic, kind and useful than our own experience of struggle, disappointment and even apparent failure. Some of the most dangerous people I have known have experienced nothing but a comfortable life, and some of the best and most trustworthy, have known only hardship, challenge and struggle.

One of the best things we can do is to embrace the struggles of life and understand that they are not a sign of failure or weakness, but the means to growth and fruitfulness.