Patients in hospital face many spiritual and emotional challenges, and so pastoral counsel in such situations needs to help patients work through these. In this article, the author employs the biblical metaphor of wilderness to equip caregivers for helping patients work through these respective challenges.

The author of Hebrews understood the church to be the people of the wilderness. Therefore, he wrote his letter in order to exhort them to endurance, since as Christians remaining in the wilderness they should have expected suffering. This endurance can only come through Christ, by seeing His superiority, incarnation and superior offering, in keeping with the understanding of promise and punishment.