Remember The Wilderness
May 17, 2020
Commentary
Is it harder for you to maintain a proper relationship with God in prosperity or in hardship? Why?
Moses doesn’t want Israel to forget God and be proud of their own attainments once they get in the promised land (v. 1). He reminds them of how they had learned humility, how God had proved their faithfulness and how He had revealed what was really in their hearts (v. 2). It is so easy for us to start thinking that life is based on material things, but things never satisfy. The more we get the more we want. Real life comes from total commitment to God, discipline, and hard work.
Israel had been in a situation in the wilderness where they had to completely depend on the Lord for their food and water (vv. 3-6). Now they were going into a land that had an abundance of water and agricultural products (v.v. 7-8). Moses warns them that prosperity may cause them to stop depending on God. The thing that will help them to remember God is to continue praising Him. Failure to praise Him will lead to forgetting Him followed quickly by the worship of other gods.
One of the major differences between the nation of Israel in the Old Testament and the church in the New Testament is that God promised Israel temporal blessing and He promises us spiritual blessings (vv. 9-10). If we can get this straight in our thinking it will cause us to rejoice rather than to lapse into a back-slidden condition.
Application
The one thing that will cause me to worship the gods of this world is to stop praising God for who He is and what He does.
Deuteronomy 8:1– 10 (NET)
1 You must keep carefully all these commandments I am giving you today so that you may live, increase in number, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised to your ancestors. 2 Remember the whole way by which he has brought you these forty years through the wilderness so that he might, by humbling you, test you to see if you have it within you to keep his commandments or not. 3 So he humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you with unfamiliar manna. He did this to teach you that humankind cannot live by bread alone, but also by everything that comes from the Lord’s mouth. 4 Your clothing did not wear out nor did your feet swell all these forty years. 5 Be keenly aware that just as a parent disciplines his child, so the Lord your God disciplines you. 6 So you must keep his commandments, live according to his standards, and revere him. 7 For the Lord your God is bringing you to a good land, a land of brooks, springs, and fountains flowing forth in valleys and hills, 8 a land of wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, and pomegranates, of olive trees and honey, 9 a land where you may eat food in plenty and find no lack of anything, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. 10 You will eat your fill and then praise the Lord your God because of the good land he has given you.
Illustration: We Do Not Know How to Deal With Prosperity
James Reston was a syndicated columnist for the New York Times for more than thirty years. In his final column for the newspaper, he wrote: “In America, we have learned something about how to deal with adversity since the great Depression, but not much about how to deal with prosperity. We are very rich, but we are not having a very good time. We are producing so much food that we don’t know what to do with the garbage, while half of the human race goes to bed hungry every night. (Source Unknown).