Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 40 years! The journey was less than 15 days in distance. What happened? What's the point here? God humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. God had the power to make it a very brief journey in the wilderness. And the same with "change" in our own lives. But how else is character formed? Overnight? How else can we come to see ourselves for who we really are? A C.S. Lewis quote comes to mind: "No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good." They had to try awful hard in a wilderness---so do we. And what does it reveal? Humility and dependence or self-knowledge and arrogance. When we come "to know what is in our heart," that knowledge rises up---that's what the word "to know" means in the Hebrew. The truth rises up in our hearts of the Power and Patience and Presence of God---and our total dependence on Him.
No comments:
Post a Comment