Exhortation to keep God and His commands in memory
8
📚You must be careful to do all the commandments which I command you this day, so that you may live, and increase in number, and go in and possess the land which the LORD swore to your fathers. 2 📚And you must remember all the way which the LORD your God led you these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you, and to test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.3 📚And he humbled you, and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, and your fathers did not know, so that he might cause you to know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by every word that comes out of the mouth of the LORD 📖.
4 📚These forty years your clothes on you did not become old, and your feet did not swell. 5 📚You must also consider in your heart, that just as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you.
8:1-5 These verses give us some very important truths. Part of verse 3 was quoted by the Lord Jesus in Matt 4:4. Verse 2 indicates that remembrance is an aid to faith and piety. The book of Deuteronomy is a book of remembrance, and several times it emphasizes the importance of the people remembering what they were and what God had done. See Deut 5:15; 7:18; 9:7; 15:15; 16:3, 12; 24:9, 22; 32:7.
Forgetting God or His works is a very serious matter and would bring on them great trouble – Deut 4:9, 23, 31; 6:12; 8:11, 14, 19; 25:19; 32:18. See also Jud 3:7; 1 Sam 12:9; Ps 50:22; 78:11; 106:13, 21; Isa 17:10; Jer 2:32; 23:27; Hos 2:13. The New Testament also speaks of the importance of remembering – Luke 24:6; John 15:20; 16:4; Acts 20:31; 2 Cor 9:6; Eph 2:11-12; 2 Tim 2:8; Heb 10:32; Jam 5:20; 2 Pet 1:15; Jude 17; Rev 2:5; 3:3.
God led His people through the desert of Sinai for at least five very good reasons:
first, to humble them (vs 2,3),
second, to test them (vs 2,16),
third, to make known the condition of their heart (v 2),
fourth, to make them understand the exceedingly important spiritual truth that man’s true life is found in hearing and obeying the Word of God (v 3),
fifth, to discipline them for their good that they might become strong, spiritual, obedient children (v 5).
All this was because of the great love He had for them. Welcome any desert that can help to accomplish such blessed results! God is now doing this same work by leading believers through the desert of this world (Heb 12:1-13). All that happens to believers is for this reason.⚜
6 📚Therefore you must keep the commandments of the LORD your God to walk in his ways and to fear him. 7 📚For the LORD your God brings you into a good land, a land of streams of water, of wells and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; 8 📚a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey; 9 📚a land where you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you may dig copper.
10 📚When you have eaten and are satisfied, then you must praise the LORD your God for the good land which he has given you. 11 📚Watch out that you do not forget the LORD your God, by not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command you this day, 12 📚so that when you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built fine houses, and lived in them, 13 📚and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold increase, and all that you have increases, 14 📚your heart will not become proud, and you forget the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage,
8:10-14 Abundance has its perils too. Especially there is the danger of pride and hardness of heart (Prov 30:8-9; Ezek 28:5; Hos 13:6; Matt 13:22; Mark 10:22-23; Rev 3:17-18). Far better a life of faith lived in poverty than a life of abundance and forgetting God.⚜
15 📚who led you through that great and terrible desert where there were fiery serpents and scorpions and drought without water, who brought water for you out of the flinty rock, 16 📚who fed you in the desert with manna, which your fathers did not know, so that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in your latter times.
17 📚Watch out that you do not say in your heart, “My power and the strength of my hand have gotten me this wealth”. 18 📚But you must remember the LORD your God; for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may establish his covenant which he swore to your fathers, as it is this day.
19 📚And it will come about if you at all forget the LORD your God, and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I testify against you this day that you will surely perish. 20 📚You will perish just as the nations which the LORD destroys before your face, because you would not be obedient to the voice of the LORD your God.
8:19-20 If Israel fell into idolatry the penalty would be destruction, just as it was with the nations before them.⚜