He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers 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.
—Deuteronomy 8:3
Today’s verse references God’s testing of Israel. God sent the Israelites into the wilderness without food, until the sixteenth day of the second month of the journey, when He feeds them. They were left to their own devices for one whole month, and they nearly starved. Through hardship, the Israelites realized that they needed the Lord to survive. The wilderness was God’s way of testing what was in their hearts, not of making them suffer.
God, of course, knew what was in their hearts, but the people of Israel didn’t. God needed to show Israel how proud and faithless they were through a humbling experience. He could easily have fed them sooner, but He waited until they suffered from hunger to teach them an important lesson. Throughout the Bible, we learn that our life should focus on God’s will, not our own.
Christians often foolishly believe we can take care of ourselves and depend on our own resources to survive. God puts us through hardships, through our own wilderness experiences, not to make us suffer but to test what’s in our hearts. The wilderness is meant to remind us that we depend on God for life and for all things—immediately, entirely and absolutely. God humbles us with suffering to remind us that we must depend on His word alone.
If you’re going through your own wilderness experience today, take faith in the knowledge that it’s God’s way of sustaining you. It can be difficult to cheerfully serve and trust in the Lord during a tough time, but this is exactly what will end days of starvation. God will give you a miraculous supply of food for the soul the moment you humble yourself and look to Him for sustenance.
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