Deuteronomy 8:3, "And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live."
Perhaps God will allow us a few days to look at this verse in detail. We will try to look at a word, thought or phrase throughout this next week that will help us not only understand God's Word a little more clearly, but that we might see Him more clearly.
This verse and whole chapter covers a number of different topics and principles that are extremely important in the life of a believer. I believe that each of them is equally important as another. It can also be said that none is more important as what is seen in the first four words of this verse, "And he humbled thee."
We know that we should all be humble. It is a great virtue to be had in any person. In this narcissistic day in which we live it can be easily seen that we need a good lesson in humility. I am completely dumbfounded by the nothings of our society that have achieved celebrity status without any honor or accomplishment of any kind. What is being talked about in this verse is much more personal than that, however, for we are not talking about how we should be humble, but we are talking about how God humbled His people.
The word "humbled" means, "through the idea of looking down or browbeating; to depress." To be honest, I never thought of God's humbling work quite like that before. Seems a little dishonorable and even despicable, doesn't it? Perhaps we have misunderstood the purpose of such a browbeating. There is a great benefit that is delivered to a person by shame and embarrassment. It might even be fair to use the term "conviction" here as well.
The first mention of this Hebrew word is found in Genesis 15:13 when God was talking to Abram and told him that his descendants would be strangers in a strange land and that, "and they shall afflict them four hundred years." The word for "humbled" in Deuteronomy 8 is the same word for "afflict" in Genesis 15. I believe it is fair to say that before we can be delivered from our spiritual Egypt and set free to pursue our Promised Land, we must first be humbled and afflicted in our bondage and captivity of sin.
We must recognize that what we might see as malice from God, is actually the mercy of God.
We will look further at this verse later.