Deuteronomy 8:2-5

Deuteronomy 8:2

This is the lesson of our lives. This is God's training, not only for the Jews, but for us. We read these verses to teach us that God's ways with man do not change; that His fatherly hand is over us, as well as over the people of Israel; that their blessings are our blessings, their dangers are our dangers; that, as St. Paul says, all these things are written for our example.

I. "He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger." How true to life that is; how often there comes to a man, at his setting out in life, a time which humbles him, when his fine plans fail him, and he has to go through a time of want and struggle. His very want, and struggles, and anxiety may be God's help to him. If he be earnest and honest, patient and God-fearing, he prospers; God brings him through. God holds him up, strengthens and refreshes him, and so the man learns that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

II. There is another danger which awaits us, as it awaited those old Jews: the danger of prosperity in old age. It is easy for a man who has fought the battle with the world, and conquered more or less, to say in his heart, as Moses feared that those old Jews would say, "My might and the power of my wit hath gotten me this wealth," and to forget the Lord his God, who guided him and trained him through all the struggles and storms of early life, and so to become vainly confident, worldly and hard-hearted, undevoted and ungodly, even though he may keep himself respectable enough, and fall into no open sin.

III. Old age itself is a most wholesome and blessed medicine for the soul of man. Anything is good which humbles us, makes us feel our own ignorance, weakness, nothingness, and cast ourselves on that God in whom we live, and move, and have our being, and on the mercy of that Saviour who died for us on the Cross, and on that Spirit of God from whose holy inspiration alone all good desires and good actions come.

C. Kingsley, Discipline, and Other Sermons,p. 40.