Deuteronomy 8:2, “And you shall remember the whole way that YHWH your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that He might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart.”
This dynamic is true throughout the Bible, but we see it in clear focus here—namely, that testing reveals what is in the heart. The trials, challenges, hardships, and—as we see in v.11ff—blessings of life are all methods of exposing the nature and quality of our hearts. Of course, this is true throughout the created world. Heat exposes the purity of metal, pressure exposes the integrity of a structure, hard use exposes the quality of a tool, a windstorm exposes the health of a tree, etc. etc. Challenge, testing, trial, hardship is fire in which the Lord exposes the hearts of His people (and, as Prov.17:3, the Lord Himself is the crucible and furnace in which this testing takes place).
And what is He looking for? What ought His testing reveal? I think we see two answers.
The first comes at the end of verse 2: “whether you would keep His commandments or not.” Is obedience something we wear on the surface? Something that a blast of heat or a buffet of wind can tear away? Or is it rooted—as it must be, Deut 6:4ff —in our heart? In the core of our being? If hardship shrivels our desire to love God and neighbor, if difficulties crowd out the glad duty of self-giving service, making us think, “I can’t bother with that right now, this is happening! I can’t spare energy for them right now, look what I’m going through!” etc., then the fires have exposed our “obedience” as an alloyed metal….silver filled with tin, as it were.
But the second, and more foundational revelation that testing brings about is what we might call the “base posture” of our heart. We see this in verse 3, “Man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of YHWH.” In other words, faith. During trials, the Lord is looking for (and, indeed, creating) faith; faith that accepts the losses testing brings (in this case, “bread”) and instead leans on and looks to YHWH alone as sustenance. “He is sufficient” — says the heart of faith—“I do not live by bread or money or health or home or job or skills etc. alone, I live by the word—that is, by the sovereign sufficiency—of YHWH alone.” And this faith, to the degree it is present, will lead to obedience, ie, to Love.
And, post-cross, we might re-state verse 3 as: “man does not live by bread alone but by the Eternal Word of God, by Jesus Christ.” The “word of YHWH” by which we live is not an impersonal fate, nor is it even sovereign, Fatherly provision for our needs. No, the word by which we live is the person of God in the Son, in Jesus Christ. We live by whole-souled dependence on this one, by casting ourselves with total abandon on all that God is in Christ. We live by feasting on this True Food, by drinking this True Drink, by depending on Him when the testing comes.
God grant that our hardships would more and more reveal, and more and more create, hearts desperately dependent on Christ and so deeply conformed to Christ.
