Sunday, March 9: “Familial Identity”

Deuteronomy 8: 2, 5: “You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. … Thus you are to know in your heart that the Lord your God was disciplining you as a man disciplines his son.”

Through forty years in the wilderness, the Lord God was testing Israel. Literally, He was assaying them, to see what they were made of. But if He was God, didn’t he already know? Yes, but His discipline proved it to them—their identity as His children, called by His Name, created as a witness of their Lord, to walk in His ways and live by His word.