The uses of adversity.
It is a great matter when in any experience of life we can read the Divine purpose in bringing us through it. The speaker in these verses unfolds the design and lessons of the wilderness discipline. Our Lord, in the temptation, found an application to himself (Matthew 4:4). Every believer will find the same in seasons of adversity.
I. ADVERSITY A DIVINE ORDINANCE. (Deuteronomy 8:2.)
1. Divinely sent. "The Lord thy God led thee" (cf. Matthew 4:1). Jesus led of the Spirit into the wilderness. Adversity may come through natural laws, as the necessary result of sin or folly; even so it is of God's ordinance—the punitive expression of his will. But adversity is not necessarily punitive. The best man living may be led into straits of affliction, of which his own actions are not in the least the causes (Job 1:1-22; Job 2:1-13). It is God who has "led" him thither for some purpose of his own.
2. The duration of which is divinely determined: "these forty years." God marks for us the term of our probations. Jesus was "forty days" without bread (Matthew 4:2).
II. THE GRACIOUS USES OF ADVERSITY. That of the Israelites was designed:
1. To humble them. It aimed at destroying the spirit of self-dependence, out of which comes pride and haughtiness (Deuteronomy 8:17, Deuteronomy 8:18). It made them feel how absolutely they depended for everything upon God—taught them how at every step they hung upon his will.
2. To teach them reliance. Faith is reliance on a Divine Power working for us and in us. "What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" Faith cannot tell, but it waits God's time and God's way of providing, confident that in his own way he will provide. This was Christ's attitude in the wilderness (Matthew 4:4).
3. To test obedience. Adversity acts as a test of the disposition. The end of God's discipline is to bring to light hidden lines of character, and to advance life to a crisis. It threes us to moral determination. Will we obey God or will we not? The younger generation of Israel, whatever their faults, showed by their conduct then and thereafter (Joshua 24:31) that the discipline of the wilderness had not been without good results.
III. GOD IS WITH US IN ADVERSITY. Though bread failed, God fed them with manna (Deuteronomy 8:3). Their every want was supplied. Jesus teaches us to trust the Father for the supply of all our needs (Matthew 3:1-17:25, 34). His own trust, vindicated in the refusal to make stones into bread, was rewarded by angels ministering unto him (Matthew 4:11). He "ate angels food" (Psalms 78:25). Our wants are not supplied by miracle, but by providence, which is all-sufficient to provide for us in every ordinary case.—J.O.