member how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, (God's people have arrived at the edge of the Promised Land and the Lord reminds them of their original starting point in slavery and of His complete provision for them for the past years. Here in His call for His people then and us today to remember the past, to remember their time of testing. He does so, not so that we beat ourselves up, dredging up all our past failures and short-comings. Rather, He calls us to remembrance so that we are conscious of His unconditional love, of His miraculous deliverance, of His undeserved mercies, of His repeated forgiveness, and of His abundant provision. When we meditate on the past times of testing through these perspectives, we remember the past through the lens of Almighty God's great salvation and redemption.) to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commands.
(The Lord already knows what is in our heart. He's omniscient. We are not. We think we know ourselves, but until we go through the wilderness, bereft of all of our own resources, and absolutely forced to depend on the Lord, we do not. Until we experience the fiery trials of life where we are forced to depend only on the Lord because we can do nothing in our human strength to rectify our situations, we do not know what lies in our hearts. We do not know the true measure of our faith and trust in God.
Today's situations are the Lord's gentle and loving ways of helping us develop our trust in Him, of forging memories that show His divine and powerful interventions in our lives
so He can bring us to the Promised Land of an abundant life in Him and which He has promised us.)
