To Humble Thee

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.

Deuteronomy 8:2 (KJV)

Humble – In an age where everything is about me, how do we practice humbleness? It’s definitely not something that we can just pick up from the variety of examples around us [sarcasm]. It’s not something we learn in school. Nor is it anything that I might naturally be – not in this western culture anyways. So how do we understand what humbleness really is?

That’s where YHVH comes in. The example above explains that God required the Israelites to remember their journey of 40 years in the desert, and to remember the affliction, the hunger, the distress, why? It was so that God might humble them. They learned humility through the trials of their lives.

We’re no different. This verse speaks to us now in the same way. God calls us during Sukkot (Feast of Booths) to remember our past afflictions and troubles. Our lives were guided in ways by God for the very purpose that we might learn humbleness. And this teaching becomes even more needed today. Just take a look around.

Sites like Facebook teach us quite the opposite. All the posts I read are always about what cool thing this person did, how great this other person is, or even the more ridiculous ones where people talk about how sad or distressed they are but they don’t say why, so it becomes a guessing game and everyone can start commenting on their post. I get caught up in this too. In what ways can I get people to start liking or talking about me? Humbleness is thrown out the window. This is a life long challenge and I see it rear its head even at work. People love to talk about themselves – and many even when they weren’t asked. 🙂

So this is where we’re at. God is working anah in our lives. Just like the Israelites were to be humbled before their entering into the promised land, so too are we being humbled before our entrance into the New Jerusalem. Yeshua is our example. He was completely humble before the Father. He learned obedience through suffering (Hebrews 5:8)… and so too are we learning obedience through suffering. And by this path, as we remember the journey of our lives, I pray we might be humbled before YHVH.