Deuteronomy 8:3 Man does not live by bread alone

Many of us remember this verse from when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, and Jesus quoted verses from the Old Testament to respond to him.  (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:13)

I’m not sure we have given enough thought, though, to what this response actually means.

Deuteronomy 8 is easily one of the most important chapters in the Old Testament, but I doubt most Christians are familiar with it.

It gives a basic overview of how God deals with His people.  There are some minor variations in the New Testament, but the pattern is pretty much the same. 

The Jews had just spent 40 years in the wilderness, because they failed to believe God when they first came to the Promised Land 40 years prior.  (actually 38 years)  Not every Jew failed to believe God, but I venture to say that we all fail today in the same way.  It doesn’t seem so drastic for us, because we did not have the experiences that Israel had.

Israel was delivered out of the land of Egypt and bondage through an amazing series of miracles.  We have not seen wonders like they did, and so it can be harder for many of us today to believe in God’s goodness and His willingness to work on our behalf.  We have to learn this the slow way.

And what is this slow way?

Deuteronomy 8:2,3 (NASB95)  ² “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. ³ “He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.

The first step is a humbling process.  We don’t understand how life works.  We tend to think of it as we reap what we sow, which is true in a sense, but we fail to see what a small part we play in the whole thing.  Yes, we act, but most of those actions are responses to what life gives us.  So ultimately we are responsible for our responses, but we have no control over the things we are responding to. 

So this humbling process makes us realize how much of life is out of our control. 

And this humbling process is also a testing process.  To see what is in our hearts.  Like Job, do we serve God because of the blessings we receive or might receive, or do we serve God because it is right?  That is a basic question we all have to answer.  We are never going to be able to understand God, so that means we will never understand everything that God does or everything that happens in life.  So how do we react when things go differently than planned or hoped for? 

And this leads us to our verse, the key part: “man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”

Bread, of course, stands for food, but it also stands for the material things of life. 

I think Exodus 15:22 shows a bit of what this all means.

In Exodus 14, the Jews had just been delivered out of the hands of the Egyptians.  They had seen God judge Egypt with ten mighty plagues of judgment.  They left the land of Egypt, but they were followed by the Egyptian army bent on killing them and forcing them to return to Egypt as slaves again.

God then opens the Red Sea for the Jews to cross and then closes it again on the Egyptians as they attempt to pursue them.  The Jews then celebrated with song and dance over this wild, crazy miracle of God.

They then begin their journey in the wilderness to their new land, the land God promised them. 

They go three days, and there is no water.  Then they find water, and they can’t drink it.

They are seeing their total lack of control over their lives.  And they are wondering how God relates to all this.  They saw His mighty deliverance on their behalf, but now they have another problem.  Not as big maybe as being slaughtered by an army and enslaved, but big in another way.  So what is God going to do?  You might think: He delivered us before, He will do it again.  Some might think: why is this even happening, if God loves us?  Some might think: are we supposed to expect God to do everything? 

They need water.  Just like we constantly need things.  And we constantly need God’s provision.  We are accustomed to thinking that we don’t need God all that much, because, well, we have food, we have a job, we have money, but we fail to see that God is as much responsible for what we have as He is for providing things for us when we don’t have them. 

This is what Jesus and Deuteronomy meant by “everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”  It’s all in God’s hand.

You still have a job.  But only by the grace of God.  You have money in the bank.  Only by the grace of God.  Our lives don’t seem so fragile and tenuous here in the United States, but the lesson is the same.  We don’t just need God in those times when we have an apparent need, but we need God in all the times that we don’t have the apparent need, because what we have is from His hand in the first place.

Later in this same chapter, God is going to tell them: Beware.  (v.11)

Why?

Because they’re going to prosper, and they’re going to think that it was their brains and strength and skill and hard work that gave them that success.  Oh, that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t want you to use your brains, strength, skill, and hard work, but “it is [God] who is giving you power to make wealth.”  (Dt. 8:18)

There are people who give no thought to God, and they have achieved much in the eyes of the world.  They just don’t know what we know.  We can talk about them another time.  But God wants us to know how much our lives are dependent on God, every day, every minute.  That shouldn’t make us cautious but bold. 

Just remember the goal of all this humbling and testing: “that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do good for you in the end.”  (v. 16)  This word ‘end’ need not mean the end of the world, when we die, but just after the humbling and testing. 

God wants us to know His goodness in this life.  Not just by faith but by experience.  He just wants us to know the true nature and reason for the good things that we have and will have in life.