Deuteronomy 8:1-20 – Be grateful and never forget God.

Here in ten verses in Deuteronomy 8:11-20, God shows how His people must always remember Him for what He had done. He also provided reasons why they should always remember Him. He recounted to the people of Israel of all the things He had done for them. God was referring to what He had done for them as a nation. Note that many things He had raised here were the experiences of the preceding generation. But He was referring to them and the forefathers as a whole. What he did was to bring up the past to motivate the present generation to be grateful and so to remember Him.

He began by taking them back to what He had done for them in the past. Firstly, He was the one who had delivered them out of Egypt, the house of slavery. Secondly, He protected them from all the perils they had encountered in the journey through the wilderness. Thirdly, He provided water and food to sustain them in the dry desert land. Fourthly, they must always remember that It was He who had given them the ability to prosper. In other words, He was the source of all their blessings. They must not pivot to think that they had within themselves to weather all that they had gone through. They must never pivot to acknowledge and serve other gods, or they would be destroyed.  

What would help the people to stay humble and grateful to God? The only way, God reckoned, was for them to consistently keep the commandments, ordinances, and statutes which He had given them. In other words, they must obey Him. By obeying Him, they would not forget all that they possessed came from Him. This would keep them humble and not proud, imagining that they had acquired everything by their own power. On the contrary, should they fail to obey the Lord, they would run the risk of forgetting Him and become self-absorbed and proud. They might even shift to trust other gods. They must always remember that God was their only source in life so that they would not pivot to worship and serve other gods. They would incur God’s anger and be destroyed when they do that.    

People tend to be forgetful. How many of us remember the good things God had done for us? There is a tendency for us to forget what we ought to remember and remember what we ought to forget. What a person remembers or forgets will clearly reveal the sort of person he or she is. An ungrateful person never remembers the good things someone has done for him. Whereas a grateful person will never forget the good things a person has done for him. Let us never forget that God is our source and be grateful to Him and serve Him faithfully. Because, without Him we will not be enjoying all the blessings in life.