Moses is preaching to the second generation, the children of those who died in the wilderness. They are about to enter a land of wheat and barley, vines and fig trees — a land where bread will be plentiful and the lesson of the manna easy to forget. So Moses preaches the wilderness back into them. The forty years of hunger were not punishment but pedagogy. God taught them dependence by withholding sufficiency, and now, on the threshold of plenty, Moses is making sure they remember what the empty stomach was for.

From the writers we read together

Dallas Willard

philosopher at USC, author of The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines (1935-2013)

Willard spent his career arguing that most Christians live as functional materialists — people who say they believe in God but who actually run on bread. Bread here is shorthand for whatever keeps the body alive and the anxieties quiet: salary, calendar, calories, approval. Willard's claim is that a human being is not built to run on those alone, and that the fatigue and brittleness so many believers feel is the predictable result of trying. We were made to metabolize the speech of God.

Deuteronomy 8:3 is the verse beneath Willard's whole project. The wilderness was God's training program in a different kind of nourishment, and Willard would say we never graduate from it — we just get better or worse at noticing the manna. The word from God's mouth still falls daily: in Scripture read slowly, in the nudge to forgive someone before noon, in the silence after prayer. The question is whether we will eat it, or whether we will eat only bread and wonder why we are still hungry.