Mike’s Bible Reading Journal
March 27, 2026 — Day 61 of 365
What Is in Your Heart
Deuteronomy 8:2 and 10:12–22
The Text
“And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.”
— Deuteronomy 8:2
“And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I am commanding you today for your good? … Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn. … He is your praise. He is your God, who has done for you these great and terrifying things that your eyes have seen.”
— Deuteronomy 10:12–22 (selected)
The Question
If God is omniscient, why does He test “to know” what is in their hearts? Doesn’t He already know?
What Came Out of Studying It
Revelatory for Israel, not informative for God. Israel needed to discover what was in its own heart. Forty years of total dependence—no food security, no water security—stripped away every layer of self-deception. You don’t really know whether you trust God until trusting God is the only option you have. The wilderness was not God’s research project. It was a mirror. He already knew what was in them. He was showing them.
Public and historical. What came out of Israel’s heart under pressure became visible to the nations, the next generation, and the biblical record. The failures at Kadesh, Meribah, the golden calf—these are the exposed contents of Israel’s heart, made visible to everyone watching and every generation reading afterward. The testing had an audience. It was meant to.
Hebrew idiom—demonstrative, not cognitive. “That he might know” used of God in testing passages (here and Genesis 22) may be declarative: God acts “so that it might be shown” what is in the heart. The knowing is less about God’s internal state and more about the public demonstration of what is actually there. Calvin notes that God speaks accommodatively—in language fitted to human understanding—and what is actually happening is that hidden things are brought into the open.
Formative, not only diagnostic. The wilderness didn’t just reveal what was in Israel’s heart—it was meant to produce something there. Verse 3: God humbled them, let them hunger, fed them with manna “so that they would know that man does not live by bread alone.” The testing creates the very knowledge it was meant to confirm.
Which is why Jesus quotes this verse against Satan in the wilderness (Matthew 4:4). He had actually learned, through real hunger and real pressure, what the wilderness was supposed to teach Israel and didn’t. The forty days echo the forty years. The temptation is the same. The outcome is different—because the one being tested is different.
Then Deuteronomy 10 Answers the Question
If Deuteronomy 8:2 asks what is in your heart, Deuteronomy 10:12–22 answers whose heart you are.
“Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them.” Not because they were faithful. Not because they passed the test. He set his heart on them. The God of gods, the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who is not partial and takes no bribe—this God set his affection on a stiff-necked people who had just been told to circumcise their stubborn hearts.
Deuteronomy 8 says: you were tested, and what came out was not good. Deuteronomy 9 recounts every failure—the golden calf, the rebellion, Moses smashing the tablets. Deuteronomy 10 says: and yet. Yet the LORD set his heart in love on you.
The “yet” is the whole gospel in one word.
What This Means for Me
I am not a consistent Bible reader. God and I both know it. I am stubborn in exactly the way Deuteronomy 10 describes. I resist the very thing that gives me life.
I belong to God. Not because of anything in me. He set his heart in love on me for His own sake, not mine. Deuteronomy 8:2 asks what’s in my heart; Deuteronomy 10 answers whose heart I am. The stubbornness God calls me to cut away is the same resistance I feel toward His Word. “Circumcise the foreskin of your heart”—stop being stubborn. He is already mine and I am already His.
Key Scriptures
Deuteronomy 8:2–5 • Deuteronomy 9:6–24 • Deuteronomy 10:12–22 • Genesis 22:1–12 • Numbers 14:1–4 • Matthew 4:1–4 • Romans 9:11–12
Prayer
Father, you tested Israel in the wilderness to show them what was in their hearts. You know what is in mine. I ask you to do the same formative work in me that you intended for them — to humble me, to let me feel my hunger, and to teach me that I do not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from your mouth. You set your heart in love on me, for your own sake. Circumcise my stubborn heart. Make me willing to sit with your Word today, and to return to it tomorrow. Through Christ, who faced the same wilderness and the same hunger and answered with the very words you gave Israel — and got it right where they did not, and where I do not. Amen.
Pray for someone you know who is in a season of testing or spiritual wilderness.
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