To Know What Was in Thine Heart, and He Already Knew

A woman asked me a question about a verse that I had read perhaps two hundred times without noticing the difficulty in it.

She said: if He knows everything, why does it say He tested them to find out?

She was not being clever. She was troubled, and the reason she was troubled came out about ten minutes later, which is the part that matters. She had been living, for most of her adult life, with the sense that she was under examination.

Not a dramatic examination. A quiet, continuous one. Every hard thing was a paper. Every failure was a result. And underneath it all was the sense that God was still gathering information about her and had not yet reached a conclusion.

That is an exhausting way to live and a great many devout people are living in it, and this verse is where a lot of them got it.

The verse, and the difficulty in it

Here it is, and the difficulty is real and worth naming before it is answered.

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, King James Version)

To know what was in thine heart. On the face of it, that reads as information gathering.

And it cannot be, because the same book and the same Scriptures say plainly that He already knows.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. (Psalm 139:1)

Thou hast searched me. Past tense, completed, and the psalm goes on for twenty more verses about how thoroughly.

So the two verses are not in conflict. They are using the word know in two different ways, and Hebrew does this constantly. To know something can mean to become acquainted with a fact, and it can also mean to bring something into the open where it can be dealt with.

You are not being investigated, and the same Scriptures that describe the proving say plainly that He searched you and knew you already (Psalm 139:1), and the Spirit is the one who holds those two together in a person who has been reading one of them as a threat.

Who the knowledge was for

Read the beginning of that verse again, because the first clause tells you who is meant to end up holding the information.

Thou shalt remember. That is the instruction, and it is addressed to the people, and it is about their memory.

The whole verse is a command to a nation to look back at forty years and understand what was in them, and the person receiving the knowledge in that sentence is the person being addressed. God does not need to remember the forty years. They do.

And Moses says it again a few verses later with the purpose attached.

Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end. (Deuteronomy 8:16)

To do thee good at thy latter end. That is the stated purpose, and it is not an assessment and it is not a filing decision. It is a good outcome for the person, named out loud, at the end of the same sentence as the proving.

You are being led toward a good outcome that is named in the verse itself, and the purpose clause is there in the text (Deuteronomy 8:16). The Spirit is the one who makes a purpose clause land on somebody who has only ever read the first half.

What permanent examination does to praying

I want to describe what this belief does in practice, because the doctrine is only interesting if it changes an evening.

A person who believes they are under examination prays defensively. Everything gets a slight edge of explanation in it. There is a low, constant awareness of how a request might look.

They also stop reporting failures, which is the serious part. If every hard thing is a result, then a bad week is evidence, and a person under assessment does not volunteer evidence.

So the very thing they most need to bring is the thing they are least able to say, and this can go on for decades in somebody nobody would ever suspect of it.

You are not producing evidence when you tell Him something, and the searching was completed before you opened your mouth (Psalm 139:1), and it is His Spirit who makes reporting a failure feel like coming home rather than like submitting a form.

And the petition in the prayer He taught assumes exactly this. It asks not to be led into it. That is not the request of a person hoping to score well. It is the request of a person who knows their own limits and is asking about a route.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Matthew 6:13)

Nobody under examination prays that. A candidate does not ask the examiner for an easier paper. A child asks a parent for a different road.

The petition He taught assumes the second relationship and not the first, and He taught it to ordinary people rather than reserving it for anybody advanced.

You have been handed the prayer of a child rather than the prayer of a candidate, and He put it in an ordinary mouth (Matthew 6:13), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who makes the difference between those two audible in a person's own voice.

And this belongs here plainly, in every article in this category. If the pressure has taken you somewhere darker, where being here at all has come into question, that is beyond what any article holds. Tell somebody tonight: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.