About a decade ago, author Michael Hopf summed up a pointed truth about human nature with a simple progression:
Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create hard times.
Many have quoted this in recent years as they’ve watched our culture change. It resonates because we can feel that we’re somewhere near the bottom of that cycle. For the better part of the last century, our nation has ridden a wave of abundance and prosperity begun around the conclusion of WWII and carried through the turn of the century that was attained through a corporate spirit of hard work, the sweat of our brow – an ethos that has not only lost momentum in those of my own generation and younger, but has actively been opposed by these same generations as oppressive, unfair, and unrealistic.
But this isn’t just about economics or politics. It runs deeper. There is a spiritual version of this reality that Scripture has warned about for thousands of years.
We stand at a crossroads in our nation – existentially and theologically. We, the church, have been blessed with ease and comfort, but the very “good times” that grew out of hard work and deep, prayerful faith are now eroding the convictions that produced them. We’re in danger of forgetting the God who gave us everything we enjoy.
Deuteronomy 8 speaks directly to our times.
A Warning from Scripture
God speaks to Israel through Moses as they stand on the edge of the Promised Land – about to move from wilderness hardship into material abundance:
“When you have eaten and are satisfied,
praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God,
failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day.
Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied,
when you build fine houses and settle down,
and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase
and all you have is multiplied,
then your heart will become proud
and you will forget the Lord your God…” (Deuteronomy 8:10–14a, NIV)
Note that God is not warning them about poverty. He’s warning them about prosperity.
The danger is not that they won’t have enough, but that they will have so much they no longer feel that they need Him. Their problem won’t be lack, but overconfidence and complacency.
Later in the chapter, God addresses what happens once that pride sets in:
“You may say to yourself,
‘My power and the strength of my hands
have produced this wealth for me.’
But remember the Lord your God,
for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth…” (Deuteronomy 8:17–18a, NIV)
Here is their crossroads:
- Will they remember God in their blessing?
- Or will they rewrite their history around their own effort and forget the Giver?
It’s not hard to see ourselves in this text.
A Spiritual Parallel to Hopf’s Cycle
Hopf’s quote describes how societies rise and fall. Deuteronomy 8 shows us the spiritual engine underneath that rise and fall. If we were to “translate” Hopf’s idea into a spiritual frame, it might look something like this:
- Desperate dependence on God produces strong faith.
(Wilderness seasons drive us to our knees. We know we can’t survive without Him.) - Strong faith, lived out over time, produces seasons of blessing.
(God honors obedience; He provides, protects, and multiplies.) - Seasons of blessing often produce spiritual complacency.
(We enjoy the gifts so much that we slowly forget the Giver. Our dependence fades.) - Spiritual complacency produces spiritual weakness and, eventually, judgment or hardship.
(When we forget God, we drift into sin, pride, and idolatry. Hardship follows – sometimes naturally, sometimes as God’s discipline.)
In other words:
Desperate dependence creates strong saints.
Strong saints (by God’s grace) create blessed seasons.
Blessed seasons often create forgetful hearts.
Forgetful hearts create desperate times again.
The issue isn’t that blessings are evil. God wanted to bless Israel. He wants to bless His people. The issue is what blessing does to the human heart when we are not vigilant.
America’s Blessings (and Our Blind Spots)
For generations, our nation has benefited from:
- Unprecedented religious freedom
- Material abundance
- Relative safety and stability
- A strong (though imperfect) heritage of biblical influence on law, morality, and community life
Much of this was built by men and women who:
- Worked hard
- Endured sacrifice
- Prayed earnestly
- Grounded their decisions largely in Scripture and in reverence for God
But comfort has a way of eroding conviction when we are not watchful.
Today we have:
- Abundance, but little gratitude
- Freedom, but little sense of responsibility
- Information, but shallow wisdom
- Entertainment, but little endurance
- Religion in our vocabulary, but often not repentance in our hearts
And in the church, we are not immune. In many places:
- We have the forms of faith without the fire of it.
- We have Christian language without Christlike lives.
- We defend “values” we no longer really practice.
- We assume God will bless a nation that has stopped blessing Him.
We’re living in the most dangerous part of Deuteronomy 8: the part where we are full, secure, and proud – and tempted to say, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this.”
The Crossroads: Forgetting God or Returning to Him
So where does that leave us?
If Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 8 are right – and they are – then we, too, are at a spiritual crossroads:
- We can continue to forget God.
Today’s church is woefully anemic. It is bewildering the things the church of today will put its energy behind that extract God’s holiness from the equation. We mistake attendance for faithfulness. We conflate spectacle for spirituality. We willingly trade organizational stability for spiritual grounding. We can double down on self-sufficiency, revise our Scriptures to remove Him, and cling to our comforts while the foundations of our faith crumble. That path leads to the “hard times” and more importantly, to the painful discipline of God. - Or we can remember God.
Not just with words and slogans, but with genuine repentance and renewed obedience. We can acknowledge that everything we have has come from His hand, and return to a posture of dependence instead of pride.
We cannot control the whole nation. But we can decide whom we will be in this hour:
- Will we be people of nostalgia, longing for the “good times” while ignoring the heart drift that produced our current moment?
- Will we be an affiliation of semi-religious Christianity enthusiasts that seek to stir up therapeutic emotional experience that we confuse with genuine revival?
- Or will we be people of repentance, willing to let God search us, humble us, and make us strong again – not for comfort’s sake, but for His glory?
What Recovery Requires
If there is to be any real recovery – nationally or within the church – it will not come mainly through our own ingenuity, strategies, or programs. It will begin in the same place Deuteronomy 8 points us: in the heart.
Here are a few starting places:
- Recover gratitude.
Verse 10 begins, “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.”- Make thanksgiving a habit, not a holiday.
- Name specific blessings and say out loud, “God did this.” Gratitude is a guardrail against pride.
- Recover obedience.
Verse 11 warns, “Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands…”- We don’t “remember” God by vague belief; we remember Him by doing what He says.
- Return to Scripture not just for comfort, but for instruction and spiritual formation.
- Recover dependence.
Verses 17–18 call out our tendency to say, “My power…my hands…”- Make it a daily practice to confess your dependence: “Lord, I have nothing that did not come from you. I can do nothing of eternal value without you.”
- Pray not as a ritual, but as a lifeline.
- Recover humility.
Prosperity tempts us to think we are better, wiser, or stronger than we are.- Humility admits: “We’ve squandered blessings. We’ve loved comfort more than Christ.”
- God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). If we want grace in these days, we must embrace humility.
- Recover the fear of the Lord.
Deuteronomy 8 (and the whole Old Testament) repeatedly ties blessing to reverence for God.- Not a cringing terror, but a deep, trembling awareness that He is holy, and we are accountable.
- The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). Without it, our “solutions” will only deepen the crisis.
The Hope Beyond the Hard Times
If Hopf is right, then hard times are coming – or are already here. But for the people of God, hard times are not the end of the story. Throughout Scripture and history, difficult days have often been the breeding ground of revival.
When empty religion is exposed. Earthly securities fail. Idols are toppled
God’s invitation becomes clearer:
“Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty. (Malachi 3:7)
The question is not simply, “What will happen to our nation?” The question is, “What will the church be in this hour?” Will we be:
- A people of convenience, or a people of covenant?
- A people clinging to comfort, or a people clinging to Christ?
- A people who forget, or a people who remember?
Deuteronomy 8 was written to a people on the threshold of blessing, with a warning that what they did with that blessing would determine their future. In many ways, we are standing at a similar threshold, though it may look more like the end of one season than the beginning of another.
The good news is that God has not changed.
- He is still the Giver of every good gift.
- He is still the One who gives us the ability to work, to create, to build.
- And He is still ready to forgive, restore, and strengthen any people who humble themselves before Him.
We may not be able to avoid the consequences of decades of drifting. But we can decide, today, that we will not add to that drift. We can become, once again, people of strong faith in hard times – people who remember God when others forget Him.
It is that same God that can bring a people whose inertia has brought us to the threat of scarcity that can revitalize our hearts and our hands, and make us a nation that sees the value in building “sweat equity” both in earnest labor and earnest prayer. There may still yet be blessing if we turn from where we’re heading and apply ourselves in God’s direction with zeal and reverence.
May we hear the warning of Deuteronomy 8,
heed it with trembling and hope,
and learn once more to say:
“Not by my power.
Not by the strength of my hands.
But by Your grace alone, O Lord.”
Daniel L. Rogers 
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