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I did know thee - I approved of thee; I loved thee; and by miraculously providing for thee in that land of drought, I demonstrated my love.
I did know thee in the wilderness - “God so knew them, as to deserve to be known by them. By “knowing” them, He shewed how He ought to be acknowledged by them.” “As we love God, because He first loved us,” so we come to know and own God, having first been owned and known of Him. God showed His knowledge of them, by knowing and providing for their needs; He knew them “in the wilderness, in the land of great drought,” where the land yielded neither food nor water. He supplied them with the “bread from heaven” and with “water from the flinty rock.” He knew and owned them all by His providence; He knew in approbation and love, and fed in body and soul those who, having been known by Him, knew and owned Him.: “No slight thing is it, that He, who knoweth all things and men, should, by grace, know us with that knowledge according to which He says to that one true Israelite, Moses, “thou hast found grace in My sight, and I know thee by name” Exodus 33:17. This we read to have been said to that one; but what He says to one, He says to all, whom now, before or since that time, He has chosen, being foreknown and predestinate, for He wrote the names of all in the book of life. All these elect are “known in the wilderness,” in the land of loneliness, in the wilderness of this world, where no one ever saw God, in the solitude of the heart and the secret of hidden knowledge, where God alone, beholding the soul tried by temptations, exercises and proves it, and accounting it, when “running lawfully,” worthy of His knowledge, professes that He “knew it.” To those so known, or named, He Himself saith in the Gospel, “rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” Luke 10:20.