Bible Commentaries

The Song of Moses

Deuteronomy 32:1).

"My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass" ( Deuteronomy 32:2).

What an easy condescension from the sublime to the minute and the comparatively? insignificant! "My doctrine"—that Deuteronomy 32:4).

In the fifth verse the whole tone changes:—

"They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of hit children: they are a perverse and crooked generation." ( Deuteronomy 32:5)

"Do ye thus requite the Lord, O foolish people and unwise? is not he thy father that hath bought thee? hath he not made thee, and established thee?" ( Deuteronomy 32:6).

So human actions are not dissociated from divine economies and heavenly thoughts. Human actions are replies to divine providence; human conduct is a commentary upon the providential method of God. We cannot take our actions and set them up solitarily, and say, We began the action, continued it, and completed it without any reference to heavenly ministries and providential interpositions and judgments. We cannot cut off our actions from the great currents of the universe. The lifting of a hand may be a prayer, or it may be a token of rebellion; the uplifted eye may be a speechless supplication; a cup of water given to a disciple in the name of Christ is given to the Master himself. Every act of condescension and benevolence ought to be considered an echo of a divine appeal. Thus the reference is once more to conscience and to reason:—"Do ye thus requite the Lord, O foolish people and unwise?"—people of a withered heart, people who have put out the lamp of understanding, people who have forgotten the first principles of human responsibility. What is it that has been omitted from the policy and worship of the unwise and foolish people? It is the fatherhood of God:—"Is not he thy father that hath bought thee?" Having got rid of the Father, all the rest is an easy run into the devil's arms; having accomplished the moral excision—having cut off ourselves from consenting to God's sovereignty—we become the guest of the enemy, and are easily led into ever-deepening depths of humiliation and disgrace. Is this possible? We will not ask—Is it true? But does not possibility itself shudder at the suggestion, and say, Do not prostitute fancy; break your little moral commandments, trample your ethics in the dust: they are but vain theories of vain minds; but let imagination alone, do not defile the sanctuary of high fancy, the thing which you suggest is impossible? The plea has reason in it, the protest is not without force from a philosophical point of view. It ought not to be possible to forget father, God, law, love, providence; it ought to be impossible for a man to be ungrateful. Are men ungrateful? Can any father testify even to the possibility of an ungrateful child? Unthankfulness ought to be impossible. We find it in this song; we are, therefore, driven back upon our own consciousness once more for confirmation or rebuttal. Have we been ungrateful? Have we forgotten the Father who made us and the God who established us? Have we taken our lives into our own hands, and treated ourselves as if we were almighty and all-wise objects of self-idolatry? Better leave these inquiries; do not ask for replies in terms: the inquiry must be left as its own pregnant and appalling answer.

Now the Psalmist will reason with the people. He will change for a moment the tone of the great Psalm; he will call a council and examine minutely the sacred past:—

"Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee" ( Deuteronomy 32:7).

"When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel" ( Deuteronomy 32:8).

"For the Lord's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance" ( Deuteronomy 32:9).

"He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye" ( Deuteronomy 32:10).

A beautiful figure represents a portion of the divine way with man:—

"As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings" ( Deuteronomy 32:11).

Prayer

Almighty God, it is a fearful thing to fall into thine hands. Thine arrows are of great number, and when they strike they pierce fatally. Who can set themselves against God and live? Whose arm is strong enough to repel thy stroke? We are consumed before thee; thou hidest thy face, and we are lost in darkness. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Our God is a consuming fire. Them that honour thee thou wilt honour, and they that despise thee shall be lightly esteemed. Now we turn and behold thy mercy, and are amazed at the tearful compassion of God. Our hearts exclaim thankfully, God is love; God is light; he has no pleasure in death: he would that the wicked might turn and live. Thou criest after the lost one that he would return; thou hast the best robe ready for him; yea, thou art waiting to be gracious, to receive us, one and all, wanderers, into thine house, and thou wilt call upon thine angels to be glad. We thank thee for all thy tender mercy, thy loving care, thy pity, thy tears. We live in God's love; we are upheld by God's omnipotence; the light of his countenance is our day, and his love in Christ is our hope for eternity. We come to the Cross—the wondrous Cross—the mystery of God, the mystery of eternity; into these things the angels desire to look. Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. We look, and live in the looking; it is thy way: thou hast called us to look unto Christ and be saved; Lord, help us to look, to fasten our eyes upon the dying Sacrifice. We commend one another to thy loving care: hold us, guide us, make us stronger day by day; and then, when the day's work is well done, call us into rest, and joy, and glory. Amen

The Song of Moses

(Continued)

Deuteronomy 32:16).

Is this little on the part of God? If we say Deuteronomy 32:17)

"Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee" ( Deuteronomy 32:18).

How is it that men soon forget the solid, the real, the substantial? What is it that delights men in spluttering rockets, in coloured fountains, in lamps swinging upon trees that are offended by their presence? See the great seething crowd waiting for the coloured fountains to spring up, and for all the little electric lamps confined in tinted globes to shine among the swaying branches! What exclamations of idiotic delight! How stunned is modern intelligence at the marvellous display of colour! Who heeds the quiet moon that looks on with unutterable amazement, and that in her motherly heart is saying,—O that they were wise, that they were less given to toy-worship and to playfulness of that kind! Here I have been shining ages upon ages—who heeds me? Which of all the sweltering, overfed throng turns a bleared eye to my course to watch me in my gently sovereignty? And the stars, too, look down upon the coloured fountains without being moved to envy by their momentary blush and by their unheard splash! We forget the Rock so soon; we prefer the toy; we want something light, something that can be spoken trippingly on the tongue—an easy fluent nothing. We do not care to bow down the head to study, to criticism, to the examination and estimation of evidence, and commit ourselves to the acceptance of sound conclusions. Can we go anywhere to see a coloured fountain? Men who do not travel half-a-mile to the greatest pulpit in the world, or the greatest altar ever built to the God of heaven, would put themselves and their families to any amount of inconvenience and expense to gaze with the admiration of idiocy upon a coloured fountain! Blessed are they who love the permanent stars, the lamps of heaven, and who set their feet broadly and squarely on God's everlasting Rock. Let us turn to the real, to the substantial, to the very revelation of God's truth, and abide there; the coloured fountain can only come now and again, but the eternal heavens are always full of light or rich with beauty. How could the Lord meet this case? He says:—

"I will hide my face from them" ( Deuteronomy 32:20).

But withdrawment is not understood by the fattened prosperity of Jeshurun; so God will proceed further. He lays down his policy in the twenty-first verse:—

"They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I—"

"—and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation." ( Deuteronomy 32:21)

Men must be met upon their own ground. We cannot address high arguments to men who have blinded their intelligence and dismissed their conscience: we reduce ourselves to a lower level than that upon which we began; and God must bring himself down to that level if he is to inflict upon sinners appropriate chastisement. Jeshurun shall feel the jealousy he himself has provoked. What will God do then? He will put honour upon nations that have hitherto been without name or status: their men shall become kings, their nameless ones shall become famous; they shall arse to dispute the primacy of Jeshurun. Then Israel will begin to think. He will say, Who are these that come up from the north? what men are these, of whom I have never heard before?—and then he will return in memory to old covenants, and promises, and vows, and will ask Heaven's explanation. There is always an explanation in heaven. Afflictions do not spring out of the dust. Your tower of strength was not thrown down because a feather blew against it. There are no accidents in the great issue and outcome of human life. When competitors arise, and you feel that the standing of your favouritism is imperilled, you will begin to wonder, and he who wisely wonders often timidly prays. The man will talk to himself in plain terms: he will say,—How is this? I have been king; I have had none to dispute my sceptre or my authority; and now the dog barks at me on the streets, and men whom I would not have numbered with the dogs of my father's flock mock me, and ask for my name, and look upon me as they would look upon some intrusive curiosity. How is this? The elders used to rise at my approach, and strong men owned me first amongst equals: now wherever I put my foot I have a sense of insecurity, and wherever I look I see no beaming face. How is this? The answer is religious: I have forgotten my appointments with God; I have hurried through a Book amid the fruitful pages of which I ought to have lingered with delight and desire and love; I have abandoned the God of my fathers: I have taken interest in new gods that came newly up; this is the reason: I am speaking truly to myself; all this I would not care at first to speak in the hearing of other people, but I will tell the truth to myself, and the truth is that my love of God has cooled, my loyalty to truth has become impaired, my communion with the heavens has become less intimate; I am not the man I was; and now God is permitting chatterers to arise around me who mock me and insult me; I have retained everything but the rod of my strength, the eloquence of my prayer, the almightiness of my faith. When men speak to themselves thus—ruthlessly, sternly, with religious frankness—they will end the monologue by saying, "I will arise, and go to my Father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned." Never did erring child say that to the Father in heaven without the Father calling for festival and music and infinite joy.

God blamed Israel because they were

"children in whom is no faith" ( Deuteronomy 32:20).

Prayer

Almighty God, guide us with thine eye in all the way of life. We need some sense of thy nearness, for the wind is cold, and the way is hard, and the end is not clearly seen. We are hardly born until we die; there is no time for anything upon the earth. Surely this is not all! The days become shorter rather than longer; we thought they would lengthen out and give us light to do some work in, but, behold, they close quickly, and the years are all gone, and there is no time to repair the past or make much of the present. There is no present: it flies whilst we describe it. We are driven on as by a mighty wind; we are withdrawn as by a hand unseen; we are spoken to by voices that have no figure; and, behold, we cannot tell what it is we see, or hear, or do. But thou hast sent word to us of thy nearness and presence and purpose; we are told that thou art a God nigh at hand and not afar off—nearer to us than we can ever be to ourselves,—a mystery of nearness, as if we were part of thee, as if thou wert part of us, as if we were one. This is a great mystery, full of solemnity and full of pathos. That we have done wrong we very well know. It is easy to do wrong: it is easy to eat honey, because it is sweet Behold, we have indeed done wrong, and so far spoiled thy purpose and stained the handiwork of God. But we are sure that we are not so great as thou art. If we have done wrong, the remedy is in thee and not in ourselves. Thou canst not be at peace so long as wickedness remains. Thou hast endeavoured to reclaim us by punishment, and thy penalties have left us harder than ever; thou hast burned us with hunger, thou hast cut us with the sword, thou hast filled the soul with terrors; and we have shed tears of fearfulness and uttered cowardly prayers and promised to be better for fear that we should be crushed; but Pharaoh-like we have turned again in the morning and defied thee to thy face; then thou hast whispered to us and persuaded us with all gentleness, and led us out to a place called Calvary to see thine agony, to behold thy love, to look upon the sacrifice for sins. This is the Lord's doing: herein is mercy combined with righteousness holding counsel with law, herein is grace abounding over sin. The devil is not Lord, the enemy is not on the throne; he sets up his purposes, and they are foiled and thrown down and buried in the grave of contempt. The Lord reigneth; the Cross is the symbol of triumph; thy Son shall have the heathen for his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession. As I live, saith the Lord, the whole earth shall be full of the glory of the Lord. This thou wilt work out in thine own way and in thine own time, but it shall be done, because the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. Surely thou wilt remember us in our low estate; our weakness shall be our plea, our sin shall be the mighty reason of our prayer; because we cannot save ourselves thy power to save shall be magnified. As for our afflictions, difficulties, disappointments, all the black things that make up life, all the miseries that chasten the heart, they are under thy control every one of them: no spark has in it more heat than thou hast entrusted to it, and no chain is longer than the links thyself hast forged. We still believe in God and have no confidence in ourselves, and have perfect distrust of the enemy when we muse upon thine almightiness and see somewhat of thy love. Reconcile us to our lot wherein we cannot amend it. Life is an infinite difficulty to some: the morning brings no light of hope, the evening no shade of rest, and the noontide is a fierce enemy; they cannot fight the battle; the bread they earn is too little, and it is embittered by many a reflection which cannot be controlled or explained; the house is lonely and dark, the children are sickly and unequal to the task of life, the whole day is full of shadows, and the night is a darkness unrelieved;—come to such; explain a little of the mystery to them; if they could but sing one note in the night-time, they would take heart again. Have pity upon those who are too successful; thou art causing them to see what prosperity means, and, behold, we regard them with compassion as they open the glittering parcel to find it full of nothingness. The world grows bitter herbs: all time and sense are like a garden-land bringing forth nothing but bitter aloes; behold, the garden is on high, where the sweet fruit grows, where the pure flowers bloom, where the birds sing God's gospels. May we set our affections upon things above, and by a mightier gravitation than that of earth be drawn towards the throne that is established for ever. Break the bad man's purpose; turn his counsel to confusion; set him upside down on the wayside that men may laugh at him who mocked their God. Prosper every good cause: give it energy and hope and secretly-multiplying resources, and may it win the whole battle, and set up God's standard—pledge of victory, pledge of peace. Amen.

The Song of Moses

(Continued)

Deuteronomy 32:20 and ending with Deuteronomy 32:25. That paragraph is a kind of armoury; it is a special chamber set apart in the great creation into which we may reverently look if we would know some resources which are available in reference to the punishment of sin. The paragraph should be read alone,—that is to say, it should be taken out of its literary setting and perused as a solitary writing. In the New Testament we find an armoury available to Christian soldiers; in that armoury we find sword and shield and breastplate, and all the other parts of an invincible panoply. In these verses we find an armoury which is not to be used by men, but which is to be solely employed by Almighty God himself. Quite a new aspect of the divine character is here revealed. How after perusing such words can we read the sweet message given in sweet syllables—"God is love"? He is a God full of terribleness according to the description given in Deuteronomy 32:20-25 of this chapter. What is God's penal reply to sin according to this record? It is a reply in the first instance of withdrawment:—"I will hide my face from them"—( Deuteronomy 32:20)—let them see what they can do with life; grant unto them their own hearts" desire, and "I will see what their end shall be"—they claim to be wise, let them light the lamp of their wisdom and see how long it will burn without my presence and blessing. This withdrawment of the divine face is the most terrific punishment that can befall the life of the human soul. It is not a stroke, or a sharp pain, or an open wound out of which the blood flows in a hot flood: all such pains can be borne with some degree of fortitude; possibly some man may have found a balm for such wounds: send for him, pay him well, ask him to make haste, to leave all other patients and clients, to flee to your side because you can reward him handsomely; but here is a punishment man cannot touch: it may be described in a sense as abstract, as purely spiritual. What are we waiting for? We are waiting for light. Who can bring it? It is not carried in the waggons of men; it cannot be fetched by the horses of kings; it lies beyond the line of our arm. For what are we pining?—for a smile. Who can buy it? None can buy it: it is not sold in the market-place for gold. We want a touch, a glance, a feeling of divine nearness; we cannot tell in words what it is we need, but such a necessity never before strained the soul and pained it with agony. So long as we can describe our suffering, our very description becomes a species of mitigation. When words fail, when our attempted utterance returns upon ourselves, the hearer being unable to make out one word we say, then the mind staggers and eloquent lips babble an idiot's tale.

God will thus punish his people homoeopathically,—an ancient plan, full of philosophy, but failing sometimes even in the hands of God. He will address like to like; he will encounter the sinner in his own mood. Says God,—"They have moved me to jealousy... I will move them to jealousy"—and jealousy falling into collision with jealousy, there shall be destruction of the unholy feeling and return to peace and concord. It is not so in reality. As a piece of abstract philosophy it sounds well; but jealousy does not cure jealousy in this sense. For a time a happy effect seems to accrue, but in the end the wickedness is deeper than before. Says God, They have set up in my place a not-god;—that is the charge he brings against them, namely, that Israel worshipped a not-god. I will vex them with a people that are not a people: I will raise up compeers out of the dust, and rivals shall spring out of the dung-hill, and men who had no name shall stand up as children of renown. That homoeopathic principle also failed. For a time it operated well: Israel began to look around, and to wonder at the mockery and humiliation; but we may become accustomed to miracles, we may become so familiar with providences as to fail to observe them. Now God will be more energetic:—

"For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell [sheol, pit], and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains" ( Deuteronomy 32:22).

"They shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning beat, and with bitter destruction: I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them with the poison of serpents of the dust" ( Deuteronomy 32:24).

God will now send another punishment—namely, the "terror within" ( Deuteronomy 32:25). That is worst of all. We can deal with any force that is visible, measurable, and otherwise estimable as to quality and energy; but who can fight a shadow? Who can put down an army of fears? Who has weapons fine enough to fight impalpable ghosts and shed blood where there is none? We cannot account for the fear: the man lies there on his couch visibly and talks with some degree of coherence; his eye has in it no unsettledness, and his voice is as firm and resonant as ever; but he has a fear in his heart: presently he will speak of it; a great terror sits upon the throne of his reason; it is in vain to laugh at the Deuteronomy 32:27).

What charge does God bring against the people?

"For they are a nation void of counsel, neither is there any understanding in them" ( Deuteronomy 32:28).

Now comes a strain—a minor tone; almightiness whispers, the God of thunders lowers his voice, and says:—

"O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!" ( Deuteronomy 32:29).

So the Bible is full of solemn calls, noble and pathetic reflections, calling men to understanding, to the acceptance of counsel, to obedience and Deuteronomy 32:31).

This verse admits of a new setting as to its meaning. It is taken thus by one of the most eminent Jewish commentators, namely: "Their rock is not as our Rock, and yet they have become our judges"—they are following the wrong course, and yet they are exalted above us, and they judge our life, and they condemn us, and they drive us away from their judgment-seat in contempt and scorn; this is a miracle in philosophy, this is an impossibility in morals; their rock is not as our Rock, and yet somehow they have ascended the judgment-seat, and we turn pale before their tribunal and humbly receive the sentence of their scorn. These inversions of natural courses have to be accounted for. We are not at liberty to allow history to perpetrate infinite jests, and to taunt us with incredible ironies. There must be harmony in history; there must be in it a tendency—a central line, always moving onward with nobleness and majesty of revelation and purpose; much that is incidental and. temporary may associate itself with that line but must fall into the harmony of the central movement. But here is an instance which cannot be accounted for on any ordinary principles. Here are people with the wrong god and the wrong law and the wrong policy, and somehow they are on the judgment-seat, and men who have the right theology in sentiment and the right law in the letter stand before them like doomed culprits.

Or take it in the other or more common way:—"For their rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges." We have the larger providence, we are under a more benevolent dispensation than themselves, our God is abler than their god; they acknowledge this, and though this acknowledgment is made to us in theory, yet in practice they seem to have the best of it: they are at home, they are in prosperity, they stand in the midst of their vineyards, they make their bread of the kidneys of wheat, whilst we are strangers and exiles and wanderers. We have the right God, but we are suffering under an afflictive providence. Let it be so anyhow, if only men will think. There is hope of any man who feels an arresting hand upon his shoulder and hears in his ear an accusatory voice, and who asks questions upon the arrest and the accusation: he is dead, but not "twice dead;" he is withered, but not "plucked up by the roots;" he is as a felled tree, but still here and there are signs of sprouting: he yet may fully live. Let every man ask himself how it is that he can have a right theology, and a right Church, and the very book of God, and yet be mocked of the enemy, chased by straws that are driven by the wind, and made afraid by withered leaves that crinkle on the ground. The reason is religious. There is something wrong at the centre; every accident seems to be right, but the central life is wrong.

"For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields cf Gomorrah: their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter: their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps" ( Deuteronomy 32:32-33).

So the song rolls on, speaking of vengeance, speaking of the enemies of God, and promising them an awful reward. When the song was ended:—

"Moses came and spake all the words of this song in the ears of the people, Deuteronomy 32:44).

"Because ye trespassed against me among the children of Israel at the waters of Meribah-Kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin; because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel" ( Deuteronomy 32:51).

Prayer

Almighty God, thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us; thou didst not in saving man take on thee the nature of angels, thou didst take upon thee the seed of Abraham; thou didst come in the image and likeness of man, which is in very deed the image and likeness of God. When thou didst so come unto us we knew thee not, for thou wert as one of ourselves, kindred in quality, the same in speech, neighbourly, friendly, social, so that we spoke of thy brethren and thy sisters, thy father and thy mother. We did not know the meaning of our own speech; we could not tell what we said, but we felt that our speech and thy vision were in contradiction; we felt thy greatness. When we did but touch the hem of thy garment we knew that thou wert more than man—than any man known to us—and we ourselves called thee Immanuel: God with us; near us, part of us, one with us; a great mystery of life, an eternal problem, not the less an eternal blessing. We thank thee for all religious thought; we bless thee that the altar elevates whomsoever touches it; we thank thee that we cannot look downward whilst we are thinking of God and the future, truth and immortality, development, and heaven; then the mind kindles; then our nature puts forth its wings and flies up to the gate of the morning and the dwelling-place of the sun, and we love the light and sing in it as birds do. May we always be faithful to the altar, may our inquiry go deeper and deeper every day, and may our love burn until perfectly disinfected of all selfishness and earthliness and limitation, until it become a great flame, aspiring in continual hope and sacrifice to the very throne of God. We bless thee for all Christian fellowship, for communion in Christ Jesus, that we can speak through him and with him, that he is our Advocate and Intercessor: our Priest, eloquent through his own blood, mighty through the weakness of the Cross, the greater for us because so pained in Gethsemane and unable to save himself on Calvary. The Lord send the mysteries of the Cross into our hearts as songs without words, great inspirations, deep and holy comfortings. Amen.