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Notes on the Book of Deuteronomy, Volume I

by Charles Henry Mackintosh · English · Gutenberg #41571 · 689,342 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Notes on the Book of Deuteronomy, Volume I

Author: Charles Henry Mackintosh


        
Release date: December 6, 2012 [eBook #41571]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES ON THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY, VOLUME I ***

  NOTES

  _on the book of_

  DEUTERONOMY

  _Volume I_

  C. H. MACKINTOSH

  "_Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in heaven._"

  "_Thy Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin
  against Thee._"

  LOIZEAUX BROTHERS

  _Neptune, New Jersey_




  FIRST EDITION 1880
  TWENTY-SEVENTH PRINTING 1965

  LOIZEAUX BROTHERS, INC., PUBLISHERS

  _A Nonprofit Organization, Devoted to the Lord's Work
  and to the Spread of His Truth_

  NEPTUNE, NEW JERSEY


  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




PREFATORY NOTE

TO THE AMERICAN EDITION


As several persons in America have, without any authority whatever
from me, undertaken to publish my four[1] volumes of "Notes," I deem
it my duty to inform the reader that I have given full permission to
Messrs. LOIZEAUX BROTHERS to publish an edition of those books in such
form as they shall consider most suitable.

  C. H. MACKINTOSH.

  _6 West Park Terrace, Scarborough,
  May 1st, 1879._

  [1] Now six.




PREFACE


The value and importance of the Word of God cannot be over-estimated
at the present moment. Its integrity and authority are being assailed
from almost every quarter and in every form of attack. "If the
foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Ps. xi. 3.)

Infidel thoughts and principles are not limited to a few literary and
speculative minds, as they were fifty years ago, but are now asserted
by many who ought to be the true guardians of Christianity and the
defenders of the Bible as a revelation from God.

In this way the multitude of the simple and unsuspecting are deceived.
If the style of address be pleasing, few care to compare what they
have been hearing with the holy Scriptures. The conscience not being
aroused, they take no further trouble.

But what of the state of immortal souls, under such a ministry, in
view of eternity? On whom does the weight of responsibility rest?
Fine-spun theories will never awaken a soul asleep in sin: the lost
sinner must be brought face to face with the plain Word of God and the
solemn realities of eternity. His voice must be heard. All is
absolute, positive, and definite here, whatever infidelity may say.
"The Word of the Lord endureth forever."

The burden of the following pages, I am thankful to find, is well
calculated to meet and counteract the looseness and indefiniteness of
the prevailing teaching of the present day.

And this, I may also say, is the burden of the book of Deuteronomy.
The Jewish lawgiver presses with great earnestness the Word of Jehovah
on the heart of Israel. It is not a book of ceremonials, but the
reminding of the people of their obligation to keep the commandments,
the statutes, and the judgments of the Lord.

This is the first moral duty of man in every age--implicit obedience
and submission to the revealed will of God. Moses speaks to the
children of Israel as a father, and appeals to them in the most tender
and loving way. "Hearken, O Israel," he says, "unto the statutes and
unto the judgments which I teach you ... ye shall not add unto the
word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it,
that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command
you." And again, he says, "Thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine
hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou
shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates."

The welfare of the people individually and nationally depended on
their faithfully observing these oft-repeated laws. To neglect them
was to bring upon themselves the displeasure and chastening of the God
of Israel.

But more need not be said here on these subjects. The reader will find
in the following pages the most ample unfolding and practical
application of these divine exhortations and warnings. But the writer
has not confined himself to what Deuteronomy teaches, but has enlarged
on what it suggests. In this way we have brought before us the grand
cardinal truths of Christianity: a wide circle of truth is embraced,
and much that applies to the individual Christian, the family, the
household, and the Church of God will be found in the accompanying
book.

It now goes forth with the earnest desire that the Lord may be
graciously pleased to use it for the glory of His own name, the help
of His people, and the eternal blessing of many precious souls.

  _A. M._

  _London, November, 1880._




CONTENTS


                  _Page._

  INTRODUCTION,         1

  CHAPTER I,           22

     "    II,         107

     "    III,        132

     "    IV,         162

     "    V,          284

     "    VI,         377




NOTES

ON

THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY

INTRODUCTION


The character of the book on which we now enter is quite as distinct
as that of any of the four preceding sections of the Pentateuch. Were
we to judge from the title of the book, we might suppose that it is a
mere repetition of what we find in previous books. This would be a
very grave mistake. There is no such thing as mere repetition in the
Word of God. Indeed, God never repeats Himself, either in His Word or
in His works. Wherever we trace our God, whether on the page of holy
Scripture or in the vast fields of creation, we see divine fullness,
infinite variety, marked design; and just in proportion to our
spirituality of mind will be our ability to discern and appreciate
these things. Here, as in all beside, we need the eye anointed with
heavenly eye-salve. What a poor idea must the man entertain of
inspiration who could imagine for a moment that the fifth book of
Moses is a barren repetition of what is to be found in Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers! Why, even in human composition we should not
expect to find such a flagrant imperfection, much less in the perfect
revelation which God has so graciously given us in His holy Word. The
fact is, there is not, from cover to cover of the inspired volume, a
single superfluous sentence, not one redundant clause, not one
statement without its own distinct meaning--its own direct
application. If we do not see this, we have yet to learn the depth,
force, and meaning of the words, "All scripture is given by
inspiration of God."

Precious words! Would they were more thoroughly understood in this our
day! It is of the utmost possible importance that the Lord's people
should be rooted, grounded, and settled in the grand truth of the
plenary inspiration of holy Scripture. It is to be feared that laxity
as to this most weighty subject is spreading in the professing church
to an appalling extent. In many quarters it has become fashionable to
pour contempt upon the idea of plenary inspiration. It is looked upon
as the veriest childishness and ignorance. It is regarded by many as a
great proof of profound scholarship, breadth of mind, and original
thinking to be able, by free criticism, to find out flaws in the
precious volume of God. Men presume to sit in judgment upon the Bible
as though it were a mere human composition. They undertake to
pronounce upon what is and what is not worthy of God. In fact, they do
virtually sit in judgment upon God Himself. The present result is, as
might be expected, utter darkness and confusion, both for those
learned doctors themselves and for all who are so foolish as to listen
to them. And as for the future, who can conceive the eternal destiny
of all those who shall have to answer before the judgment-seat of
Christ for the sin of blaspheming the Word of God, and leading
hundreds astray by their infidel teaching?

We shall not, however, occupy time in dwelling upon the sinful folly
of infidels and skeptics (even though called Christians), or their
puny efforts to cast dishonor upon that peerless volume which our
gracious God has caused to be written for our learning. They will some
day or other find out their fatal mistake. God grant it may not be too
late! And as for us, let it be our deep joy and consolation to
meditate upon the Word of God, that so we may ever be discovering some
fresh treasure in that exhaustless mine--some new moral glories in
that heavenly revelation!

The book of Deuteronomy holds a very distinct place in the inspired
canon. Its opening lines are sufficient to prove this.--"These be the
words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the
wilderness, in the plain over against the Red Sea, between Paran, and
Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab."

Thus much as to the place in which the lawgiver delivered the contents
of this marvelous book. The people had come up to the eastern bank of
the Jordan, and were about to enter upon the land of promise. Their
desert wanderings were nearly ended, as we learn from the third verse,
in which the point of time is as distinctly marked as is the
geographical position in verse 1.--"It came to pass in the fortieth
year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses
spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the Lord
had given him in commandment unto them."

Thus, not only have we both time and place set forth with divine
precision and minuteness, but we also learn, from the words just
quoted, that the communications made to the people in the plains of
Moab were very far indeed from being a repetition of what has come
before us in our studies on the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and
Numbers. Of this we have further and very distinct proof in a passage
in chapter xxix. of the book on which we are now entering.--"These are
the words of the covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with
the children of Israel in the land of Moab, _beside the covenant which
He made with them in Horeb_."

Let the reader note particularly these words. They speak of two
covenants--one at Horeb and one in Moab; and the latter, so far from
being a mere repetition of the former, is as distinct from it as any
two things can be. Of this we shall have the fullest and clearest
evidence in our study of the profound book which now lies open before
us.

True, the Greek title of the book, signifying the law a second time,
might seem to give rise to the idea of its being a mere recapitulation
of what has gone before; but we may rest assured it is not so.
Indeed, it would be a very grave error to think so. The book has its
own specific place. Its scope and object are as distinct as possible.
The grand lesson which it inculcates, from first to last, is
_obedience_; and that, too, not in the mere letter, but in the spirit
of love and fear--an obedience grounded upon a known and enjoyed
relationship--an obedience quickened by the sense of moral obligations
of the weightiest and most influential character.

The aged lawgiver--the faithful, beloved, and honored servant of the
Lord was about to take leave of the congregation. He was going to
heaven and they were about to cross the Jordan, and hence his closing
discourses are solemn and affecting in the very highest degree. He
reviews the whole of their wilderness history, and that, too, in a
manner most touching and impressive. He recounts the scenes and
circumstances of their forty eventful years of desert life, in a style
eminently calculated to touch the deepest moral springs of the heart.
We hang over these most precious discourses with wonder and delight.
They possess an incomparable charm, arising from the circumstances
under which they were delivered, as well as from their own divinely
powerful contents. They speak to us no less effectively than to those
for whom they were specially intended. Many of the appeals and
exhortations come home to us with a power of application as if they
had been uttered but yesterday.

And is it not thus with all Scripture? Are we not continually struck
with its marvelous power of adaptation to our own very state, and to
the day in which our lot is cast? It speaks to us with a point and
freshness as if it were written expressly for us--written this very
day. There is nothing like Scripture. Take any human writing of the
same date as the book of Deuteronomy; if you could lay your hand on
some volume written three thousand years ago, what would you find? A
curious relic of antiquity--something to be placed in the British
Museum, side by side with an Egyptian mummy, having no application
whatever to us or to our time--a musty document--a piece of obsolete
writing, practically useless to us, referring only to a state of
society and to a condition of things long since passed away and buried
in oblivion.

The Bible, on the contrary, is the book for to-day. It is God's own
book--His perfect revelation. It is His own very voice speaking to
each one of us. It is a book for every age, for every clime, for every
class, for every condition--high and low, rich and poor, learned and
ignorant, old and young. It speaks in a language so simple that a
child can understand it, and yet so profound that the most gigantic
intellect cannot exhaust it. Moreover, it speaks right home to the
heart; it touches the deepest springs of our moral being; it goes down
to the hidden roots of thought and feeling in the soul; it judges us
thoroughly. In a word, it is, as the inspired apostle tells us, "quick
and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to
the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow,
and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Heb.
iv. 12.)

And then mark the marvelous comprehensiveness of its range. It deals
as accurately and as forcibly with the habits and customs, the manners
and maxims of the nineteenth century of the Christian era as with
those of the very earliest ages of human existence. It displays a
perfect acquaintance with man in every stage of his history. The
London of to-day and the Tyre of three thousand years ago are
mirrored, with like precision and faithfulness, on the sacred page.
Human life, in every stage of its development, is portrayed by a
master-hand in that wonderful volume which our God has graciously
penned for our learning.

What a privilege to possess such a book!--to have in our hands a
divine revelation!--to have access to a book, every line of which is
given by inspiration of God!--to have a divinely given history of the
past, the present, and the future! Who can estimate aright such a
privilege as this?

But then, this book judges man--judges his ways--judges his heart. It
tells him the truth about himself. Hence man does not like God's book.
An unconverted man would vastly prefer a newspaper or a sensational
novel to the Bible. He would rather read the report of a trial in one
of our criminal courts than a chapter in the New Testament.

Hence, too, the constant effort to pick holes in God's blessed book.
Infidels in every age and of every class have labored hard to find
out flaws and contradictions in holy Scripture. The determined enemies
of the Word of God are to be found, not only in the ranks of the
vulgar, the coarse, and the demoralized, but amongst the educated, the
refined, and the cultivated. Just as it was in the days of the
apostles, "certain lewd fellows of the baser sort," and "devout and
honorable women"--two classes so far removed from each other socially
and morally--found one point in which they could heartily agree,
namely, the utter rejection of the Word of God and of those who
faithfully preached it. (Comp. Acts xiii. 50 with xvii. 5.) So we ever
find that men who differ in almost every thing else, agree in their
determined opposition to the Bible. Other books are let alone. Men
care not to point out defects in Virgil, in Horace, in Homer, or
Herodotus; but the Bible they cannot endure, because it exposes them
and tells them the truth about themselves and the world to which they
belong.

And was it not exactly the same with the living Word--the Son of
God--the Lord Jesus Christ when He was here among men? Men hated Him
because He told them the truth. His ministry, His words, His ways--His
whole life was a standing testimony against the world; hence their
bitter and persistent opposition. Other men were allowed to pass on,
but He was watched and waylaid at every turn of His path. The great
leaders and guides of the people "sought to entangle Him in His talk,"
to find occasion against Him, in order that they might deliver Him to
the power and authority of the governor. Thus it was during His
marvelous life; and at the close, when the blessed One was nailed to
the cross between two malefactors, these latter were let alone; there
were no insults heaped upon them--the chief priests and elders did not
wag their heads at them. No; all the insults, all the mockery, all the
coarse and heartless vulgarity--all was heaped upon the divine
Occupant of the centre cross.

Now, it is well we should thoroughly understand the real source of all
the opposition to the Word of God--whether it be the living Word or
the written Word. It will enable us to estimate it at its real worth.
The devil hates the Word of God--hates it with a perfect hatred; and
hence he employs learned infidels to write books to prove that the
Bible is not the Word of God, that it cannot be, inasmuch as there are
mistakes and discrepancies in it; and not only so, but in the Old
Testament we find laws and institutions, habits and practices,
unworthy of a gracious and benevolent Being.

To all this style of argument we have one brief and pointed reply. Of
all these learned infidels we simply say, They know nothing whatever
about the matter. They may be very learned, very clever, very deep and
original thinkers, well made up in general literature, very competent
to give an opinion on any subject within the domain of natural and
moral philosophy, very able to discuss any scientific question;
moreover, they may be very amiable in private life--truly estimable
characters--kind, benevolent, philanthropic, beloved in private and
respected in public,--all this they may be, but being unconverted, and
not having the Spirit of God, they are wholly unfit to form, much less
to give, a judgment on the subject of holy Scripture. If any one
wholly ignorant of astronomy were to presume to sit in judgment on the
principles of the Copernican system, these very men of whom we speak
would at once pronounce him utterly incompetent to speak, and unworthy
to be heard on such a subject. In short, no one has any right whatever
to offer an opinion on a matter with which he is unacquainted. This is
an admitted principle on all hands; and therefore its application in
the case now before us cannot justly be called in question.

Now, the inspired apostle tells us, in his first epistle to the
Corinthians, that "the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; _neither can he know
them_, because they are spiritually discerned." This is conclusive. He
speaks of man in his natural state, be he ever so learned, ever so
cultivated. He is not speaking of any special class of men, but simply
of man in his unconverted state--man destitute of the Spirit of God.
Some may imagine that the apostle refers to man in a state of
barbarism, or savage ignorance. By no means; it is simply man in
nature, be he a learned philosopher or an ignorant clown. "He cannot
know the things of the Spirit of God." How, then, can he form or give
a judgment as to the Word of God? How can he take it upon him to say
what is or what is not worthy of God to write? And if he is audacious
enough to do so (as, alas! he is), who will be foolish enough to
listen to him? His arguments are baseless, his theories worthless, his
books only fit for the wastepaper basket; and all this, be it
observed, on the universally admitted principle above stated, that no
one has any title to be heard on a subject of which he is wholly
ignorant.

In this way we dispose of the whole tribe of infidel writers. Who
would think of listening to a blind man on the subject of light and
shade? And yet such a man has much more claim to be heard than an
unconverted man on the subject of inspiration. Human learning, however
extensive and varied--human wisdom, however profound, cannot qualify a
man to form a judgment upon the Word of God. No doubt a scholar may
examine and collate MSS. simply as a matter of criticism; he may be
able to form a judgment as to the question of authority for any
particular reading of a passage; but this is a different matter
altogether from an infidel writer undertaking to pronounce judgment
upon the revelation which God has, in His infinite goodness, given to
us. We maintain that no man can do this. It is only by the Spirit, who
Himself inspired the holy Scriptures, that those Scriptures can be
understood and appreciated. The Word of God must be received upon its
own authority. If man can judge it or reason upon it, it is not the
Word of God at all. Has God given us a revelation, or has He not? If
He has, it must be absolutely perfect in every respect; and being
such, it must be entirely beyond the range of human judgment. Man is
no more competent to judge Scripture than he is to judge God. The
Scriptures judge man; not man the Scriptures.

This makes all the difference. Nothing can be more miserably
contemptible than the books which infidels write against the Bible.
Every page, every paragraph, every sentence, only goes to illustrate
the truth of the apostle's statement, that "the natural man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God; ... _neither can he know them_,
because they are spiritually discerned." Their gross ignorance of the
subject with which they undertake to deal is only equaled by their
self-confidence. Of their irreverence we say nothing; for who would
think of looking for reverence in the writings of infidels? We might
perhaps look for a little modesty were it not that we are fully aware
of the bitter _animus_ which lies at the root of all such writings,
and renders them utterly unworthy of a moment's consideration. Other
books may have a dispassionate examination; but the precious book of
God is approached with the foregone conclusion that it is not a divine
revelation, because, forsooth, infidels tell us that God could not
give us a written revelation of His mind.

How strange! Men can give us a revelation of their thoughts (and
infidels have done so pretty plainly), but God cannot! What folly!
What presumption! Why, we may lawfully inquire, could not God reveal
His mind to His creatures? Why should it be thought a thing
incredible? For no reason whatever, but because infidels would have it
so. The wish is, in this case assuredly, father to the thought. The
question raised by the old serpent in the garden of Eden nearly six
thousand years ago, has been passed on from age to age by all sorts of
skeptics, rationalists, and infidels, namely, "Hath God said?" We
reply, with intense delight, Yes; blessed be His holy name, He has
spoken--spoken to us. He has revealed His mind; He has given us the
holy Scriptures. "_All scripture is given by inspiration of God_, and
is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect
[αρτοις], thoroughly furnished unto all good works." And
again, "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our
learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might
have hope." (2 Tim. iii. 16, 17; Rom. xv. 4.)

The Lord be praised for such words! They assure us that all Scripture
is given of God, and that all Scripture is given to us. Precious link
between the soul and God! What tongue can tell the value of such a
link? God has spoken--spoken to us. His Word is a rock against which
all the waves of infidel thought dash themselves in contemptible
impotency, leaving it in its own divine strength and eternal
stability. Nothing can touch the Word of God. Not all the powers of
earth and hell, men and devils combined can ever move the Word of
God. There it stands, in its own moral glory, spite of all the
assaults of the enemy, from age to age. "Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is
settled in heaven." "Thou hast magnified Thy Word above all Thy name."
What remains for us? Just this: "Thy Word have I hid in my heart, that
I might not sin against Thee." Here lies the deep secret of peace. The
heart is linked to the throne--yea, to the very heart of God by means
of His most precious Word, and is thus put in possession of a peace
which the world can neither give nor take away. What can all the
theories, the reasonings, and the arguments of infidels effect? Just
nothing. They are esteemed as the dust of the summer threshing-floor.
To one who has really learnt, through grace, to confide in the Word of
God--to rest on the authority of holy Scripture, all the infidel books
that ever were written are utterly worthless, pointless, powerless;
they display the ignorance and terrible presumption of the writers;
but as to Scripture, they leave it just where it ever has been and
ever will be--"settled in heaven," as immovable as the throne of
God.[2] The assaults of infidels cannot touch the throne of God,
neither can they touch His Word; and, blessed be His name, neither can
they touch the peace that flows through the heart that rests on that
imperishable foundation. "Great peace have they that love Thy law, and
nothing shall offend them." "The Word of our God shall stand forever."
"All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of
grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but
the Word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the Word which by
the gospel is preached unto you." (1 Pet. i. 24, 25.)

  [2] In referring to infidel writers, we should bear in mind that by
  far the most dangerous of such are those calling themselves
  Christians. In our young days, whenever we heard the word "infidel,"
  we at once thought of a Tom Paine or a Voltaire; now, alas! we have to
  think of so-called bishops and doctors of the professing church.
  Tremendous fact!

Here we have the same precious golden link again. The Word which has
reached us in the form of glad tidings is the Word of the Lord which
endureth forever; and hence our salvation and our peace are as stable
as the Word on which they are founded. If _all_ flesh is as grass, and
_all_ the glory of man as the flower of grass, then what are the
arguments of infidels worth? They are as worthless as withered grass
or a faded flower; and the men who put them forth and those who are
moved by them will find them to be so, sooner or later. Oh, the sinful
folly of arguing against the Word of God--arguing against the only
thing in all this world that can give rest and consolation to the
poor, weary human heart--arguing against that which brings the glad
tidings of salvation to poor lost sinners--brings them fresh from the
heart of God!

But we may perhaps here be met by the question so often raised, and
which has troubled many and led them to fly for refuge to what is
called "the authority of the church." The question is this: "How are
we to know that the book which we call the Bible is the Word of God?"
Our answer to this question is a very simple one--it is this: The One
who has graciously given us the blessed book can give us also the
certainty that the book is from Him. The same Spirit who inspired the
various writers of the holy Scriptures can make us know that those
Scriptures are the very voice of God speaking to us. It is only by the
Spirit that any one can discern this. As we have already seen, "the
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; ... neither
can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." If the Holy
Spirit does not make us know, and give us the certainty that the Bible
is the Word of God, no man or body of men can possibly do it; and on
the other hand, if He does give us the blessed certainty, we do not
need the testimony of man.

We freely admit that on this great question a shadow of uncertainty
would be positive torture and misery; but who can give us certainty?
God alone. If all the men upon earth were to agree in their testimony
to the authority of holy Scripture--if all the councils that ever sat,
all the doctors that ever taught, all the fathers that ever wrote,
were in favor of the dogma of plenary inspiration--if the universal
church, if every denomination in christendom were to assent to the
truth that the Bible is, in very deed, the Word of God--in a word, if
we had all the human authority that could possibly be had in reference
to the integrity of the Word of God, it would be utterly insufficient
as a ground of certainty; and if our faith were founded on that
authority, it would be perfectly worthless. God alone can give us the
certainty that He has spoken in His Word; and blessed be His name,
when He gives it, all the arguments, all the cavilings, all the
quibblings, all the questionings of infidels, ancient and modern, are
as the foam on the water, the smoke from the chimney-top, or the dust
on the floor. The true believer rejects them as so much worthless
rubbish, and rests in holy tranquillity in that peerless revelation
which our God has graciously given us.

It is of the very last possible importance for the reader to be
thoroughly clear and settled as to this grave question, if he would be
raised above the influence of infidelity on the one hand and
superstition on the other. Infidelity undertakes to tell us that God
has not given us a book-revelation of His mind--could not give it:
Superstition undertakes to tell us that even though God has given us a
revelation, yet we cannot be assured of it without man's authority,
nor understand it without man's interpretation. Now it is well to see
that by both alike we are deprived of the precious boon of holy
Scripture. And this is precisely what the devil aims at. He wants to
rob us of the Word of God; and he can do this quite as effectually by
the apparent self-distrust that humbly and reverently looks to wise
and learned men for authority, as by an audacious infidelity that
boldly rejects all authority, human or divine.

Take a case. A father writes a letter to his son at Canton--a letter
full of the affection and tenderness of a father's heart. He tells him
of his plans and arrangements, tells him of every thing that he thinks
would interest the heart of a son--every thing that the love of a
father's heart could suggest. The son calls at the post-office in
Canton to inquire if there is a letter from his father. He is told by
one official that there is no letter, that his father has not written
and could not write--could not communicate his mind by such a medium
at all, that it is only folly to think of such a thing. Another
official comes forward, and says, Yes; there is a letter here for you,
but you cannot possibly understand it; it is quite useless to you,
indeed it can only do you positive mischief inasmuch as you are quite
unable to read it aright. You must leave the letter in our hands, and
we will explain to you such portions of it as we consider suitable for
you. The former of these two officials represents Infidelity; the
latter, Superstition. By both alike would the son be deprived of the
longed-for letter--the precious communication from his father's heart.
But what, we may inquire, would be his answer to these unworthy
officials? A very brief and pointed one we may rest assured. He would
say to the first, I know my father can communicate his mind to me by
letter, and that he has done so. He would say to the second, I know my
father can make me understand his mind far better than you can. He
would say to both, and that, too, with bold and firm decision. Give me
up at once my father's letter; it is addressed to me, and no man has
any right to withhold it from me.

Thus, too, should the simple-hearted Christian meet the _insolence_ of
Infidelity and the _ignorance_ of Superstition--the two special
agencies of the devil, in this our day, in setting aside the precious
Word of God. "My Father has communicated His mind, and He can make me
understand the communication."--"All Scripture is given _by
inspiration of God_;" and, "Whatsoever things were written aforetime
were written _for our learning_." Magnificent answer to every enemy of
God's precious and peerless revelation, be he rationalist or
ritualist!

We do not attempt to offer any apology to the reader for this
lengthened introduction to the book of Deuteronomy. Indeed we are only
too thankful for an opportunity of bearing our feeble testimony to the
grand truth of the divine inspiration of the holy Scriptures. We feel
it to be our sacred duty, as most surely it is our high privilege, to
press upon all to whom we have access, the immense importance--yea,
the absolute necessity of the most uncompromising decision on this
point. We must faithfully maintain, at all cost, the divine authority,
and therefore the absolute supremacy and all-sufficiency, of the Word
of God at all times, in all places, for all purposes. We must hold to
it that the Scriptures, having been given of God, are complete, in the
very highest and fullest sense of the word; that they do not need any
human authority to accredit them, or any human voice to make them
available: they speak for themselves, and carry their own credentials
with them. All we have to do is to believe and obey, not to reason or
discuss. God has spoken it: it is ours to hearken, and yield an
unreserved and reverent obedience.

This is one grand leading point throughout the book of Deuteronomy, as
we shall see in the progress of our meditations; and never was there a
moment, in the history of the Church of God, in which it was more
needful to urge home on the human conscience the necessity of implicit
obedience to the Word of God. It is, alas! but little felt. Professing
Christians, for the most part, seem to consider that they have a right
to think for themselves--to follow their own reason, their own
judgment, or their own conscience. They do not believe that the Bible
is a divine and universal guide-book. They think there are very many
things in which we are left to choose for ourselves; hence the almost
numberless sects, parties, creeds, and schools of thought. If human
opinion be allowed at all, then, as a matter of course, one man has as
good a right to think as another; and thus it has come to pass that
the professing church has become a proverb and a by-word for division.

And what is the sovereign remedy for this widespread disease? Here it
is: _Absolute and complete subjection to the authority of holy
Scripture_. It is not men going to Scripture to get _their_ opinions
and _their_ views confirmed; but going to Scripture to get the mind of
God as to every thing, and bowing down their whole moral being to
divine authority. This is the one pressing need of the day in which
our lot is cast--reverent subjection, in all things, to the supreme
authority of the Word of God. No doubt, there will be variety in our
measure of intelligence, in our apprehension and appreciation of
Scripture; but what we specially urge upon all Christians is that
condition of soul, that attitude of heart expressed in those precious
words of the psalmist, "Thy Word have I hid in mine heart, that I
might not sin against Thee." This, we may rest assured, is grateful to
the heart of God. "To this man will I look, even to him that is poor
and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My Word."

Here lies the true secret of moral security. Our knowledge of
Scripture may be very limited; but if our reverence for it be
profound, we shall be preserved from a thousand errors--a thousand
snares. And then there will be steady growth. We shall grow in the
knowledge of God, of Christ, and of the written Word; we shall delight
to draw from those living and exhaustless depths of holy Scripture,
and to range through those green pastures which infinite grace has so
freely thrown open to the flock of Christ. Thus shall the divine life
be nourished and strengthened; the Word of God will become more and
more precious to our souls, and we shall be lead, by the powerful
ministry of the Holy Ghost, into the depth, fullness, majesty, and
moral glory of holy Scripture. We shall be delivered completely from
the withering influences of all mere systems of theology, high, low,
or moderate--a most blessed deliverance! We shall be able to tell the
advocates of all the schools of divinity under the sun that whatever
elements of truth they may have in their systems we have in divine
perfectness in the Word of God; not twisted and tortured to make them
fit into a system, but in their right place in the wide circle of
divine revelation which has its eternal centre in the blessed Person
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.




CHAPTER I.


"These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side
Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red Sea,
between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab.
(There are eleven days' journey from Horeb, by the way of Mount Seir,
unto Kadesh-barnea.)"

The inspired writer is careful to give us, in the most precise manner,
all the bearings of the place in which the words of this book were
spoken in the ears of the people. Israel had not yet crossed the
Jordan; they were just beside it, and over against the Red Sea where
the mighty power of God had been so gloriously displayed nearly forty
years before. The whole position is described with a minuteness which
shows how thoroughly God entered into every thing that concerned His
people. He was interested in all their movements and in all their
ways. He kept a faithful record of all their encampments. Their was
not a single circumstance connected with them, however trifling,
beneath His gracious notice. He attended to every thing. His eye
rested continually on that assembly as a whole, and on each member in
particular. By day and by night He watched over them. Every stage of
their journey was under His immediate and most gracious
superintendence. There was nothing, however small, beneath His notice;
nothing, however great, beyond His power.

Thus it was with Israel in the wilderness of old, and thus it is with
the Church now--the Church as a whole, and each member in particular.
A Father's eye rests upon us continually, His everlasting arms are
around and underneath us day and night. "He withdraweth not His eyes
from the righteous." He counts the hairs of our heads, and enters,
with infinite goodness, into every thing that concerns us. He has
charged Himself with all our wants and all our cares. He would have us
to cast our every care on Him, in the sweet assurance that He careth
for us. He most graciously invites us to roll our every burden over on
Him, be it great or small.

All this is truly wonderful. It is full of deepest consolation. It is
eminently calculated to tranquilize the heart, come what may. The
question is, Do we believe it? are our hearts governed by the faith of
it? Do we really believe that the almighty Creator and Upholder of all
things, who bears up the pillars of the universe, has graciously
undertaken to do for us all the journey through? Do we thoroughly
believe that "the Possessor of heaven and earth" is our Father? and
that He has charged Himself with all our wants from first to last? Is
our whole moral being under the commanding power of those words of the
inspired apostle, "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him
up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all
things?" Alas! it is to be feared that we know but little of the power
of these grand yet simple truths. We talk about them, we discuss them,
we profess them, we give a nominal assent to them; but with all this,
we prove, in our daily life--in the actual details of our personal
history, how feebly we enter into them. If we truly believed that our
God has charged Himself with all our necessities--if we were finding
all our springs in Him--if He were a perfect covering for our eyes and
a resting-place for our hearts, could we possibly be looking to poor
creature-streams, which so speedily dry up and disappoint our hearts?
We do not and cannot believe it. It is one thing to hold the theory of
the life of faith, and another thing altogether to live that life. We
constantly deceive ourselves with the notion that we are living by
faith, when in reality we are leaning on some human prop, which sooner
or later is sure to give way.

Reader, is it not so? Are we not constantly prone to forsake the
Fountain of living waters, and hew out for ourselves broken cisterns,
which can hold no water? And yet we speak of living by faith! We
profess to be looking only to the living God for the supply of our
need, whatever that need may be, when, in point of fact, we are
sitting beside some creature-stream and looking for something there.
Need we wonder if we are disappointed? How could it possibly be
otherwise? Our God will not have us dependent upon aught or any one
but Himself. He has, in manifold places in His Word, given us His
judgment as to the true character and sure result of all
creature-confidence. Take the following most solemn passage from the
prophet Jeremiah: "Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh
flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall
be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh;
but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land
and not inhabited." And then mark the contrast--"Blessed is the man
that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is: for he shall be
as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by
the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be
green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall
cease from yielding fruit." (Jer. xvii. 5-8.)

Here we have, in language divinely forcible, clear, and beautiful, both
sides of this most weighty subject put before us. Creature-confidence
brings a certain curse; it can only issue in barrenness and
desolation. God, in very faithfulness, will cause every human stream
to dry up--every human prop to give way, in order that we may learn
the utter folly of turning away from Him. What figure could be more
striking or impressive than those used in the above passage?--"A heath
in the desert," "parched places in the wilderness," "a salt land not
inhabited." Such are the figures used by the Holy Ghost to illustrate
all mere human dependence--all confidence in man.

But on the other hand, what can be more lovely or more refreshing than
the figures used to set forth the deep blessedness of simple trust in
the Lord?--"A tree planted by the waters," "spreading out her roots by
the rivers," the leaf ever green, the fruit never ceasing. Perfectly
beautiful! Thus it is with the man who trusteth in the Lord, and whose
hope the Lord is. He is nourished by those eternal springs that flow
from the heart of God. He drinks at the Fountain, life-giving and
free. He finds all his resources in the living God. There may be
"heat," but he does not see it; "the year of drought" may come, but he
is not careful. Ten thousand creature-streams may dry up, but he does
not perceive it, because he is not dependent upon them; he abides hard
by the ever-gushing Fountain. He can never want any good thing. He
lives by faith.

And here, while speaking of the life of faith--that most blessed life,
let us clearly understand what it is, and carefully see that we are
living it. We sometimes hear this life spoken of in a way by no means
intelligent. It is not unfrequently applied to the mere matter of
trusting God for food and raiment. Certain persons who happen to have
no visible source of temporal supplies--no settled income--no property
of any kind, are singled out and spoken of as "living by faith," as if
that marvelous and glorious life had no higher sphere or wider range
than temporal things--the mere supply of our bodily wants.

Now, we cannot too strongly protest against this most unworthy view of
the life of faith. It limits its sphere and lowers its range in a
manner perfectly intolerable to any one who understands aught of its
most holy and precious mysteries. Can we for a moment admit that a
Christian who happens to have a settled income of any kind is to be
deprived of the privilege of living by faith? Or, further, can we
permit that life to be limited and lowered to the mere matter of
trusting God for the supply of our bodily wants? Does it soar no
higher than food and raiment? Does it give no more elevated thought of
God than that He will not let us starve or go naked?

Far away, and away forever, be the unworthy thought! The life of faith
must not be so treated. We cannot allow such a gross dishonor to be
offered to it, or such a grievous wrong done to those who are called
to live it. What, we would ask, is the meaning of those few but
weighty words, "The just shall live by faith"? They occur, first of
all, in Habakkuk ii. They are quoted by the apostle in Romans i, where
he is, with a master-hand, laying the solid foundations of
Christianity. He quotes them again in Galatians iii, where he is, with
intense anxiety, recalling those bewitched assemblies to those solid
foundations which they, in their folly, were abandoning. Finally, he
quotes them again in chapter x. of his epistle to the Hebrews, where
he is warning his brethren against the danger of casting away their
confidence and giving up the race.

From all this we may assuredly gather the immense importance and
practical value of the brief but far-reaching sentence, "The just
shall live by faith." But to whom does it apply? Is it only for a few
of the Lord's servants, here and there, who happen to have no settled
income? We utterly reject the thought. It applies to every one of the
Lord's people. It is the high and happy privilege of all who come
under the title--that blessed title, "The just." We consider it a very
grave error to limit it in any way. The moral effect of such
limitation is most injurious. It gives undue prominence to one
department of the life of faith which, if any distinction be
allowable, we should judge to be the very lowest. But in reality,
there should be no distinction: the life of faith is one. Faith is the
grand principle of the divine life from first to last. By faith we are
justified, and by faith we live; by faith we stand, and by faith we
walk. From the starting-post to the goal of the Christian course it is
all by faith.

Hence, therefore, it is a serious mistake to single out certain
persons who trust the Lord for temporal supplies, and speak of them as
living by faith, as if they alone did so. And not only so, but such
persons are held up to the gaze of the Church of God as something
wonderful; and the great mass of Christians are led to think that the
privilege of living by faith lies entirely beyond their range. In
short, they are led into a complete mistake as to the real character
and sphere of the life of faith, and thus they suffer materially in
the inner life.

Let the Christian reader, then, distinctly understand that it is his
happy privilege, whoever he be or whatever be his position, to live a
life of faith, in all the depth and fullness of that word. He may,
according to his measure, take up the language of the blessed apostle,
and say, "The life that I live in the flesh, I live by the faith of
the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." Let nothing
rob him of this high and holy privilege which belongs to every member
of the household of faith. Alas! we fail. Our faith is weak, when it
ought to be strong, bold, and vigorous. Our God delights in a bold
faith. If we study the gospels, we shall see that nothing so refreshed
and delighted the heart of Christ as a fine bold faith--a faith that
understood Him and drew largely upon Him. Look, for example, at the
Syrophenician in Mark vii, and the centurion in Luke vii.

True, He could meet a weak faith--the very weakest. He could meet an
"If Thou _wilt_" with a gracious "I will"--an "If Thou _canst_" with
"If thou canst believe, all things are possible." The faintest look,
the feeblest touch, was sure to meet with a gracious response; but the
Saviour's heart was gratified and His spirit refreshed when He could
say, "O woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt;"
and again, "I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel."

Let us remember this. We may rest assured it is the very same to-day
as when our blessed Lord was here amongst men. He loves to be trusted,
to be used, to be drawn upon. We can never go too far in counting on
the love of His heart or the strength of His hand. There is nothing
too small, nothing too great for Him; He has all power in heaven and
on earth; He is head over all things to His Church; He holds the
universe together; He upholds all things by the word of His power.
Philosophers talk of the forces and laws of nature: the Christian
thinks with delight of Christ, His hand, His Word, His mighty power.
By Him all things were created, and by Him all things consist.

And then His love! What rest, what comfort, what joy, to know and
remember that the almighty Creator and Upholder of the universe is the
everlasting Lover of our souls! that He loves us perfectly; that His
eye is ever upon us, His heart ever toward us; that He has charged
Himself with all our wants, whatever these wants may be--whether
physical, mental, or spiritual! There is not a single thing within the
entire range of our necessities that is not treasured up for us in
Christ. He is Heaven's treasury--God's storehouse, and all this for
us.

Why, then, should we ever turn to another? Why should we ever,
directly or indirectly, make known our wants to a poor fellow-mortal?
Why not go straight to Jesus? Do we want sympathy? Who can sympathize
with us like our most merciful High-Priest, who is touched with the
feeling of our infirmities? Do we want help of any kind? Who can help
us like our almighty Friend, the Possessor of unsearchable riches? Do
we want counsel or guidance? Who can give it like the blessed One who
is the very wisdom of God, and who is made of God unto us wisdom? Oh,
let us not wound His loving heart, and dishonor His glorious name by
turning away from Him. Let us jealously watch against the tendency so
natural to us to cherish human hopes, creature-confidences, and
earthly expectations. Let us abide hard by the Fountain, and we shall
never have to complain of the streams. In a word, let us seek to live
by faith, and thus glorify God in our day and generation.

We shall now proceed with our chapter; and in so doing, we would call
the reader's attention to verse 2. It is certainly a very remarkable
parenthesis. "(There are eleven days' journey from Horeb, by the way
of Mount Seir, unto Kadesh-barnea.)" Eleven days! and yet it took them
forty years! How was this? Alas! we need not travel far for the
answer. It is only too like ourselves. How slowly we get over the
ground! What windings and turnings! How often we have to go back and
travel over the same ground again and again! We are slow travelers,
because we are slow learners. It may be we feel disposed to marvel how
Israel could have taken forty years to accomplish a journey of eleven
days; but we may, with much greater reason, marvel at ourselves. We,
like them, are kept back by our unbelief and slowness of heart; but
there is far less excuse for us than for them, inasmuch as our
privileges are so very much higher.

Some of us have much reason to be ashamed of the time we spend over
our lessons. The words of the blessed apostle do but too forcibly
apply to us--"For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have
need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the
oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of
strong meat." Our God is a faithful and wise as well as a gracious and
patient Teacher. He will not permit us to pass cursorily over our
lessons. Sometimes, perhaps, we think we have mastered a lesson, and
we attempt to move on to another; but our wise Teacher knows better,
and He sees the need of deeper ploughing. He will not have us mere
theorists or smatterers: He will keep us, if need be, year after year
at our scales until we learn to sing.

Now, while it is very humbling to us to be so slow in learning, it is
very gracious of Him to take such pains with us, in order to make us
sure. We have to bless Him for His mode of teaching as for all
beside--for the wonderful patience with which He sits down with us
over the same lesson again and again, in order that we may learn it
thoroughly.[3]

  [3] The journey of Israel from Horeb to Kadesh-barnea illustrates but
  too forcibly the history of many souls in the matter of finding peace.
  Many of the Lord's beloved people go on for years, doubting and
  fearing, never knowing the blessedness of the liberty wherewith Christ
  makes His people free. It is most distressing, to any one who really
  cares for souls, to see the sad condition in which some are kept all
  their days, through legality, bad teaching, false manuals of devotion,
  and such like. It is a rare thing now-a-days to find in christendom a
  soul fully established in the peace of the gospel. It is considered a
  good thing--a sign of humility--to be always doubting. Confidence is
  looked upon as presumption. In short, things are turned completely
  upside down. The gospel is not known: souls are under law instead of
  under grace,--they are kept at a distance instead of being taught to
  draw nigh. Much of the religion of the day is a deplorable mixture of
  Christ and self, law and grace, faith and works. Souls are kept in a
  perfect muddle all their days.

  Surely these things demand the grave consideration of all who occupy
  the responsible place of teachers and preachers in the professing
  church. There is a solemn day approaching, when all such will be
  called to render an account of their ministry.

"And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on
the first day of the month, that Moses spake unto the children of
Israel, according unto all that the Lord had given him in commandment
unto them." (Ver. 3.) These few words contain a volume of weighty
instruction for every servant of God--for all who are called to
minister in the Word and doctrine. Moses gave the people just what he
himself had received from God--nothing more, nothing less. He brought
them into direct contact with the living Word of Jehovah. This is the
grand principle of ministry at all times. Nothing else is of any real
value. The Word of God is the only thing that will stand. There is
divine power and authority in it. All mere human teaching, however
interesting--however attractive at the time, will pass away and leave
the soul without any foundation to rest upon.

Hence it should be the earnest, jealous care of all who minister in
the assembly of God, to preach the Word in all its purity, in all its
simplicity; to give it to the people as they get it from God; to bring
them face to face with the veritable language of holy Scripture. Thus
will their ministry tell, with living power, on the hearts and
consciences of their hearers. It will link the soul with God Himself,
by means of the Word, and impart a depth and solidity which no human
teaching can ever produce.

Look at the blessed apostle Paul. Hear him express himself on this
weighty subject.--"And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with
excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of
God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus
Christ, and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in
fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not
with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the
Spirit and of power." What was the object of all this fear and
trembling? "That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but
in the power of God." (1 Cor. ii. 1-5.)

This true-hearted faithful servant of Christ sought only to bring the
souls of his hearers into direct personal contact with God Himself. He
sought not to link them with Paul. "Who then is Paul, and who is
Apollos, but ministers _by whom ye believed_?" All false ministry has
for its object the attaching of souls to itself. Thus the minister is
exalted, God is shut out, and the soul left without any divine
foundation to rest upon. True ministry, on the contrary, as seen in
Paul and Moses, has for its blessed object the attaching of the soul
to God. Thus the minister gets his true place--simply an instrument,
God is exalted, and the soul established on a sure foundation which
can never be moved.

But let us hear a little more from our apostle on this most weighty
subject. "Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I
preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand;
by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto
you, unless ye have believed in vain. _For I delivered unto you first
of all that which I also received_"--nothing more, nothing less,
nothing different--"how that Christ died for our sins _according to
the Scriptures_; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the
third day _according to the Scriptures_."

This is uncommonly fine. It demands the serious consideration of all
who would be true and effective ministers of Christ. The apostle was
careful to allow the pure stream to flow down from its living
source--the heart of God, into the souls of the Corinthians. He felt
that nothing else was of any value. If he had sought to link them on
to himself, he would have sadly dishonored his Master, done them a
grievous wrong, and he himself would most assuredly suffer loss in the
day of Christ.

But no; Paul knew better. He would not, for worlds, lead any to build
upon himself. Hear what he says to his much-loved Thessalonians.--"For
this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when _ye
received the Word of God_ which ye heard of us, ye received it _not as
the word of men_, but _as it is in truth, the Word of God_, which
effectually worketh also in you that believe." (1 Thess. ii. 13.)

We feel solemnly responsible to commend this grave and important point
to the serious consideration of the Church of God. If all the
professed ministers of Christ were to follow the example of Moses and
Paul, in reference to the matter now before us, we should witness a
very different condition of things in the professing church. But the
plain and serious fact is, that the Church of God, like Israel of old,
has wholly departed from the authority of His Word. Go where you will,
and you find things done and taught which have no foundation in
Scripture. Things are not only tolerated but sanctioned and stoutly
defended which are in direct opposition to the mind of Christ. If you
ask for the divine authority for this, that, and the other institution
or practice, you will be told that Christ has not given us directions
as to matters of church government; that in all questions of
ecclesiastical polity, clerical orders, and liturgical services, He
has left us free to act according to our consciences, judgment, or
religious feelings; that it is simply absurd to demand a "Thus saith
the Lord" for all the details connected with our religious
institutions: there is a broad margin left to be filled up according
to our national customs and our peculiar habits of thought. It is
considered that professing Christians are left perfectly free to form
themselves into so-called churches, to choose their own form of
government, to make their own arrangements, and to appoint their own
office-bearers.

Now the question which the Christian reader has to consider is, "Are
these things so?" Can it be that our Lord Christ has left His Church
without guidance as to matters so interesting and momentous? Can it be
possible that the Church of God is worse off, in the matter of
instruction and authority, than Israel? In our studies on the books of
Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, we have seen (for who could help
seeing?) the marvelous pains which Jehovah took to instruct His people
as to the most minute particulars connected with their public worship
and private life. As to the tabernacle, the temple, the priesthood,
the ritual, the various feasts and sacrifices, the periodical
solemnities, the months, the days, the very hours, all was ordered and
settled with divine precision. Nothing was left to mere human
arrangement. Man's wisdom, his judgment, his reason, his conscience,
had nothing whatever to do in the matter. Had it been left to man, how
should we ever have had that admirable, profound, and far-reaching
typical system which the inspired pen of Moses has set before us? If
Israel had been allowed to do what (as some would fain persuade us)
the Church is allowed, what confusion, what strife, what division,
what endless sects and parties, would have been the inevitable result!

But it was not so. The Word of God settled every thing. "As the Lord
commanded Moses." This grand and influential sentence was appended to
every thing that Israel had to do, and to every thing they were not to
do. Their national institutions and their domestic habits--their
public and their private life, all came under the commanding authority
of "Thus saith the Lord." There was no occasion for any member of the
congregation to say, I cannot see this, or, I cannot go with that, or,
I cannot agree with the other. Such language could only be regarded as
the fruit of self-will. He might just as well say, I cannot agree with
Jehovah. And why? Simply because the Word of God had spoken as to
every thing, and that, too, with a clearness and simplicity which left
no room whatever for human discussion. Throughout the whole of the
Mosaic economy there was not the breadth of a hair of margin left in
which to insert the opinion or the judgment of man. It pertained not
to man to add the weight of a feather to that vast system of types and
shadows which had been planned by the divine mind, and set forth in
language so plain and pointed, that all Israel had to do was to
_obey_--not to argue, not to reason, not to discuss, but to obey.

Alas! alas! they failed, as we know. They did their own will; they
took their own way; they did "every man that which was right in his
own eyes." They departed from the Word of God, and followed the
imaginations and devices of their own evil heart, and brought upon
themselves the wrath and indignation of offended Deity, under which
they suffer till this day, and shall yet suffer unexampled
tribulation.

But all this leaves untouched the point on which we are just now
dwelling. Israel had the oracles of God, and these oracles were
divinely sufficient for their guidance in every thing. There was no
room left for the commandments and doctrines of men. The Word of the
Lord provided for every possible exigence, and that Word was so plain
as to render human comment needless.

Is the Church of God worse off, as regards guidance and authority,
than Israel of old? Are Christians left to think and arrange for
themselves in the worship and service of God? Are there any questions
left open for human discussion? Is the Word of God sufficient, or is
it not? Has it left any thing unprovided for? Let us hearken
diligently to the following powerful testimony: "All Scripture is
given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the
man of God may be _perfect_ [αρτοις] _throughly furnished
unto all good works_." (2 Tim. iii.)

This is perfectly conclusive. Holy Scripture contains all that the man
of God can possibly require to make him perfect, to equip him
thoroughly for every thing that can be called a "good work." And if
this be true as to the man of God individually, it is equally true as
to the Church of God collectively. Scripture is all-sufficient--for
each, for all. Thank God that it is so! What a signal mercy to have a
divine guide-book! Were it not so, what should we do? whither should
we turn? what would become of us? If we were left to human tradition
and human arrangement in the things of God, what hopeless confusion!
what clashing of opinions! what conflicting judgments! And all this of
necessity, inasmuch as one man would have quite as good a right as
another to put forth his opinion and to suggest his plan.

We shall perhaps be told that, notwithstanding our possession of the
holy Scripture, we have, nevertheless, sects, parties, creeds, and
schools of thought almost innumerable. But why is this? Simply because
we refuse to submit our whole moral being to the authority of holy
Scripture. This is the real secret of the matter--the true source of
all those sects and parties which are the shame and sorrow of the
Church of God.

It is vain for men to tell us that these things are good in
themselves--that they are the legitimate fruit of that free exercise
of thought and private judgment which form the very boast and glory of
Protestant Christianity. We do not and cannot believe for a moment
that such a plea will stand before the judgment-seat of Christ. We
believe, on the contrary, that this very boasted freedom of thought
and independence of judgment are in direct opposition to that spirit
of profound and reverent obedience which is due to our adorable Lord
and Master. What right has a servant to exercise his private judgment
in the face of his master's plainly expressed will? None whatever. The
duty of a servant is simply to obey--not to reason or to question, but
to do what he is told. He fails, as a servant, just in so far as he
exercises his own private judgment. The most lovely moral trait in a
servant's character is implicit, unquestioning, and unqualified
obedience. The one grand business of a servant is to do his master's
will.

All this will be fully admitted in human affairs; but in the things of
God, men think themselves entitled to exercise their private judgment.
It is a fatal mistake. God has given us His Word; and that Word is so
plain, that wayfaring men, though fools, need not err therein. Hence,
therefore, if we were all guided by that Word,--if we were all to bow
down in a spirit of unquestioning obedience to its divine authority,
there could not be conflicting opinions and opposing sects. It is
quite impossible that the voice of holy Scripture can teach opposing
doctrines. It cannot possibly teach one man Episcopacy; another,
Presbyterianism; and another, Independency. It cannot possibly furnish
a foundation for opposing schools of thought. It would be a positive
insult offered to the divine volume to attempt to attribute to it all
the sad confusion of the professing church. Every pious mind must
recoil, with just horror, from such an impious thought. Scripture
cannot contradict itself; and therefore if two men or ten thousand men
are exclusively taught by Scripture, they will think alike.

Hear what the blessed apostle says to the church at Corinth--says to
us, "Now I beseech you, brethren, _by the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ_" (mark the mighty moral force of this appeal) "that ye all
_speak the same thing_, and that there be no divisions among you; but
that ye be perfectly joined together in _the same mind_, and in _the
same judgment_."

Now the question is, how was this most blessed result to be reached?
Was it by each one exercising the right of private judgment? Alas! it
was this very thing that gave birth to all the division and contention
in the assembly at Corinth, and drew forth the sharp rebuke of the
Holy Ghost. Those poor Corinthians thought they had a right to think
and judge and choose for themselves, and what was the result? "It hath
been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the
house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you. Now this I say,
that _every one of you saith_, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I
of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided?"

Here we have private judgment and its sad fruit--its necessary fruit.
One man has quite as good a right to think for himself as another; and
no man has any right whatsoever to force his opinion upon his fellow.
Where, then, lies the remedy? In flinging to the winds our private
judgments, and reverently submitting ourselves to the supreme and
absolute authority of holy Scripture. If it be not thus, how could
the apostle beseech the Corinthians to "speak the same thing, and to
be perfectly joined together in the same mind, and in the same
judgment"? Who was to prescribe the "thing" that all were to "speak"?
In whose "mind" or whose "judgment" were all to be "perfectly joined
together"? Had any one member of the assembly, however gifted or
intelligent, the slightest shadow of a right to set forth what his
brethren were to speak, to think, or to judge? Most certainly not.
There was one absolute, because divine, authority to which all were
bound, or rather privileged, to submit themselves. Human opinions,
man's private judgment, his conscience, his reason--all these things
must go for what they are worth; and most assuredly they are perfectly
worthless as authority. The Word of God is the _only_ authority; and
if we are all governed by that, we shall "all speak the same thing,"
and "there will be no divisions among us;" but we shall "be perfectly
joined together in the same mind, and in the same judgment."

Lovely condition! But, alas! it is not the present condition of the
Church of God; and therefore it is perfectly evident that we are not
all governed by the one supreme, absolute, and all-sufficient
authority--the voice of holy Scripture--that most blessed voice that
can never utter one discordant note--a voice ever divinely harmonious
to the circumcised ear.

Here lies the root of the whole matter. The Church has departed from
the authority of Christ, as set forth in His Word. Until this is
seen, it is only lost time to discuss the claims of conflicting
systems, ecclesiastical or theological. If a man does not see that it
is his sacred duty to test every ecclesiastical system, every
liturgical service, and every theological creed by the Word of God,
discussion is perfectly useless. If it be allowable to settle things
according to expediency--according to man's judgment, his conscience,
or his reason, then verily we may as well at once give up the case as
hopeless. If we have no divinely settled authority--no perfect
standard--no infallible guide, we cannot see how it is possible for
any one to possess the certainty that he is treading in the true path.
If indeed it be true that we are left to choose for ourselves, amid
the almost countless paths which lie around us, then farewell to all
certainty--farewell to peace of mind and rest of heart--farewell to
all holy stability of purpose and fixedness of aim. If we cannot say
of the ground we occupy, of the path we pursue, and of the work in
which we are engaged, "This is the thing which the Lord hath
commanded," we may rest assured we are in a wrong position, and the
sooner we abandon it the better.

Thank God, there is no necessity whatever for His child or His servant
to continue for one hour in connection with what is wrong. "Let every
one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." But how are
we to know what is iniquity? By the Word of God. Whatever is contrary
to Scripture, whether in morals or in doctrines, is iniquity, and I
must depart from it, cost what it may. It is an individual
matter.--"_Let every one._"--"_He_ that hath ears."--"_He_ that
overcometh."--"If _any_ man hear My voice."

Here is the point. Let us mark it well. It is _Christ's_ voice. It is
not the voice of this good man or that good man; it is not the voice
of the church, the voice of the fathers, the voice of general
councils, but the voice of our own beloved Lord and Master. It is the
individual conscience in direct, living contact with the voice of
Christ--the living, eternal Word of God--the holy Scriptures. Were it
merely a question of human conscience or judgment or authority, we are
at once plunged in hopeless uncertainty, inasmuch as what one man
might judge to be iniquity, another might consider to be perfectly
right. There must be some fixed standard to go by--some supreme
authority from which there can be no appeal; and, blessed be God,
there is. God has spoken; He has given us His Word; and it is at once
our bounden duty, our high privilege, our moral security, our true
enjoyment, to obey that Word.

Not man's interpretation of the Word, but the Word itself. This is
all-important. We must have nothing--absolutely nothing between the
human conscience and divine revelation. Men talk to us about the
authority of the church. Where are we to find it? Suppose a really
anxious, earnest, honest soul, longing to know the true way. He is
told to listen to the voice of the church. He asks, Which church? Is
it the Greek, Latin, Anglican, or Scotch church? Not two of them
agree. Nay, more; there are conflicting parties, contending sects,
opposing schools of thought, in one and the self-same body. Councils
have differed, fathers have disagreed, popes have anathematized one
another. In the Anglican Establishment, we have high-church,
low-church, and broad-church, each differing from the rest. In the
Scotch or Presbyterian church, we have the Established church, the
United Presbyterian, and the Free church. And then if the anxious
inquirer turns away in hopeless perplexity from those great bodies, in
order to seek guidance amid the ranks of Protestant dissenters, is he
likely to fare any better?

Ah! reader, it is perfectly hopeless. The whole professing church has
revolted from the authority of Christ, and cannot possibly be a guide
or an authority for any one. In the second and third chapters of the
book of Revelation, the church is seen under judgment, and the appeal,
seven times repeated, is, "He that hath an ear, let him hear"--what?
The voice of the church? Impossible! The Lord could never direct us to
hear the voice of that which is itself under judgment. Hear what,
then? "Let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches."

And where is this voice to be heard? _Only_ in the holy Scriptures,
given of God, in His infinite goodness, to guide our souls in the way
of peace and truth, notwithstanding the hopeless ruin of the church,
and the thick darkness and wild confusion of baptized christendom. It
lies not within the compass of human language to set forth the value
and importance of having a divine and therefore an infallible and
all-sufficient guide and authority for our individual path.

But be it remembered, we are solemnly responsible to bow to that
authority, and follow that guide. It is utterly vain, indeed morally
dangerous, to profess to have a divine guide and authority unless we
are thoroughly subject thereto. This it was that characterized the
Jews in the days of our Lord. They had the Scriptures, but they did
not obey them. And one of the saddest features in the present
condition of christendom is its boasted possession of the Bible, while
the authority of that Bible is boldly set aside.

We deeply feel the solemnity of this, and would earnestly press it
upon the conscience of the Christian reader. The Word of God is
virtually ignored amongst us. Things are practiced and sanctioned, on
all hands, which not only have no foundation in Scripture, but are
diametrically opposed to it. We are not exclusively taught and
absolutely governed by Scripture.

All this is most serious, and demands the attention of all the Lord's
people in every place. We feel compelled to raise a warning note in
the ears of all Christians in reference to this most weighty subject.
Indeed, it is the sense of its gravity and vast moral importance that
has led us to enter upon the service of writing these "Notes on the
book of Deuteronomy." It is our earnest prayer that the Holy Ghost
may use these pages to recall the hearts of the Lord's dear people to
their true and proper place--even the place of reverent allegiance to
His blessed Word. We feel persuaded that what will characterize all
those who will walk devotedly in the closing hours of the Church's
earthly history will be profound reverence for the Word of God, and
genuine attachment to the Person of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
The two things are inseparably bound together by a sacred and
imperishable link.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying, 'Ye have dwelt long
enough in this mount: turn you, and take your journey, and go to the
mount of the Amorites, and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the
plain, in the hills, and in the vale, and in the south, and by the
sea-side, to the land of the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon, unto the
great river, the river Euphrates.'" (Ver. 6, 7.)

We shall find, throughout the whole of the book of Deuteronomy, the
Lord dealing much more directly and simply with the people than in any
of the three preceding books; so far is it from being true that
Deuteronomy is a mere repetition of what has passed before us in
previous sections. For instance, in the passage just quoted there is
no mention of the movement of the cloud--no reference to the sound of
the trumpet. "The Lord our God spake unto us." We know, from the book
of Numbers, that the movements of the camp were governed by the
movements of the cloud, as communicated by the sound of the trumpet.
But neither the trumpet nor the cloud is alluded to in this book. It
is much more simple and familiar. "The Lord our God spake unto us in
Horeb, saying, 'Ye have dwelt long enough in this mount.'"

This is very beautiful. It reminds us somewhat of the lovely
simplicity of patriarchal times, when the Lord spake unto the fathers
as a man speaketh to his friend. It was not by the sound of a trumpet,
or by the movement of a cloud, that the Lord communicated His mind to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was so very near to them that there was
no need, no room for an agency characterized by ceremony and distance.
He visited them, sat with them, partook of their hospitality, in all
the intimacy of personal friendship.

Such is the lovely simplicity of the order of things in patriarchal
times; and this it is which imparts a peculiar charm to the narratives
of the book of Genesis.

But in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers we have something quite
different. There, we have set before us a vast system of types and
shadows, rites, ordinances, and ceremonies, imposed on the people for
the time being, the import of which is unfolded to us in the epistle
to the Hebrews.--"The Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into
the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first
tabernacle was yet standing; which was a figure for the time then
present, in which were offered both gifts and sacrifices, that could
not make him that did the service perfect, as pertaining to the
conscience; which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings,
and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation."
(Heb. ix. 8-10.)

Under this system, the people were at a distance from God. It was not
with them as it had been with their fathers in the book of Genesis.
God was shut in from them, and they were shut out from Him. The
leading features of the Levitical ceremonial, so far as the people
were concerned, were bondage, darkness, distance; but on the other
hand, its types and shadows pointed forward to that one great
Sacrifice which is the foundation of all God's marvelous counsels and
purposes, and by which He can, in perfect righteousness, and according
to all the love of His heart, have a people near unto Himself, to the
praise of the glory of His grace, throughout the golden ages of
eternity.

Now, it has been already remarked, we shall find in Deuteronomy
comparatively little of rites and ceremonies. The Lord is seen more in
direct communication with the people; and even the priests, in their
official capacity, come rarely before us; and if they are referred to,
it is very much more in a moral than in a ceremonial way. Of this we
shall have ample proof as we pass along; it is a marked feature of
this beautiful book.

"The Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying, 'Ye have dwelt long
enough in this mount: turn you, and take your journey, and go to the
mount of the Amorites.'" What a rare privilege for any people to have
the Lord so near to them, and so interested in all their movements and
in all their concerns, great and small! He knew how long they ought to
remain in any one place, and whither they should next bend their
steps. They had no need to harass themselves about their journeyings,
or about any thing else. They were under the eye and in the hands of
One whose wisdom was unerring, whose power was omnipotent, whose
resources were inexhaustible, whose love was infinite, who had charged
Himself with the care of them, who knew all their need, and was
prepared to meet it, according to all the love of His heart and the
strength of His holy arm.

What, then, we may ask, remained for them to do? What was their plain
and simple duty? Just to obey. It was their high and holy privilege to
rest in the love and obey the commandments of Jehovah, their covenant
God. Here lay the blessed secret of their peace, their happiness, and
their moral security. They had no need whatever to trouble themselves
about their movements, no need of planning or arranging. Their
journeyings were all ordered for them by One who knew every step of
the way from Horeb to Kadesh-barnea, and they had just to live by the
day, in happy dependence upon Him.

Happy position! Privileged path! Blessed portion! But it demanded a
broken will, an obedient mind, a subject heart. If when Jehovah had
said, "Ye have compassed this mountain long enough," they, on the
contrary, were to form the plan of compassing it a little longer, they
would have had to compass it without Him. His companionship, His
counsel, and His aid could only be counted upon in the path of
obedience.

Thus it was with Israel in their desert wanderings, and thus it is
with us. It is our most precious privilege to leave all our matters in
the hands, not merely of a covenant God, but of a loving Father. He
arranges our movements for us; He fixes the bounds of our habitation;
He tells us how long to stay in a place, and where to go next. He has
charged Himself with all our concerns, all our movements, all our
wants. His gracious word to us is, "Be careful for nothing; but in
every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your
requests be made known unto God." And what then? "The peace of God,
which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds
through Christ Jesus."

But it may be the reader feels disposed to ask, How does God guide His
people now? We cannot expect to hear His voice telling us when to move
or where to go. To this we reply, at once, It cannot surely be that
the members of the Church of God--the body of Christ--are worse off in
the matter of divine guidance than Israel in the wilderness. Cannot
God guide His children--cannot Christ guide His servants--in all their
movements and in all their service? Who would think, for a moment, of
calling in question a truth so plain and so precious? True, we do not
expect to hear a voice, or see the movement of a cloud; but we have
what is very much better, very much higher, very much more intimate.
We may rest assured our God has made ample provision for us in this,
as in all beside, according to all the love of His heart.

Now, there are three ways in which we are guided: we are guided by the
Word, we are guided by the Holy Ghost, and we are guided by the
instincts of the divine nature; and we have to bear in mind that the
instincts of the divine nature, the leadings of the Holy Ghost, and
the teaching of holy Scripture will always harmonize. This is of the
utmost importance to keep before us. A person might fancy himself to
be led by the instincts of the divine nature, or by the Holy Spirit,
to pursue a certain line of action involving consequences at issue
with the Word of God. Thus his mistake would be made apparent. It is a
very serious thing for any one to act on mere impulse or impression.
By so doing, he may fall into a snare of the devil, and do very
serious damage to the cause of Christ. We must calmly weigh our
impressions in the balances of the sanctuary, and faithfully test them
by the standard of the divine Word. In this way we shall be preserved
from error and delusion. It is a most dangerous thing to trust
impressions or act on impulse. We have seen the most disastrous
consequences produced by so doing. Facts _may be_ reliable. Divine
authority is absolutely infallible. Our own impressions may prove as
delusive as a will-o'-the-wisp, or a mirage of the desert: human
feelings are most untrustworthy. We must ever submit them to the most
severe scrutiny, lest they betray us into some fatally false line of
action. We can trust Scripture without a shadow of misgiving; and we
shall find, without exception, that the man who is led by the Holy
Ghost, or guided by the instincts of the divine nature, will never act
in opposition to the Word of God. This is what we may call an axiom in
the divine life--an established rule in practical Christianity. Would
that it had been more attended to in all ages of the Church's history!
Would that it were more pondered in our own day!

But there is another point in this question of divine guidance which
demands our serious attention. We not unfrequently hear people speak
of "the finger of divine Providence" as something to be relied upon
for guidance. This may be only another mode of expressing the idea of
being guided by circumstances, which, we do not hesitate to say, is
very far indeed from being the proper kind of guidance for a
Christian.

No doubt, our Lord may and does, at times, intimate His mind and
indicate our path by His providence; but we must be sufficiently near
to Him to be able to interpret the providence aright, else we may find
that what is called "an opening of Providence" may actually prove an
opening by which we slip off the holy path of obedience. Surrounding
circumstances, just like our inward impressions, must be weighed in
the presence of God, and judged by the light of His Word, else they
may lead us into the most terrible mistakes. Jonah might have
considered it a remarkable providence to find a ship going to
Tarshish; but had he been in communion with God, he would not have
needed a ship. In short, the Word of God is the one grand test and
perfect touchstone for every thing--for outward circumstances and
inward impressions--for feelings, imaginations, and tendencies--all
must be placed under the searching light of holy Scripture and there
calmly and seriously judged. This is the true path of safety, peace,
and blessedness for every child of God.

It may, however, be said, in reply to all this, that we cannot expect
to find a text of Scripture to guide us in the matter of our
movements, or in the thousand little details of daily life. Perhaps
not; but there are certain great principles laid down in Scripture,
which, if properly applied, will afford divine guidance even where we
might not be able to find a particular text. And not only so, but we
have the fullest assurance that our God can and does guide His
children in all things. "The steps of a good man are ordered of the
Lord."--"The meek will He guide in judgment; and the meek will He
teach His way."--"I will guide thee with Mine eye." He can signify His
mind to us as to this or that particular act or movement. If not,
where are we? How are we to get on? How are we to regulate our
movements? Are we to be drifted hither and thither by the tide of
circumstances? Are we left to blind chance, or to the mere impulse of
our own will?

Thank God, it is not so. He can, in His own perfect way, give us the
certainty of His mind in any given case; and without that certainty we
should never move. Our Lord Christ (all homage to His peerless name!)
can intimate His mind to His servant as to where He would have him to
go and what He would have him to do; and no true servant will ever
think of moving or acting without such intimation. We should never act
or move in uncertainty. If we are not sure, let us be quiet and wait.
Very often it happens that we harass and fret ourselves about
movements that God would not have us make at all. A person once said
to a friend, "I am quite at a loss to know which way to turn." "Then,
don't turn at all," was the friend's wise reply.

But here an all-important moral point comes in, and that is, our whole
condition of soul. This, we may rest assured, has very much to do with
the matter of guidance. It is "the meek He will guide in judgment, and
teach His way." We must never forget this. If only we are humble and
self-distrusting--if we wait on our God, in simplicity of heart,
uprightness of mind, and honesty of purpose, He will most assuredly
guide us. But it will never do to go and ask counsel of God in a
matter about which our mind is made up, or our will is at work.

This is a fatal delusion. Look at the case of Jehoshaphat, in 1 Kings
xxii.--"It came to pass in the third year, that Jehoshaphat the king
of Judah came down to the king of Israel"--a sad mistake, to begin
with.--"And the king of Israel said unto his servants, 'Know ye that
Ramoth in Gilead is ours, and we be still, and take it not out of the
hand of the king of Syria?' And he said unto Jehoshaphat, 'Wilt thou
go with me to battle to Ramoth-gilead?' And Jehoshaphat said to the
king of Israel, 'I am as thou art, my people as thy people, my horses
as thy horses; and, (as we have it in 2 Chronicles xviii. 3,) we will
be with thee in the war.'"

Here we see that his mind was made up before ever he thought of asking
counsel of God in the matter. He was in a false position and a wrong
atmosphere altogether. He had fallen into the snare of the enemy,
through lack of singleness of eye, and hence he was not in a fit state
to receive or profit by divine guidance. He was bent on his own will,
and the Lord left him to reap the fruits of it; and but for infinite
and sovereign mercy, he would have fallen by the sword of the Syrians,
and been borne a corpse from the battle-field.

True, he did say to the king of Israel, "Inquire, I pray thee, at the
word of the Lord to-day." But where was the use of this, when he had
already pledged himself to a certain line of action? What folly for
any one to make up his mind and then go and ask for counsel! Had he
been in a right state of soul, he never would have sought counsel in
such a case at all; but his state of soul was bad, his position false,
and his purpose in direct opposition to the mind and will of God.
Hence, although he heard, from the lips of Jehovah's messenger, His
solemn judgment on the entire expedition, yet he took his own way, and
well-nigh lost his life in consequence.

We see the same thing in the forty-second chapter of Jeremiah. The
people applied to the prophet to ask counsel as to their going down
into Egypt; but they had already made up their minds as to their
course--they were bent on their own will. Miserable condition! Had
they been meek and humble, they would not have needed to ask counsel
in the matter; but they said unto Jeremiah the prophet, "'Let, we
beseech thee, our supplication be accepted before thee, and pray for
us unto the Lord _thy_ God [Why not say, The Lord _our_ God?] even for
all this remnant; (for we are left but a few of many, as thine eyes do
behold us:) that the Lord _thy_ God may show us the way wherein we may
walk, and the thing that we may do.' Then Jeremiah the prophet said
unto them, 'I have heard you; behold, I will pray unto the Lord _your_
God according to your words; and it shall come to pass, that
whatsoever thing the Lord shall answer you, I will declare it unto
you; I will keep nothing back from you.' Then they said to Jeremiah,
'The Lord be a true and faithful witness between us, if we do not even
according to all things for the which the Lord _thy_ God shall send
thee to us. Whether it be good, or whether it be evil [How could the
will of God be aught but good?], we will obey the voice of the Lord
our God, to whom we send thee; that it may be well with us, when we
obey the voice of the Lord our God.'"

Now, all this seemed very pious and very promising; but mark the
sequel. When they found that the judgment and counsel of God did not
tally with their will, "then spake ... _all the proud men_, saving
unto Jeremiah, 'Thou speakest falsely: the Lord our God hath not sent
thee to say, Go not into Egypt to sojourn there.'"

Here, the real state of the case comes clearly out. Pride and
self-will were at work; their vows and promises were false. "Ye
dissembled in your hearts," says Jeremiah, "when ye sent me unto the
Lord your God, saying, 'Pray for us unto the Lord our God; and
according unto all that the Lord our God shall say, so declare unto
us, and we will do it.'" It would have been all very well had the
divine response fallen in with their will in the matter; but inasmuch
as it ran counter, they rejected it altogether.

How often is this the case! The Word of God does not suit man's
thoughts; it judges them, it stands in direct opposition to his will,
it interferes with his plans, and hence he rejects it. The human will
and human reason are ever in direct antagonism to the Word of God, and
the Christian must refuse both the one and the other if he really
desires to be divinely guided. An unbroken will and blind reason, if
we listen to them, can only lead us into darkness, misery, and
desolation. Jonah _would_ go to Tarshish, when he ought to have gone
to Nineveh; and the consequence was that he found himself "in the
belly of hell," with "the weeds wrapped about his head." Jehoshaphat
_would_ go to Ramoth-gilead, when he ought to have been at Jerusalem;
and the consequence was that he found himself surrounded by the swords
of the Syrians. The remnant, in the days of Jeremiah, _would_ go into
Egypt, when they ought to have remained at Jerusalem; and the
consequence was that they died by the sword, by the famine, and by the
pestilence in the land of Egypt, "whither they _desired_ to go and to
sojourn."

Thus it must ever be. The path of self-will is sure to be a path of
darkness and misery; it cannot be otherwise: the path of obedience, on
the contrary, is a path of peace, a path of light, a path of blessing,
a path on which the beams of divine favor are ever poured in living
lustre. It may, to the human eye, seem narrow, rough, and lonely; but
the obedient soul finds it to be the path of life, peace, and moral
security. "The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth
more and more unto the perfect day." Blessed path! May the writer and
the reader ever be found treading it, with a steady step and earnest
purpose.

Before turning from this great practical subject of divine guidance
and human obedience, we must ask the reader to refer, for a few
moments, to a very beautiful passage in the eleventh chapter of Luke.
He will find it full of the most valuable instruction.

"The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is
single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is
evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed, therefore, that
the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body
therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be
full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee
light." (Ver. 34-36.)

Nothing can exceed the moral force and beauty of this passage. First
of all, we have the "single eye." This is essential to the enjoyment
of divine guidance. It indicates a broken will--a heart honestly fixed
upon doing the will of God. There is no under-current, no mixed
motive, no personal end in view. There is the one simple desire and
earnest purpose to do the will of God, whatever that will may be.

Now, when the soul is in this attitude, divine light comes streaming
in and fills the whole body. Hence it follows that if the body is not
full of light, the eye is not single; there is some mixed motive;
self-will or self-interest is at work; we are not upright before God.
In this case, any light which we profess to have is darkness; and
there is no darkness so gross or so terrible as that judicial darkness
which settles down upon the heart governed by self-will while
professing to have light from God. This will be seen in all its
horrors by and by in christendom, when "that Wicked shall be revealed,
whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall
destroy with the brightness of His coming; even him, whose coming is
after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,
and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish;
because _they received not the love of the truth_, that they might be
saved. And _for this cause_ God shall send them strong delusion, that
they should believe a lie; that they all might be damned who believed
not the truth, but _had pleasure in unrighteousness_." (2 Thess. ii.
8-12.)

How awful is this! How solemnly it speaks to the whole professing
church! How solemnly it addresses the conscience of both the writer
and the reader of these lines! Light not acted upon becomes
darkness.--"If the light which is in thee be darkness, how great is
that darkness!" But on the other hand, a little light honestly acted
upon is sure to increase; for "to him that hath shall more be given,"
and "the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more
and more unto the perfect day."

This moral progress is beautifully and forcibly set forth in Luke xi.
36.--"If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having _no part
dark_"--no chamber kept closed against the heavenly rays--no dishonest
reserve--the whole moral being laid open, in genuine simplicity, to
the action of divine light; then "the whole shall be full of light, as
when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light." In a word,
the obedient soul has not only light for his own path, but the light
shines out, so that others see it, like the bright shining of a
candle. "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your
good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."

We have a very vivid contrast to all this in the thirteenth chapter of
Jeremiah.--"Give glory to the Lord your God, _before He cause
darkness_, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and
while ye look for light, He turn it into the shadow of death, and make
it gross darkness." The way to give glory to the Lord our God is to
obey His Word. The path of duty is a bright and blessed path; and the
one who, through grace, treads that path will never stumble on the
dark mountains. The truly humble, the lowly, the self-distrusting,
will keep far away from those dark mountains, and walk in that blessed
path which is ever illuminated by the bright and cheering beams of
God's approving countenance.

This is the path of the just, the path of heavenly wisdom, the path of
perfect peace. May we ever be found treading it, beloved reader; and
let us never, for one moment, forget that it is our high privilege to
be divinely guided in the most minute details of our daily life. Alas!
for the one who is not so guided. He will have many a stumble, many a
fall, many a sorrowful experience. If we are not guided by our
Father's eye, we shall be like the horse or the mule, which have no
understanding, whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle,--like
the horse, impetuously rushing where he ought not, or the mule,
obstinately refusing to go where he ought. How sad for a Christian to
be like these! How blessed to move, from day to day, in the path
marked out for us by our Father's eye!--a path which the vulture's eye
hath not seen, or the lion's whelp trodden; the path of holy
obedience; the path in which the meek and lowly will ever be found, to
their deep joy, and the praise and glory of Him who has opened it for
them and given them grace to tread it.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the remainder of our chapter, Moses rehearses in the ears of the
people, in language of touching simplicity, the facts connected with
the appointment of the judges, and the mission of the spies. The
appointment of the judges, Moses here attributes to his own
suggestion: the mission of the spies was the suggestion of the people.
That dear and most honored servant of God felt the burden of the
congregation too heavy for him; and assuredly it was very heavy;
though we know well that the grace of God was amply sufficient for the
demand, and, moreover, that that grace could act as well by one man as
by seventy.

Still, we can well understand the difficulty felt by "the meekest man
in all the earth" in reference to the responsibility of so grave and
important a charge; and truly the language in which he states his
difficulty is affecting in the highest degree. We feel as though we
must quote it for the reader.

"And I spake unto you at that time, saying, 'I am not able to bear you
myself alone [Surely not; what mere mortal could? But God was there
to be counted upon for exigence of every hour.]: the Lord your God
hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of
heaven for multitude.' (The Lord God of your fathers make you a
thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as He hath
promised you.)" Lovely parenthesis! Exquisite breathing of a large and
lowly heart! "How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance, and your
burden, and _your strife_?"

Alas! here lay the secret of much of the "cumbrance" and the "burden."
They could not agree among themselves,--there were controversies,
contentions, and questions; and who was sufficient for these things?
what human shoulder could sustain such a burden? How different it
might have been with them! Had they walked lovingly together, there
would have been no cases to decide, and therefore no need of judges to
decide them. If each member of the congregation had sought the
prosperity, the interest, and the happiness of his brethren, there
would have been no "strife," no "cumbrance," no "burden." If each had
done all that in him lay to promote the common good, how lovely would
have been the result!

But, ah! it was not so with Israel in the desert; and, what is still
more humbling, it is not so in the Church of God, although our
privileges are so much higher. Hardly had the assembly been formed by
the presence of the Holy Ghost ere the accents of murmuring and
discontent were heard. And about what? About "neglect," whether
fancied or real. Whatever way it was, _self_ was at work. If the
neglect was merely imaginary, the Grecians were to blame; and if it
was real, the Hebrews were to blame. It generally happens, in such
cases, that there are faults on both sides; but the true way to avoid
all strife, contention, and murmuring is to put self in the dust and
earnestly seek the good of others. Had this excellent way been
understood and adopted, from the outset, what a different task the
ecclesiastical historian would have had to perform! But, alas! it has
not been adopted; and hence the history of the professing church, from
the very beginning, has been a deplorable and humiliating record of
controversy, division, and strife. In the very presence of the Lord
Himself, whose whole life was one of complete self-surrender, the
apostles disputed about who should be greatest. Such a dispute could
never have arisen had each known the exquisite secret of putting self
in the dust and seeking the good of others. No one who knows aught of
the true moral elevation of self-emptiness could possibly seek a good
or a great place for himself. Nearness to Christ so satisfies the
lowly heart, that honors, distinctions, and rewards are little
accounted of; but where self is at work, there you will have envy and
jealousy, strife and contention, confusion and every evil work.

Witness the scene between the two sons of Zebedee and their ten
brethren, in the tenth chapter of Mark. What was at the bottom of it?
Self. The two were thinking of a good place for themselves in the
kingdom, and the ten were angry with the two for thinking of any such
thing. Had each set self aside, and sought the good of others, such a
scene would never have been enacted,--the two would not have been
thinking about themselves, and hence there would have been no ground
for the "indignation" of the ten.

But it is needless to multiply examples. Every age of the church's
history illustrates and proves the truth of our statement that self
and its odious workings are the producing cause of strife, contention,
and division, always. Turn where you will--from the days of the
apostles down to the days in which our lot is cast, and you will find
unmortified self to be the fruitful source of strife and schism; and
on the other hand, you will find that to sink self and its interests
is the true secret of peace, harmony, and brotherly love. If only we
learn to set self aside, and seek earnestly the glory of Christ and
the prosperity of His beloved people, we shall not have many "cases"
to settle.

We must now return to our chapter.

"How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance, and your burden, and your
strife? Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your
tribes, and I will make them rulers over you. And ye answered me, and
said, 'The thing which thou hast spoken is good for us to do.' So I
took the chief of your tribes, _wise_ men, and _known_"--men fitted of
God, and possessing, because entitled to, the confidence of the
congregation--"and made them heads over you, captains over thousands,
and captains over hundreds, and captains over fifties, and captains
over tens, and officers among your tribes."

Admirable arrangement! If indeed it had to be made, nothing could be
better adapted to the maintenance of order than the graduated scale of
authority, varying from the captain of ten to the captain of a
thousand; the lawgiver himself at the head of all, and he in immediate
communication with the Lord God of Israel.

We have no allusion here to the fact recorded in Exodus xviii, namely,
that the appointment of those rulers was at the suggestion of Jethro,
Moses' father-in-law; neither have we any reference to the scene in
Numbers xi. We call the reader's attention to this as one of the many
proofs which lie scattered along the pages of Deuteronomy that it is
very far indeed from being a mere repetition of the preceding sections
of the Pentateuch. In short, this delightful book has a marked
character of its own, and the mode in which facts are presented is in
perfect keeping with that character. It is very evident that the
object of the venerable lawgiver, or rather of the Holy Ghost in him,
was to bring every thing to bear, in a moral way, upon the hearts of
the people, in order to produce that one grand result which is the
special object of the book from beginning to end, namely, a loving
obedience to all the statutes and judgments of the Lord their God.

We must bear this in mind if we would study aright the book which lies
open before us. Infidels, skeptics, and rationalists may impiously
suggest to us the thought of discrepancies in the various records
given in the different books; but the pious reader will reject, with a
holy indignation, every such suggestion, knowing that it emanates
directly from the father of lies, the determined and persistent enemy
of the precious revelation of God. This, we feel persuaded, is the
true way in which to deal with all infidel assaults upon the Bible.
Argument is useless, inasmuch as infidels are not in a position to
understand or appreciate its force; they are profoundly ignorant of
the matter. Nor is it merely a question of profound ignorance, but of
determined hostility; so that, in every way, the judgment of all
infidel writers on the subject of divine inspiration is utterly
worthless and perfectly contemptible. We would pity and pray for the
men, while we thoroughly despise and indignantly reject their
opinions. The Word of God is entirely above and beyond them. It is as
perfect as its Author, and as imperishable as His throne; but its
moral glories, its living depths, and its infinite perfections are
only unfolded to faith and need. "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of
heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

If we are only content to be as simple as a babe, we shall enjoy the
precious revelation of a Father's love, as given by His Spirit in the
holy Scriptures; but on the other hand, those who fancy themselves
wise and prudent--who build upon their learning, their philosophy, and
their reason--who think themselves competent to sit in judgment on the
Word of God, and hence on God Himself, are given over to judicial
darkness, blindness, and hardness of heart. Thus it comes to pass that
the most egregious folly and the most contemptible ignorance that man
can display will be found in the pages of those learned writers who
have dared to write against the Bible. "Where is the wise? where is
the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made
foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God
the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of
preaching to save them that believe." (1 Cor. i. 20, 21.)

"If any man will be wise, let him become a fool." Here lies the grand
moral secret of the matter. Man must get to the end of his own wisdom,
as well as of his own righteousness. He must be brought to confess
himself a fool ere he can taste the sweetness of divine wisdom. It is
not within the range of the most gigantic human intellect, aided by
all the appliances of human learning and philosophy, to grasp the very
simplest elements of divine revelation; and therefore, when
unconverted men, whatever may be the force of their genius or the
extent of their learning, undertake to handle spiritual subjects, and
more especially the subject of the divine inspiration of holy
Scripture, they are sure to exhibit their profound ignorance, and
utter incompetency to deal with the question before them. Indeed,
whenever we look into an infidel book, we are struck with the
feebleness of their most forcible arguments; and not only so, but in
every instance in which they attempt to find a discrepancy in the
Bible, we see only divine wisdom, beauty, and perfectness.

We have been led into the foregoing line of thought in connection with
the subject of the appointment of the elders, which is given to us in
each book according to the wisdom of the Holy Ghost, and in perfect
keeping with the scope and object of the book. We shall now proceed
with our quotation.

"And I charged your judges at that time, saying, 'Hear the causes
between your brethren, and _judge righteously_ between every man and
his brother, and _the stranger_ that is with him. _Ye shall not
respect persons_ in judgment; but _ye shall hear the small as well as
the great_; _ye shall not be afraid of the face of man_; for the
judgment is God's; and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it
unto me, and I will hear it.'"

What heavenly wisdom is here! what even-handed justice! what holy
impartiality! In every case of difference, all the facts on both sides
were to be fully heard and patiently weighed. The mind was not to be
warped by prejudice, predilection, or personal feeling of any kind.
The judgment was to be formed, not by impressions, but by
facts--clearly established, undeniable facts. Personal influence was
to have no weight whatever. The position and circumstances of either
party in the cause were not to be considered. The case must be
decided entirely upon its own merits. "Ye shall hear the small as well
as the great." The poor man was to have the same even-handed justice
meted out to him as the rich; the stranger as one born in the land. No
difference was to be allowed.

How important is all this! how worthy of our attentive consideration!
how full of deep and valuable instruction for us all! True, we are not
all called to be judges or elders or leaders; but the great moral
principles laid down in the above quotation are of the very utmost
value to every one of us, inasmuch as cases are continually occurring
which call for their direct application. Wherever our lot may be cast,
whatever our line of life or sphere of action, we are liable, alas! to
meet with cases of difficulty and misunderstanding between our
brethren,--cases of wrong, whether real or imaginary; and hence it is
most needful to be divinely instructed as to how we ought to carry
ourselves in respect to such.

Now, in all such cases, we cannot be too strongly impressed with the
necessity of having our judgment based on facts--all the facts on both
sides. We must not allow ourselves to be guided by our own
impressions, for we all know that mere impressions are most
untrustworthy. They may be correct, and they may be utterly false.
Nothing is more easily received and conveyed than a false impression,
and therefore any judgment based on mere impressions is worthless. We
must have solid, clearly established facts--facts established by two
or three witnesses, as Scripture so distinctly enforces. (Deut. xvii.
6; Matt. xviii. 16; 2 Cor. xiii. 1; 1 Tim. v. 19.)

But further, we must never be guided in judgment by an _ex parte_
statement. Every one is liable, even with the best intentions, to give
a color to his statement of a case. It is not that he would
intentionally make a false statement, or tell a deliberate lie; but
through inaccuracy of memory, or one cause or another, he may not
present the case as it really is. Some fact may be omitted, and that
one fact may so affect all the other facts as to alter their bearing
completely. "_Audi alteram partem_" ("Hear the other side") is a
wholesome motto. And not only hear the other side, but hear all the
facts on both sides, and thus you will be able to form a sound and
righteous judgment. We may set it down as a standing rule, that any
judgment formed without an accurate knowledge of all the facts is
perfectly worthless. "Hear the causes between your brethren, and judge
righteously between every man and his brother, and the stranger that
is with him." Seasonable, needed words, most surely, at all times, in
all places, and under all circumstances. May we apply our hearts to
them.

And how important the admonition in verse 17! "Ye shall not respect
persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great;
ye shall not be afraid of the face of man." How these words discover
the poor human heart! How prone we are to respect persons--to be
swayed by personal influence--to attach importance to position and
wealth--to be afraid of the face of man!

What is the divine antidote against all these evils? Just this: the
fear of God. If we set the Lord before us, at all times, it will
effectually deliver us from the pernicious influence of partiality,
prejudice, and the fear of men. It will lead us to wait humbly and
patiently on the Lord for guidance and counsel in all that may come
before us, and thus we shall be preserved from forming hasty and
one-sided judgments of men and things--that fruitful source of
mischief amongst the Lord's people in all ages.

       *       *       *       *       *

We shall now dwell for a few moments on the very affecting manner in
which Moses brings before the congregation all the circumstances
connected with the mission of the spies, which, like the appointment
of the judges, is in perfect keeping with the scope and object of the
book. This is only what we might expect. There is not, there could not
be, a single sentence of useless repetition in the divine volume;
still less could there be a single flaw, a single discrepancy, a
single contradictory statement. The Word of God is absolutely
perfect--perfect as a whole, perfect in all its parts. We must firmly
hold and faithfully confess this in the face of this infidel age.

We speak not of human translations of the Word of God, in which there
must be more or less of imperfection; though even here, we cannot but
be "filled with wonder, love, and praise" when we mark the way in
which our God so manifestly presided over our excellent English
translation, so that the poor man at the back of a mountain may be
assured of possessing, in his common English Bible, the revelation of
God to his soul. And most surely we are warranted in saying that this
is just what we might look for at the hands of our God. It is but
reasonable to infer that the One who inspired the writers of the Bible
would also watch over the translation of it; for inasmuch as He gave
it originally, in His grace, to those who could read Hebrew and Greek,
so would He not, in the same grace, give it in every language under
heaven? Blessed forever be His holy name, it is His gracious desire to
speak to every man in the very tongue in which he was born,--to tell
us the sweet tale of His grace--the glad tidings of salvation in the
very accents in which our mothers whispered into our infant ears those
words of love that went right home to our very hearts. (See Acts ii.
5-8.)

Oh that men were more impressed and affected with the truth and power
of all this, and then we should not be troubled with so many foolish
and unlearned questions about the Bible.

Let us now hearken to the account given by Moses of the mission of the
spies--its origin and its result. We shall find it full of most
weighty instruction, if only the ear be open to hear and the heart
duly prepared to ponder.

"And I commanded you at that time all the things which ye should do."
The path of simple obedience was plainly set before them. They had
but to tread it with an obedient heart and firm step. They had not to
reason about consequences, or weigh the results; all these they had
just to leave in the hands of God, and move on with steady purpose in
the blessed path of obedience.

"And when we departed from Horeb, we went through all that _great and
terrible wilderness_, which ye saw by the way of the mountain of the
Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us; and we came to
Kadesh-barnea. And I said unto you, 'Ye are come unto the mountain of
the Amorites, which the Lord our God doth give unto us. Behold, the
Lord thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as
the Lord God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be
discouraged.'"

Here was their warrant for entering upon immediate possession. The
Lord their God had given them the land and set it before them. It was
theirs by His free gift--the gift of His sovereign grace, in pursuance
of the covenant made with their fathers. It was His eternal purpose to
possess the land of Canaan through the seed of Abraham His friend.
This ought to have been enough to set their hearts perfectly at rest,
not only as to the character of the land, but also as to their
entrance upon it. There was no need of spies. Faith never wants to spy
what God has given. It argues that what He has given must be worth
having, and that He is able to put us in full possession of all that
His grace has bestowed. Israel might have concluded that the same
hand that had conducted them "through all that great and terrible
wilderness" could bring them in and plant them in their destined
inheritance.

So Faith would have reasoned; for it always reasons from God down to
circumstances, never from circumstances up to God. "If God be for us,
who can be against us?" This is Faith's argument, grand in its
simplicity and simple in its moral grandeur. When God fills the whole
range of the soul's vision, difficulties are little accounted of. They
are either not seen, or, if seen, they are viewed as occasions for the
display of divine power. Faith exults in seeing God triumphing over
difficulties.

But, alas! the people were not governed by faith on the occasion now
before us, and therefore they had recourse to spies. Of this Moses
reminds them, and that, too, in language at once most tender and
faithful.--"And ye came near unto me, _every one of you_, and said,
'We will send men before us, and they shall search us out the land,
and bring us word again, by what way we must go up, and into what
cities we shall come.'"

Surely, they might well have trusted God for all this. The One who had
brought them up out of Egypt, made a way for them through the sea,
guided them through the trackless desert, was fully able to bring them
into the land. But no; they would send spies, simply because their
hearts had not simple confidence in the true, the living, the almighty
God.

Here lay the moral root of the matter; and it is well that the reader
should thoroughly seize this point. True it is that, in the history
given in Numbers, the Lord told Moses to send the spies; but why?
Because of the moral condition of the people. And here we see the
characteristic difference and yet the lovely harmony of the two books.
Numbers gives us the public history, Deuteronomy the secret source of
the mission of the spies; and as it is in perfect keeping with Numbers
to give us the former, so it is in perfect keeping with Deuteronomy to
give us the latter. The one is the complement of the other. We could
not fully understand the subject had we only the history given in
Numbers. It is the touching commentary given in Deuteronomy which
completes the picture. How perfect is Scripture! All we need is the
eye anointed to see and the heart prepared to appreciate its moral
glories.

It may be, however, that the reader still feels some difficulty in
reference to the question of the spies. He may feel disposed to ask
how it could be wrong to send them when the Lord told them to do so.
The answer is, The wrong was not in the act of sending them when they
were told, but in the wish to send them at all. The wish was the fruit
of unbelief, and the command to send them was because of that
unbelief.

We may see something of the same in the matter of divorce in Matthew
xix.--"The Pharisees also came unto Him, tempting Him, and saying unto
Him, 'Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?'
And He answered and said unto them, 'Have ye not read, that He which
made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For
this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to
his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no
more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,
let not man put asunder.' They say unto Him, 'Why did Moses, then,
command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He
saith unto them, 'Moses _because of the hardness of your hearts_
suffered you to put away your wives; but from the beginning it was not
so.'"

It was not in keeping with God's original institution, or according to
His heart, that a man should put away his wife; but, in consequence of
the hardness of the human heart, divorce was permitted by the
lawgiver. Is there any difficulty in this? Surely not; unless the
heart is bent on making one. Neither is there any difficulty in the
matter of the spies. Israel ought not to have needed them: simple
faith would never have thought of them. But the Lord saw the real
condition of things and issued a command accordingly; just as, in
after ages, He saw the heart of the people bent on having a king, and
He commanded Samuel to give them one.--"And the Lord said unto Samuel,
'Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee;
for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected Me, that I
should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have
done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this
day, wherewith they have forsaken Me, and served other gods, so do
they also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: _howbeit
yet protest solemnly_ unto them, and shew them the manner of the king
that shall reign over them.'" (1 Sam. viii. 7-9.)

Thus we see that the mere granting of a desire is no proof whatever
that such desire is according to the mind of God. Israel ought not to
have asked for a king. Was not Jehovah sufficient? was not He their
King? could not He, as He had ever done, lead them forth to battle and
fight for them? Why seek an arm of flesh? why turn away from the
living, the true, the almighty God to lean on a poor fellow-worm? What
power was there in a king but that which God might see fit to bestow
upon him? None whatever. All the power, all the wisdom, all real good,
was in the Lord their God; and it was there for them--there at all
times, to meet their every need. They had but to lean upon His
almighty arm--to draw upon His exhaustless resources, to find all
their springs in Him.

When they did get a king, according to their hearts' desire, what did
he do for them? "All the people followed him trembling." The more
closely we study the melancholy history of Saul's reign, the more we
see that he was, almost from the very outset, a positive hindrance
rather than a help. We have but to read his history, from first to
last, in order to see the truth of this. His whole reign was a
lamentable failure, aptly and forcibly set forth in two glowing
sentences of the prophet Hosea,--"I gave thee a king in Mine anger,
and took him away in My wrath." In a word, he was the answer to the
unbelief and self-will of the people, and therefore all their
brilliant hopes and expectations respecting him were most lamentably
disappointed. He failed to answer the mind of God, and, as a necessary
consequence, he failed to meet the people's need. He proved himself
wholly unworthy of the crown and sceptre, and his ignominious fall on
Mount Gilboa was in melancholy keeping with his whole career.

Now, when we come to consider the mission of the spies, we find it
too, like the appointment of a king, ending in complete failure and
disappointment. It could not be otherwise, inasmuch as it was the
fruit of unbelief. True, God gave them spies, and Moses, with touching
grace, says, "The saying pleased me well; and I took twelve men of
you, one of a tribe,"--it was Grace coming down to the condition of
the people and consenting to a plan which was suited to that
condition; but this by no means proves that either the plan or the
condition was according to the mind of God. Blessed be His name, He
can meet us in our unbelief though He is grieved and dishonored by it.
He delights in a bold, artless faith; it is the only thing in all this
world that gives Him His proper place. Hence, when Moses said to the
people, "Behold, the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee: go up
and possess it, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath said unto thee;
fear not, neither be discouraged," what would have been the proper
response from them? Here we are: lead on, almighty Lord--lead on to
victory. Thou art enough. With Thee as our leader, we move on with
joyful confidence. Difficulties are nothing to Thee, and therefore
they are nothing to us. Thy word and Thy presence are all we want. In
these we find at once our authority and power. It matters not in the
least to us who or what may be before us: mighty giants, towering
walls, frowning bulwarks--what are they all in the presence of the
Lord God of Israel, but as withered leaves before the whirlwind? Lead
on, O Lord.

This would have been the language of Faith; but, alas! it was not the
language of Israel on the occasion before us. God was not sufficient
for them. They were not prepared to go up, leaning on His arm alone:
they were not satisfied with His report of the land; they would send
spies. Any thing for the poor human heart but simple dependence upon
the one living and true God. The natural man cannot trust God, simply
because he does not know Him. "They that know Thy name will put their
trust in Thee."

God must be known, in order to be trusted; and the more fully He is
trusted, the better He becomes known. There is nothing in all this
world so truly blessed as a life of simple faith; but it must be a
reality and not a mere profession. It is utterly vain to talk of
living by faith, while the heart is secretly resting on some
creature-prop. The true believer has to do exclusively with God. He
finds in Him all his resources. It is not that he undervalues the
instruments or the channels which God is pleased to use; quite the
reverse. He values them exceedingly; and cannot but value them, as the
means which God uses for his help and blessing; but he does not allow
them to displace God. The language of his heart is, "My soul, wait
thou only upon God; for my expectation is from Him. He _only_ is my
rock."

There is peculiar force in the word "only." It searches the heart
thoroughly. To look to the creature, directly or indirectly, for the
supply of any need, is, in principle, to depart from the life of
faith; and, oh! it is miserable work, this looking, in any way, to
creature-streams. It is just as morally degrading as the life of faith
is morally elevating. And not only is it degrading, but disappointing.
Creature-props give way, and creature-streams run dry; but they that
trust in the Lord shall never be confounded, and never want any good
thing. Had Israel trusted the Lord instead of sending spies, they
would have had a very different tale to tell; but spies they would
send, and the whole affair proved a most humiliating failure.

"And they turned, and went up into the mountain, and came unto the
valley of Eschol, and searched it out. And they took of the fruit of
the land in their hands, and brought it down unto us, and brought us
word again, and said, 'It is a good land which the Lord our God doth
give us.'" How could it possibly be otherwise when God was giving it?
Did they want spies to tell them that the gift of God was good?
Assuredly, they ought not. An artless faith would have argued thus:
Whatever God gives must be worthy of Himself; we want no spies to
assure us of this. But, ah! this artless faith is an uncommonly rare
gem in this world; and even those who possess it know but little of
its value or how to use it. It is one thing to talk of the life of
faith, and another thing altogether to live it,--the theory is one
thing, the living reality quite another. But let us never forget that
it is the privilege of every child of God to live by faith, and,
further, that the life of faith takes in every thing that the believer
can possibly need, from the starting-post to the goal of his earthly
career. We have already touched upon this important point; it cannot
be too earnestly or constantly insisted upon.

With regard to the mission of the spies, the reader will note with
interest the way in which Moses refers to it. He confines himself to
that portion of their testimony which was according to truth; he says
nothing about the ten infidel spies. This is in perfect keeping with
the scope and object of the book. Every thing is brought to bear, in a
moral way, on the conscience of the congregation. He reminds them that
they themselves had proposed to send the spies; and yet, although the
spies had placed before them the fruit of the land, and borne
testimony to its goodness, they would not go up.--"Notwithstanding ye
would not go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your
God." There was no excuse whatever. It was evident that their hearts
were in a state of positive unbelief and rebellion, and the mission of
the spies, from first to last, only made this fully manifest.

"And ye murmured in your tents, and said, 'Because the Lord hated
us'--a terrible lie on the very face of it!--'He hath brought us forth
out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites,
to destroy us.'" What a strange proof of hatred! How utterly absurd
are the arguments of unbelief! Surely, had He hated them, nothing was
easier than to leave them to die amid the brick-kilns of Egypt,
beneath the cruel lash of Pharaoh's taskmasters. Why take so much
trouble about them? Why those ten plagues sent upon the land of their
oppressors? Why, if He hated them, did He not allow the waters of the
Red Sea to overwhelm them as they had overwhelmed their enemies? Why
had He delivered them from the sword of Amalek? In a word, why all
these marvelous triumphs of grace on their behalf if He hated them?
Ah! if they had not been governed by a spirit of dark and senseless
unbelief, such a brilliant array of evidence would have led them to a
conclusion the direct opposite of that to which they gave utterance.
There is nothing beneath the canopy of heaven so stupidly irrational
as unbelief; and, on the other hand, there is nothing so sound, clear,
and logical as the simple argument of a childlike faith. May the
reader ever be enabled to prove the truth of this.

"And ye murmured in your tents." Unbelief is not only a blind and
senseless reasoner, but a dark and gloomy murmurer. It neither gets
to the right side of things nor the bright side of things. It is
always in the dark--always in the wrong, simply because it shuts out
God, and looks only at circumstances. They said, "Whither shall we go
up? our brethren have discouraged our hearts, saying, 'The people is
greater and taller than we'--but they were not greater than
Jehovah--'and the cities are great and _walled up to heaven_'--the
gross exaggeration of unbelief--'and moreover we have seen the sons of
the Anakims there.'"

Now, Faith would say, Well, what though the cities be walled up to
heaven, our God is above them, for He is _in_ heaven. What are great
cities or lofty walls to Him who formed the universe, and sustains it
by the Word of His power? What are Anakims in the presence of the
almighty God? If the land were covered with walled cities from Dan to
Beersheba, and if the giants were as numerous as the leaves of the
forest, they would be as the chaff of the threshing-floor before the
One who has promised to give the land of Canaan to the seed of
Abraham, His friend, for an everlasting possession.

But Israel had not faith, as the inspired apostle tells us in the
third chapter of Hebrews, "They could not enter in because of
unbelief." Here lay the great difficulty. The walled cities and the
terrible Anakims would soon have been disposed of had Israel only
trusted God. He would have made very short work of all these; but, ah!
that deplorable unbelief! it ever stands in the way of our blessing.
It hinders the outshining of the glory of God; it casts a dark shadow
over our souls, and robs us of the privilege of proving the
all-sufficiency of our God to meet our every need and remove our every
difficulty.

Blessed be His name, He never fails a trusting heart. It is His
delight to honor the very largest drafts that Faith hands in at His
exhaustless treasury. His assuring word to us ever is, "Be not afraid;
only believe." And again, "According to your faith be it unto you."
Precious soul-stirring words! may we all realize more fully their
living power and sweetness. We may rest assured of this, we can never
go too far in counting on God; it would be a simple impossibility. Our
grand mistake is that we do not draw more largely upon His infinite
resources. "Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldest believe, thou
shouldest see the glory of God?"

Thus we can see why it was that Israel failed to see the glory of God
on the occasion before us,--they did not believe. The mission of the
spies proved a complete failure. As it began, so it ended--in the most
deplorable unbelief. God was shut out: difficulties filled their
vision.

"They could not enter in." They could not see the glory of God.
Hearken to the deeply affecting words of Moses. It does the heart good
to read them. They touch the very deepest springs of our renewed
being.--"Then I said unto you, 'Dread not, neither be afraid of them.
The Lord your God which goeth before you, He shall fight for
you'--only think of God fighting for people! think of Jehovah as a Man
of war!--'He shall fight for you, according to all that He did for you
in Egypt before your eyes; and in the wilderness, where thou hast seen
how that _the Lord thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son_, in
all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place.' Yet in this
thing _ye did not believe the Lord your God_, who went in the way
before you, to search you out a place to pitch your tents in, in fire
by night, to show you by what way ye should go, and in a cloud by
day."

What moral force, what touching sweetness in this appeal! How clearly
we can see here, as indeed on every page of the book, that Deuteronomy
is not a barren repetition of facts, but a most powerful commentary on
those facts. It is well that the reader should be thoroughly clear as
to this. If in the book of Exodus or Numbers the inspired lawgiver
records the actual facts of Israel's wilderness-life, in the book of
Deuteronomy he comments on those facts with a pathos that quite melts
the heart. And here it is that the exquisite style of Jehovah's acts
is pointed out and dwelt upon with such inimitable skill and delicacy.
Who could consent to give up the lovely figure set forth in the words,
"As a man doth bear his son"? Here we have the style of the action.
Could we do without this? Assuredly not. It is the style of an action
that touches the heart, because it is the style that so peculiarly
expresses the heart. If the power of the _hand_ or the wisdom of the
_mind_ is seen in the _substance_ of an action, the love of the
_heart_ comes out in the _style_. Even a little child can understand
this, though he might not be able to explain it.

But, alas! Israel could not trust God to bring them into the land.
Notwithstanding the marvelous display of His power, His faithfulness,
His goodness, and loving-kindness, from the brick-kilns of Egypt to
the very borders of the land of Canaan, yet they did not believe. With
an array of evidence which ought to have satisfied any heart, they
still doubted. "And the Lord heard the voice of your words, and was
wroth, and sware, saying, 'Surely there shall not one of these men of
this evil generation see that good land, which I sware to give unto
your fathers, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh; he shall see it; and to
him will I give the land that he hath trodden upon, and to his
children, because he hath wholly followed the Lord.'"

"Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest
see the glory of God?" Such is the divine order. Men will tell you
that seeing is believing, but in the kingdom of God, believing is
seeing. Why was it that not a man of that evil generation was allowed
to see the good land? Simply because they did not believe in the Lord
their God. On the other hand, why was Caleb allowed to see and take
possession? Simply because he believed. Unbelief is ever the great
hindrance in the way of our seeing the glory of God.--"He did not many
mighty works there because of their unbelief." If Israel had only
believed, only trusted the Lord their God, only confided in the love
of His heart and in the power of His arm, He would have brought them
in and planted them in the mountain of His inheritance.

And just so is it with the Lord's people now. There is no limit to the
blessings which we might enjoy, could we only count more fully upon
God. "All things are possible to him that believeth." Our God will
never say, You have drawn too largely; you expect too much.
Impossible. It is the joy of His loving heart to answer the very
largest expectations of Faith.

Let us, then, draw largely. "Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it."
The exhaustless treasury of heaven is thrown open to Faith. "_All
things_ whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall
receive." "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth
to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.
But let him ask in faith, _nothing wavering_." Faith is the divine
secret of the whole matter--the main-spring of Christian life from
first to last. Faith wavers not, staggers not: Unbelief is ever a
waverer and a staggerer, and hence it never sees the glory of God,
never sees His power. It is deaf to His voice and blind to His
actings; it depresses the heart and weakens the hands; it darkens the
path and hinders all progress. It kept Israel out of the land of
Canaan for forty years; and we have no conception of the amount of
blessing, privilege, power and usefulness which we are constantly
missing through its terrible influence. If faith were in more lively
exercise in our hearts, what a different condition of things we should
witness in our midst. What is the secret of the deplorable deadness
and barrenness throughout the wide field of Christian profession? How
are we to account for our impoverished condition, our low tone, our
stunted growth? Why is it that we see such poor results in every
department of Christian work? Why are there so few genuine
conversions? Why are our evangelists so frequently cast down by reason
of the paucity of their sheaves? How are we to answer all these
questions? what is the cause? Will any one attempt to say it is not
our unbelief?

No doubt, our divisions have much to do with it; our worldliness, our
carnality, our self-indulgence, our love of ease. But what is the
remedy for all these evils? How are our hearts to be drawn out in
genuine love to all our brethren? By faith, that precious principle
"that worketh by love." Thus the blessed apostle says to the dear
young converts at Thessalonica, "Your faith groweth exceedingly." And
what then? "The love of every one of you all toward each other
aboundeth." Thus it must ever be. Faith puts us into direct contact
with the eternal spring of love in God Himself, and the necessary
consequence is that our hearts are drawn out in love to all who belong
to Him--all in whom we can, in the very feeblest way, trace His
blessed image. We cannot possibly be near the Lord and not love all
who in every place call upon His name out of a pure heart. The nearer
we are to Christ, the more intensely we must be knit, in true
brotherly love, to every member of His body.

Then as to worldliness, in all its varied forms, how is it to be
overcome? Hear the reply of another inspired apostle.--"For whatsoever
is born of God overcometh the world; and this is the victory that
overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the
world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" The new
man, walking in the power of faith, lives above the world, above its
motives, above its objects, its principles, its habits, its fashions;
he has nothing in common with it. Though in it, he is not of it; he
moves right athwart its current; he draws all his springs from heaven;
his life, his hope, his all is there, and he ardently longs to be
there himself when his work on earth is done.

Thus we see what a mighty principle faith is. It purifies the heart,
it works by love, and it overcomes the world. In short, it links the
heart in living power with God Himself, and this is the secret of true
elevation, holy benevolence, and divine purity. No marvel, therefore,
that Peter calls it "precious faith," for truly it is precious beyond
all human thought.

See how this mighty principle acted in Caleb, and the blessed fruit it
produced. He was permitted to realize the truth of those words,
uttered hundreds of years afterwards, "According to your faith be it
unto you." He believed that God was able to bring them into the land,
and that all the difficulties and hindrances were simply bread for
faith. And God, as He ever does, answered his faith. "Then the
children of Judah came unto Joshua in Gilgal; and Caleb the son of
Jephunneh the Kenezite said unto him, 'Thou knowest the thing that the
Lord said unto Moses the man of God concerning me and thee in
Kadesh-barnea. Forty years old was I when Moses the servant of the
Lord sent me from Kadesh-barnea to espy out the land; and I brought
him word again as it was in my heart'--the simple testimony of a
bright and lovely faith.--'Nevertheless my brethren that went up with
me made the heart of the people melt; but I wholly followed the Lord
my God. And Moses sware on that day, saying, Surely the land whereon
thy feet have trodden shall be thine inheritance, and thy children's
forever, because thou hast wholly followed the Lord my God. And now,
behold, the Lord hath kept me alive, _as He said_, these forty and
five years, ever since the Lord spake this word unto Moses, while the
children of Israel wandered in the wilderness; and now, lo, I am this
day fourscore and five years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I
was in the day that Moses sent me; as my strength was then, even so is
my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in. Now
therefore give me this mountain, whereof the Lord spake in that day;
for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there, and that the
cities were great and fenced: if so be the Lord will be with me, then
I shall be able to drive them out, as the Lord said.'"

How refreshing are the utterances of an artless faith! How edifying!
how truly encouraging! How vividly they contrast with the gloomy,
depressing, withering accents of dark, God-dishonoring unbelief! "And
Joshua blessed him, and gave unto Caleb the son of Jephunneh Hebron
for an inheritance. Hebron therefore became the inheritance of Caleb
the son of Jephunneh the Kenezite unto this day, because that he
wholly followed the Lord God of Israel." (Joshua xiv.) Caleb, like his
father Abraham, was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and we may
say, with all possible confidence, that inasmuch as faith ever honors
God, He ever delights to honor faith; and we feel persuaded that if
only the Lord's people could more fully confide in God, if they would
but draw more largely upon His infinite resources, we should witness a
totally different condition of things from what we see around us.
"Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest
see the glory of God?" Oh for a more lively faith in God--a bolder
grasp of His faithfulness, His goodness, and His power! Then we might
look for more glorious results in the gospel-field; more zeal, more
energy, more intense devotedness in the Church of God; and more of the
fragrant fruits of righteousness in the life of believers
individually.

We shall now, for a moment, look at the closing verses of our
chapter, in which we shall find some very weighty instruction. And,
first of all, we see the actings of divine government displayed in a
most solemn and impressive manner. Moses refers, in a very touching
way, to the fact of his exclusion from the promised land.--"Also the
Lord was angry with me _for your sakes_, saying, 'Thou also shalt not
go in thither.'"

Mark the words, "for your sakes." It was very needful to remind the
congregation that it was on their account that Moses, that beloved and
honored servant of the Lord, was prevented from crossing the Jordan,
and setting his foot upon the land of Canaan. True, "he spake
unadvisedly with his lips," but "they provoked his spirit" to do so.
This ought to have touched them to the quick. They not only failed,
through unbelief, to enter in themselves, but they were the cause of
his exclusion, much as he longed to see "that goodly mountain and
Lebanon." (See Ps. cvi. 32.)

But the government of God is a grand and awful reality. Let us never
for one moment forget this. The human mind may marvel why a few
ill-advised words, a few hasty sentences, should be the cause of
keeping such a beloved and honored servant of God from that which he
so ardently desired; but it is our place to bow the head in humble
adoration and holy reverence, not to reason or judge. "Shall not the
Judge of all the earth do right?" Most surely. He can make no mistake.
"Great and marvelous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true
are Thy ways, Thou King of nations." "God is greatly to be feared in
the assembly of the saints; and to be had in reverence of all them
that are about Him." "Our God is a consuming fire;" and "it is a
fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

Does it in any wise interfere with the action and range of the divine
government that we, as Christians, are under the reign of grace? By no
means. It is as true to-day as ever it was that "whatsoever _a man_
soweth, that shall he also reap." Hence, therefore, it would be a
serious mistake for any one to draw a plea from the freedom of divine
grace to trifle with the enactments of divine government. The two
things are perfectly distinct, and should never be confounded. Grace
can pardon--freely, fully, eternally; but the wheels of Jehovah's
governmental chariot roll on, in crushing power and appalling
solemnity. Grace pardoned Adam's sin; but Government drove him out of
Eden, to earn a living by the sweat of his brow, amid the thorns and
thistles of a cursed earth: Grace pardoned David's sin, but the sword
of Government hung over his house to the end,--Bathsheba was the
mother of Solomon, but Absalom rose in rebellion.

So with Moses; Grace brought him to the top of Pisgah and showed him
the land, but Government sternly and absolutely forbad his entrance
thither. Nor does it in the least touch this weighty principle to be
told that Moses, in his official capacity as the representative of the
legal system, could not bring the people into the land. This is quite
true; but it leaves wholly untouched the solemn truth now before us.
Neither in the twentieth chapter of Numbers nor in the first chapter
of Deuteronomy have we any thing about Moses in his official capacity.
It is himself personally we have before us, and he is forbidden to
enter the land because of having spoken unadvisedly with his lips.

It will be well for us all to ponder deeply, as in the immediate
presence of God, this great practical truth. We may rest assured that
the more truly we enter into the knowledge of grace, the more we shall
feel the solemnity of government, and entirely justify its enactments.
Of this we are most fully persuaded. But there is imminent danger of
taking up, in a light and careless manner, the doctrines of grace
while the heart and the life are not brought under the sanctifying
influence of those doctrines. This has to be watched against with holy
jealousy. There is nothing in all this world more awful than mere
fleshly familiarity with the theory of salvation by grace. It opens
the door for every form of licentiousness. Hence it is that we feel
the necessity of pressing upon the conscience of the reader the
practical truth of the government of God. It is most salutary at all
times, but particularly so in this our day, when there is such a
fearful tendency to turn the grace of our God into lasciviousness. We
shall invariably find that those who most fully enter into the deep
blessedness of being under the reign of grace, do also most
thoroughly justify the actings of divine government.

But we learn, from the closing lines of our chapter, that the people
were by no means prepared to submit themselves under the governmental
hand of God; in short, they would neither have grace nor government.
When invited to go up at once and take possession of the land, with
the fullest assurances of the divine presence and power with them,
they hesitated and refused to go. They gave themselves up completely
to a spirit of dark unbelief. In vain did Joshua and Caleb sound in
their ears the most encouraging words, in vain did they set before
their eyes the rich fruit of the goodly land, in vain did Moses seek
to move them by the most soul-stirring words; they would not go up
when they were told to go. And what then? They were taken at their
word. According to their unbelief, so was it unto them. "Moreover,
your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, and your children,
which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall
go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess
it. But as for you, turn you, and take your journey into the
wilderness, by the way of the Red Sea."

How sad! and yet how else could it be? If they would not, in simple
faith, go up into the land, there remained nothing for them but
turning back into the wilderness. But to this they would not submit.
They would neither avail themselves of the provisions of grace nor bow
to the sentence of judgment.--"Then ye answered and said unto me, 'We
have sinned against the Lord; we will go up and fight, according to
all that the Lord our God commanded us.' And when ye had girded on
every man his weapon of war, ye were ready to go up into the hill."

This looked like contrition and self-judgment; but it was hollow and
false. It is a very easy thing to _say_, "We have sinned." Saul said
it in his day; but he said it without heart, without any genuine sense
of what he was saying. We may easily gather the force and value of the
words "I have sinned" from the fact that they were immediately
followed by "_Honor me_ now, I pray thee, before the elders of my
people." What a strange contradiction!--"I have sinned," yet "Honor
me." If he had really felt his sin, how different his language would
have been! how different his spirit, style, and deportment! but it was
all a solemn mockery. Only conceive a man full of himself, making use
of a form of words, without one atom of true heart-feeling; and then,
in order to get honor for himself, going through the empty formality
of worshiping God. What a picture! Can any thing be more sorrowful?
How terribly offensive to Him who desires truth in the inward parts,
and who seeks those to worship Him who worship Him in spirit and in
truth! The feeblest breathings of a broken and contrite heart are
precious to God; but, oh, how offensive to Him are the hollow
formalities of a mere religiousness, the object of which is to exalt
man in his own eyes and in the eyes of his fellows! How perfectly
worthless is the mere lip-confession of sin where the heart does not
feel it! As a recent writer has well remarked, "it is an easy thing to
say, 'We have sinned,' but how often we have to learn that it is not
the quick, abrupt confession of sin which affords evidence that sin is
felt! It is rather a proof of hardness of heart. The conscience feels
that a certain act of confessing the sin is necessary, but perhaps
there is hardly any thing which more hardens the heart than the habit
of confessing sin without feeling it. This, I believe, is one of the
great snares of christendom from of old and now, that is, the
stereotyped acknowledgment of sin--the mere habit of hurrying through
a formula of confession to God. I dare say we have almost all done so,
without referring to any particular mode; for, alas! there is
formality enough; and without having written forms, the heart may
frame forms of its own, as we may have observed, if not known it, in
our own experience, without finding fault with other people."[4]

  [4] "Lectures Introductory to the Pentateuch," by W. Kelly.

Thus it was with Israel at Kadesh. Their confession of sin was utterly
worthless; there was no truth in it. Had they felt what they were
saying, they would have bowed to the judgment of God, and meekly
accepted the consequence of their sin. There is no finer proof of true
contrition than quiet submission to the governmental dealings of God.
Look at the case of Moses. See how he bowed his head to the divine
discipline. "The Lord," he says, "was angry with me for your sakes,
saying, 'Thou also shalt not go in thither. But Joshua the son of Nun,
which standeth before thee, he shall go in thither: encourage him; for
he shall cause Israel to inherit it.'"

Here, Moses shows them that they were the cause of his exclusion from
the land; and yet he utters not a single murmuring word, but meekly
bows to the divine judgment, not only content to be superseded by
another, but ready to appoint and encourage his successor. There is no
trace of jealousy or envy here. It was enough for that beloved and
honored servant if God was glorified and the need of the congregation
met. He was not occupied with himself or his own interests, but with
the glory of God and the blessing of His people.

But the people manifested a very different spirit. "We will go up and
fight." How vain! How foolish! When commanded by God and encouraged by
His true-hearted servants to go up and possess the land, they replied,
"Whither shall we go up?" and when commanded to turn back into the
wilderness, they replied, "We will go up and fight."

"And the Lord said unto me, 'Say unto them, Go not up, neither fight;
for I am not among you; lest ye be smitten before your enemies.' So I
spake unto you; and ye would not hear, but rebelled against the
commandment of the Lord, and went presumptuously up into the hill. And
the Amorites, which dwelt in that mountain, came out against you, and
chased you, as bees do, and destroyed you in Seir, even unto Hormah."

It was quite impossible for Jehovah to accompany them along the path
of self-will and rebellion; and, most assuredly, Israel, without the
divine presence, could be no match for the Amorites. If God be for us
and with us, all must be victory; but we cannot count on God if we are
not treading the path of obedience. It is simply the height of folly
to imagine that we can have God with us if our ways are not right.
"The name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous runneth into it
and is safe." But if we are not walking in practical righteousness, it
is wicked presumption to talk of having the Lord as our strong tower.

Blessed be His name, He can meet us in the very depths of our weakness
and failure, provided there be the genuine and hearty confession of
our true condition; but to assume that we have the Lord with us while
we are doing our own will and walking in palpable unrighteousness, is
nothing but wickedness and hardness of heart. "Trust in the Lord, and
do good"--this is the divine order; but to talk of trusting in the
Lord while doing evil, is to turn the grace of our God into
lasciviousness, and place ourselves completely in the hands of the
devil, who only seeks our moral ruin. "The eyes of the Lord run to and
fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong in the behalf
of them whose heart is perfect toward Him." When we have a good
conscience, we can lift up the head and move on through all sorts of
difficulties; but to attempt to tread the path of faith with a bad
conscience, is the most dangerous thing in this world. We can only
hold up the shield of faith when our loins are girt with truth, and
the breast covered with the breastplate of righteousness.

It is of the utmost importance that Christians should seek to maintain
practical righteousness, in all its branches. There is immense moral
weight and value in these words of the blessed apostle Paul, "Herein
do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offense
toward God and men." He ever sought to wear the breastplate, and to be
clothed in that white linen which is the righteousness of saints. And
so should we. It is our holy privilege to tread, day by day, with firm
step, the path of duty, the path of obedience, the path on which the
light of God's approving countenance ever shines; then, assuredly, we
can count on God, lean upon Him, draw from Him, find all our springs
in Him, wrap ourselves up in His faithfulness, and thus move on, in
peaceful communion and holy worship, toward our heavenly home.

It is not, we repeat, that we cannot look to God in our weakness, our
failure, and even when we have erred and sinned. Blessed be His name,
we can; and His ear is ever open to our cry. "If we confess our sins,
He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from
all unrighteousness." (1 John i.) "Out of the depths have I cried unto
thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let Thine ears be attentive to the
voice of my supplications. If Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O
Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou
mayest be feared." (Ps. cxxx.) There is absolutely no limit to divine
forgiveness, inasmuch as there is no limit to the extent of the
atonement, no limit to the virtue and efficacy of the blood of Jesus
Christ, God's Son, which cleanseth from all sin; no limit to the
prevalency of the intercession of our adorable Advocate, our great
High-Priest, who is able to save to the uttermost--right through and
through to the end--them that come unto God by Him.

All this is most blessedly true; it is largely taught and variously
illustrated throughout the volume of inspiration; but the confession
of sin, and the pardon thereof, must not be confounded with practical
righteousness. There are two distinct conditions in which we may call
upon God: we may call upon Him in deep contrition and be heard, or we
may call upon Him with a good conscience and an uncondemning heart and
be heard. But the two things are very distinct; and not only are they
distinct in themselves, but they both stand in marked contrast with
that indifference and hardness of heart which would presume to count
on God in the face of positive disobedience and practical
unrighteousness. It is this which is so dreadful in the sight of the
Lord, and which must bring down His heavy judgment. Practical
righteousness He owns and approves; confessed sin He can freely and
fully pardon; but to imagine that we can put our trust in God while
our feet are treading the path of iniquity, is nothing short of the
most shocking impiety. "Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The
temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord,
are these. For if ye throughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye
throughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbor; if ye
oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not
innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your
hurt: then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I
gave to your fathers, forever and ever. Behold, ye trust in lying
words, that cannot profit. Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery,
and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other
gods whom ye know not; and come and stand before Me in this house,
which is called by My name, and say, 'We are delivered to do all these
abominations?'" (Jeremiah vii.)

God deals in moral realities. He desires truth in the inward parts;
and if men will presume to hold the truth in unrighteousness, they
must look out for His righteous judgment. It is the thought of all
this that makes us feel the awful condition of the professing church.
The solemn passage which we have just culled from the prophet
Jeremiah, though bearing primarily upon the men of Judah and the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, has a very pointed application to
christendom. We find, in the third chapter of 2 Timothy, that all the
abominations of heathenism, as detailed in the close of Romans i, are
reproduced in the last days under the garb of the Christian
profession, and in immediate connection with "a form of godliness."
What must be the end of such a condition of things? Unmitigated wrath.
The very heaviest judgments of God are reserved for that vast mass of
baptized profession which we call christendom. The moment is rapidly
approaching when all the beloved and blood-bought people of God shall
be called away out of this dark and sinful, though so-called
"Christian world," to be forever with the Lord, in that sweet home of
love prepared in the Father's house. Then the "strong delusion" shall
be sent upon christendom--upon those very countries where the light of
a full-orbed Christianity has shone, where a full and free gospel has
been preached, where the Bible has been circulated by millions, and
where all, in some way or another, profess the name of Christ and call
themselves Christians.

And what then?--what is to follow this "strong delusion"? Any fresh
testimony? any further overtures of mercy? any further effort of
long-suffering grace? Not for christendom! not for the rejecters of
the gospel of God! not for Christless, Godless professors of the
hollow and worthless forms of Christianity! The heathen shall hear
"the everlasting gospel"--"the gospel of the kingdom;" but as for that
terrible thing, that most frightful anomaly called christendom--"the
vine of the earth," nothing remains but the wine-press of the wrath
of Almighty God, the blackness and darkness forever, the lake that
burneth with fire and brimstone.

Reader, these are the true sayings of God. Nothing would be easier
than to place before your eyes an array of Scripture proof perfectly
unanswerable: this would be foreign to our present object. The New
Testament, from cover to cover, sets forth the solemn truth above
enunciated; and every system of theology under the sun that teaches
differently will be found, on this point at least, to be totally
false.




CHAPTER II.


The closing lines of chapter i. show us the people weeping before the
Lord.--"And ye returned and wept before the Lord; but the Lord would
not hearken to your voice, nor give ear unto you. So ye abode in
Kadesh many days, according unto the days that ye abode there."

There was no more reality in their tears than in their words,--their
weeping was no more to be trusted than their confession. It is
possible for people to confess and shed tears without any true sense
of sin in the presence of God. This is very solemn. It is really
mocking God. We know, blessed forever be His name, that a truly
contrite heart is His delight. He makes His abode with such. "The
sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart,
O God, Thou wilt not despise." The tears that flow from a penitent
heart are more precious, by far, to God than the cattle upon a
thousand hills, because they prove that there is room in that heart
for Him; and this is what He seeks, in His infinite grace. He wants to
dwell in our hearts, and fill us with the deep, unspeakable joy of His
own most blessed presence.

But Israel's confession and tears at Kadesh were not real, and hence
the Lord could not accept them. The feeblest cry of a broken heart
ascends directly to the throne of God, and is immediately answered by
the soothing, healing balm of His pardoning love; but when tears and
confession stand connected with self-will and rebellion, they are not
only utterly worthless, but a positive insult to the divine Majesty.

Thus, then, the people had to turn back into the wilderness, and
wander there for forty years. There was nothing else for it. They
would not go up into the land, in simple faith, with God, and He would
not go up with them in their self-will and self-confidence; they had,
therefore, simply to accept the consequence of their disobedience. If
they would not enter the land, they must fall in the wilderness.

How solemn is all this! and how solemn is the Spirit's commentary upon
it in the third chapter of Hebrews! and how pointed and forcible the
application to us! We must quote the passage for the benefit of the
reader.--"Wherefore, as the Holy Ghost saith, 'To-day if ye will hear
His voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day
of temptation in the wilderness; when your fathers tempted Me, proved
Me, and saw My works forty years. Wherefore I was grieved with that
generation, and said, They do alway err _in heart_; and they have not
known My ways. So I sware in My wrath, They shall not enter into My
rest.' Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart
of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another
daily, while it is called 'To-day;' lest any of you be hardened
through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ,
if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end;
while it is said, 'To-day if ye will hear His voice, harden not your
hearts, as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard, did
provoke; howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses. But with
whom was He grieved forty years? was it not with them that had sinned,
whose carcases fell in the wilderness? And to whom sware He that they
should not enter into His rest, but to them that believed not? So we
see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. Let us therefore
fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into His rest, any of
you should seem to come short of it. For unto us was the gospel
preached, as well as unto them; but the word preached did not profit
them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard."

Here, as in every page of the inspired volume, we learn that unbelief
is _the_ thing that grieves the heart and dishonors the name of God;
and not only so, but it robs us of the blessings, the dignities, and
the privileges which infinite grace bestows. We have very little idea
of how much we lose, in every way, through the unbelief of our hearts.
Just as in Israel's case the land was before them, in all its
fruitfulness and beauty, and they were commanded to go and take
possession, but "they could not enter in because of unbelief;" so with
us--we fail to possess ourselves of the fullness of blessing which
sovereign grace has put within our reach. The very treasury of heaven
is thrown open to us, but we fail to appropriate. We are poor, feeble,
empty, and barren when we might be rich, vigorous, full, and fruitful.
We are blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in
Christ, but how shallow is our apprehension! how feeble our grasp! how
poor our thoughts!

Then, again, who can calculate how much we lose, through our unbelief,
in the matter of the Lord's work in our midst? We read in the gospel
of a certain place in which our blessed Lord could not do many mighty
works, because of their unbelief. Has this no voice for us? Do we too
hinder Him by unbelief? We shall perhaps be told by some that the Lord
will carry on His work irrespective of us or our faith; He will gather
out His own and accomplish the number of His elect spite of our
unbelief. Not all the power of earth and hell--men and devils combined
can hinder the carrying out of His counsels and purposes; and as to
His work, It is not by might nor by power, but by His Spirit. Human
efforts are in vain; and the Lord's cause can never be furthered by
Nature's excitement.

Now, all this is perfectly true; but it leaves wholly untouched the
inspired statement quoted above. "He could there do not many mighty
works, because of their unbelief." Did not those people lose blessing
through their unbelief? did they not hinder much good being done? We
must beware how we surrender our minds to the withering influence of a
pernicious fatalism, which, with a certain semblance of truth, is
utterly false, inasmuch as it denies all human responsibility and
paralizes all godly energy in the cause of Christ. We have to bear in
mind that the same One who, in His eternal counsels, has decreed the
end, has also designed the means; and if we, in the sinful unbelief of
our hearts and under the influence of one-sided truth, fold our arms
and neglect the means, He will set us aside and carry on His work by
other hands. He will work, blessed be His holy name, but we shall lose
the dignity, the privilege, and the blessing of being His instruments.

Look at that striking scene in the second of Mark. It most forcibly
illustrates the great principle which we desire to press upon all who
may read these lines. It proves the power of faith, in connection with
the carrying on of the Lord's work. If the four men whose conduct is
here set forth had suffered themselves to be influenced by a
mischievous fatalism, they would have argued that it was no use doing
any thing--if the palsied man was to be cured he would be cured,
without human effort. Why should they busy themselves in climbing up
on the house, uncovering the roof, and letting down the sick man into
the midst before Jesus? Ah, it was well for the palsied man and well
for themselves that they did not act on such miserable reasoning as
this. See how their lovely faith wrought. It refreshed the heart of
the Lord Jesus; it brought the sick man into the place of healing,
pardon, and blessing; and it gave occasion for the display of divine
power, which arrested the attention of all present and gave testimony
to the great truth that God was on earth, in the Person of Jesus of
Nazareth, healing diseases and forgiving sins.

Many other examples might be adduced, but there in no need. All
Scripture establishes the fact that unbelief hinders our blessing,
hinders our usefulness, robs us of the rare privilege of being God's
honored instruments in the carrying on of His glorious work, and of
seeing the operations of His hand and His Spirit in our midst; and, on
the other hand, that faith draws down power and blessing, not only for
ourselves, but for others,--that it both glorifies and gratifies God,
by clearing the platform of the creature and making room for the
display of divine power. In short, there is no limit to the blessing
which we might enjoy at the hand of our God if our hearts were more
governed by that simple faith which ever counts on Him, and which He
ever delights to honor. "According to your faith, be it unto you."
Precious soul-stirring words! May they encourage us to draw more
largely upon those exhaustless resources which we have in God. He
delights to be used, blessed forever be His holy name. His word to us
is, "Open thy mouth _wide_, and I will fill it." We can never expect
too much from the God of all grace, who has given us His only begotten
Son, and will with Him freely give us all things.

But Israel could not trust God to bring them into the land; they
presumed to go in their own strength, and, as a consequence, were put
to flight before their enemies. Thus it must ever be. Presumption and
faith are two totally different things: the former can only issue in
defeat and disaster; the latter, in sure and certain victory.

"Then we turned and took our journey into the wilderness, by the way
of the Red Sea, as the Lord spake unto me; and we compassed Mount Seir
many days." There is great moral beauty in the little word "_we_."
Moses links himself thoroughly with the people. He and Joshua and
Caleb had all to turn back into the wilderness, in company with the
unbelieving congregation. This might, in the judgment of nature, seem
hard; but we may rest assured it was good and profitable. There is
always deep blessing in bowing to the will of God, even though we may
not always be able to see the why and the wherefore of things. We do
not read of a single murmuring word from these honored servants of God
at having to turn back into the wilderness for forty years, although
they were quite ready to go up into the land. No; they simply turned
back. And well they might, when Jehovah turned back also. How could
they think of complaining, when they beheld the traveling-chariot of
the God of Israel facing round to the wilderness? Surely the patient
grace and long-suffering mercy of God might well teach them to accept,
with a willing mind, a protracted sojourn in the wilderness, and to
wait for the blessed moment of entrance upon the promised land.

It is a great thing always to submit ourselves meekly under the hand
of God. We are sure to reap a rich harvest of blessing from the
exercise. It is really taking the yoke of Christ upon us, which, as He
Himself assures us, is the true secret of rest. "Come unto Me, all ye
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke
upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye
shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is
light."

What was this yoke? It was absolute and complete subjection to the
Father's will. This we see in perfection in our adorable Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ. He could say, "Even so, Father; for so it seemed
good in Thy sight." Here was the point with Him--"good in Thy sight."
This settled every thing. Was His testimony rejected? did He seem to
labor in vain, and spend His strength for naught and in vain? What
then? "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth." It was all
right. Whatever pleased the Father, pleased Him. He never had a
thought or wish that was not in perfect consonance with the will of
God. Hence He, as a man, ever enjoyed perfect rest. He rested in the
divine counsels and purposes. The current of His peace was unruffled,
from first to last.

This was the yoke of Christ; and this is what He, in His infinite
grace, invites us to take upon us, in order that we too may find rest
unto our souls. Let us mark and seek to understand the words, "ye
shall _find_ rest." We must not confound the "rest" which _He gives_
with the "rest" which we find. When the weary, burdened, heavy-laden
soul comes to Jesus in simple faith, He gives rest--settled rest--the
rest which flows from the full assurance that all is done,--sins
forever put away; perfect righteousness accomplished, revealed, and
possessed; every question divinely and eternally settled; God
glorified; Satan silenced; conscience tranquillized.

Such is the rest which Jesus gives when we come to Him. But then we
have to move through the scenes and circumstances of our daily life.
There are trials, difficulties, exercises, buffetings, disappointments,
and reverses of all sorts. None of these can, in the smallest degree,
touch the rest which Jesus gives; but they may very seriously
interfere with the rest which we are to find. They do not trouble the
conscience, but they may greatly trouble the heart; they may make us
very restless, very fretful, very impatient. For instance, I want to
preach at Glasgow; I am announced to do so; but lo! I am shut up in a
sick-room in London. This does not trouble my conscience, but it may
greatly trouble my heart; I may be in a perfect fever of restlessness,
ready to exclaim, How tiresome! How terribly disappointing! Whatever
am I to do? It is most untoward!

And how is this state of things to be met? How is the troubled heart
to be tranquillized, and the restless mind to be calmed down? What do
I want? I want to find rest; how am I to find it? By stooping down and
taking Christ's precious yoke upon me--the very yoke which He Himself
ever wore, in the days of His flesh--the yoke of complete subjection
to the will of God. I want to be able to say, without one atom of
reserve--to say from the very depths of my heart, "Thy will, O Lord,
be done." I want such a profound sense of His perfect love to me, and
of His infinite wisdom in all His dealings with me, that I would not
have it otherwise if I could--yea, that I would not move a finger to
alter my position or circumstances, feeling assured that it is very
much better for me to be suffering on a sick-bed in London than
speaking on a platform in Glasgow.

Here lies the deep and precious secret of rest of heart, as opposed to
restlessness. It is the simple ability to thank God for every thing,
be it ever so contrary to our own will and utterly subversive of our
own plans. It is not a mere assent to the truth that "all things work
together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called
according to His purpose;" it is the positive sense--the actual
realization of the divine fact that the thing which God appoints is
the very best thing for us; it is perfect repose in the love, wisdom,
power, and faithfulness of the One who has graciously undertaken for
us in every thing, and charged Himself with all that concerns us for
time and eternity. We know that love will always do its very best for
its object. What must it be to have God doing His very best for us?
Where is the heart that would not be satisfied with God's best if only
it knows aught of Him?

But He must be known ere the heart can be satisfied with His will.
Eve, in the garden of Eden, beguiled by the serpent, became
dissatisfied with the will of God. She _wished_ for something which He
had forbidden, and this something the devil undertook to supply. She
thought the devil could do better for her than God. She thought to
better her circumstances by taking herself out of the hands of God and
placing herself in the hands of Satan. Hence it is that no unrenewed
heart can ever, by any possibility, rest in the will of God. If we
search the human heart to the bottom, if we submit it to a faithful
analysis, we shall not find so much as a single thought in unison with
the will of God--no, not one. And even in the case of the true
Christian--the child of God, it is only as he is enabled, by the grace
of God, to mortify his own will, to reckon himself dead, and to walk
in the Spirit, that he can delight in the will of God, and give thanks
in every thing. It is one of the very finest evidences of the new
birth to be able, without a single shade of reserve, to say, in
respect to every dealing of the hand of God, "Thy will be done." "Even
so, Father; for so it seemed good in Thy sight." When the heart is in
this attitude, Satan can make nothing of it. It is a grand point to be
able to tell the devil and to tell the world--tell them, not in word
and in tongue, but in deed and in truth; not merely with the lips, but
in the heart and the life--_I am perfectly satisfied with the will of
God_.

This is the way to find rest. Let us see that we understand it. It is
the divine remedy for that unrest, that spirit of discontent, that
dissatisfaction with our appointed lot and sphere, so sadly prevalent
on all hands. It is a perfect cure for that restless ambition so
utterly opposed to the mind and spirit of Christ, but so entirely
characteristic of the men of this world.

May we, beloved reader, cultivate, with holy diligence, that meek and
lowly spirit which is, in the sight of God, of great price, which bows
to His blessed will in all things, and vindicates His dealings, come
what may. Thus shall our peace flow as a river, and the name of our
Lord Jesus Christ shall be magnified in our course, character, and
conduct.

Ere turning from the deeply interesting and practical subject which
has been engaging our attention, we would observe that there are three
distinct attitudes in which the soul may be found in reference to the
dealings of God, namely, subjection, acquiescence, and rejoicing. When
the will is broken, there is subjection; when the understanding is
enlightened as to the divine object, there is acquiescence; and when
the affections are engaged with God Himself, there is positive
rejoicing. Hence we read, in the tenth chapter of Luke, "In that hour
Jesus _rejoiced_ in spirit, and said, '_I thank Thee_, O Father, Lord
of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it
seemed good in Thy sight.'" That blessed One found His perfect delight
in all the will of God. It was His meat and drink to carry out that
will, at all cost. In service or in suffering, in life or in death, He
never had any motive but the Father's will. He could say, "I do always
the things that please Him." Eternal and universal homage to His
peerless name!

We shall now proceed with our chapter.

"And the Lord spake unto me, saying, 'Ye have compassed this mountain
long enough; turn you northward.'"

The word of the Lord determined every thing. It fixed how long the
people were to remain in any given place, and it indicated with equal
distinctness whither they were next to bend their steps. There was no
need whatever for them to plan or arrange their movements: it was the
province and prerogative of Jehovah to settle all for them; it was
theirs to obey. There is no mention here of the cloud and the
trumpet; it is simply God's word and Israel's obedience.

Nothing can be more precious to a child of God, if only the heart be
in a right condition, than to be guided, in all his movements, by the
divine command. It saves a world of anxiety and perplexity. In
Israel's case, called as they were to journey through a great and
terrible wilderness, where there was no way, it was an unspeakable
mercy to have their every movement, their every step, their every
halting-place, ordered by on infallible Guide. There was no need
whatever for them to trouble themselves about their movements, no need
to inquire how long they were to stay in any given place, or where
they were to go next; Jehovah settled all for them. It was for them
simply to wait on Him for guidance, and to do what they were told.

Yes, reader, here was the grand point--a waiting and an obedient
spirit. If this were lacking, they were liable to all sorts of
questionings, reasonings, and rebellious activities. When God said,
"Ye have compassed this mountain long enough," had Israel replied, No;
we want to compass it a little longer: we are very comfortable here,
and we do not wish to make any change; or, again, if when God said,
"Turn you northward" they had replied, No; we vastly prefer going
eastward; what would have been the result? Why, they would have
forfeited the divine presence with them, and who could guide or help
or feed them then? They could only count on the divine presence with
them while they trod the path indicated by the divine command. If
they chose to take their own way, there was nothing for them but
famine, desolation, and darkness. The stream from the smitten rock,
and the heavenly manna, were only to be found in the path of
obedience.

Now, we Christians have to learn our lesson in all this--a wholesome,
needed, valuable lesson. It is our sweet privilege to have our path
marked out for us, day by day, by divine authority. Of this we are to
be most deeply and thoroughly persuaded. We are not to allow ourselves
to be robbed of this rich blessing by the plausible reasonings of
unbelief. God has promised to guide us, and His promise is yea and
Amen. It is for us to make our own the promise, in the artless
simplicity of faith. It is as solid and as real and as true as God can
make it. We cannot admit for a moment that Israel in the desert were
better off in the matter of guidance than God's heavenly people in
their passage through this world. How did Israel know the length of
the haltings or the line of their march? By the word of God. Are we
worse off? Far be the thought. Yea, we are better off by far than
they. We have the Word and Spirit of God to guide us. To us pertains
the high and holy privilege of walking in the footsteps of the Son of
God.

Is not this perfect guidance? Yes, thank God, it is. Hear what our
adorable Lord Jesus Christ saith to us,--"I am the light of the world;
he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the
light of life." Let us mark these words, "he that _followeth Me_." He
has left us "an example, that we should follow His steps." This is
living guidance. How did Jesus walk? Always and only by the
commandment of His Father. By that He acted; by that He moved; without
it He never acted, moved, or spoke.

Now, we are called to follow Him; and in so doing, we have the
assurance of His own word that we shall not walk in darkness, but
shall have the light of life. Precious words!--"_the light of life_."
Who can sound their living depths? who can duly estimate their worth?
"The darkness is past, and the true light now shineth," and it is for
us to walk in the full blaze of the light that shines along the
pathway of the Son of God. Is there any uncertainty, any perplexity,
any ground for hesitation here? Clearly not. How could there be if we
are following Him? It is utterly impossible to combine the two ideas.

And be it remarked here that it is not by any means a question of
having a literal text of Scripture for every movement or every act.
For example, I cannot expect to get a text of Scripture, or a voice
from heaven, to tell me to go to London or to Edinburgh; or how long I
am to stay when I go. How, then, it may be asked, am I to know where I
ought to go, or how long I am to stay? The answer is, Wait on God, in
singleness of eye and sincerity of heart, and He will make your path
as plain as a sunbeam. This was what Jesus did; and if we follow Him,
we shall not walk in darkness. "I will guide thee with Mine eye" is a
most precious promise; but in order to profit by it, we must be near
enough to Him to catch the movement of His eye, and intimate enough
with Him to understand its meaning.

Thus it is, in all the details of our daily life. It would answer a
thousand questions, and solve a thousand difficulties, if we did but
wait for divine guidance, and never attempt to move without it. If I
have not gotten light to move, it is my plain duty to be still. We
should never move in uncertainty. It often happens that we harass
ourselves about moving or acting, when God would have us to be still
and do nothing. We go and ask God about it, but get no answer; we
betake ourselves to friends for advice and counsel, but they cannot
help us, for it is entirely a question between our own souls and the
Lord. Thus we are plunged in doubt and anxiety. And why? Simply
because the eye is not single; we are not following Jesus, "the light
of the world." We may set it down as a fixed principle, a precious
axiom in the divine life, that if we are following Jesus, we shall
have the light of life. He has said it, and that is enough for faith.

Hence, then, we deem ourselves perfectly warranted in concluding that
the One who guided His earthly people in all their desert wanderings,
can and will guide His heavenly people now in all their movements and
in all their ways. But, on the other hand, let us see to it that we
are not bent on doing our own will, having our own way, and carrying
out our own plans. "Be ye not as the horse or as the mule, which have
no understanding, whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle,
lest they come near unto thee." Be it our one grand aim to walk in the
footsteps of that blessed One who pleased not Himself, but ever moved
in the current of the divine will, never acted without divine
authority; who, though Himself God over all, blessed forever, yet,
having taken His place as a man, on the earth, surrendered completely
His own will, and found His meat and His drink in doing the will of
His Father. Thus shall our hearts and minds be kept in perfect peace;
and we shall be enabled to move on, from day to day, with firm and
decided step, along the path indicated for us by our divine and
ever-present Guide, who not only knows, as God, every step of the way,
but who, as man, has trodden it before us, and left us an example that
we should follow His steps. May we follow Him more faithfully in all
things, through the gracious ministry of the Holy Ghost, who dwelleth
in us.

       *       *       *       *       *

We have now to invite the reader's attention to a subject of very deep
interest, and one which occupies a large place in Old-Testament
scripture, and is forcibly illustrated in the chapter which lies open
before us, namely, God's government of the world, and His wonderful
ordering of the nations of the earth. It is a grand and all-important
fact to keep ever before the mind that the One whom we know as "the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," and our God and Father,
takes a real, lively, personal interest in the affairs of
nations--that He takes cognizance of their movements and of their
dealings one with another.

True, all this is in immediate connection with Israel and the land of
Palestine, as we read in the thirty-second chapter of our book, and
eighth verse--a passage of singular interest and of great suggestive
power.--"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." Israel was and
shall yet be God's earthly centre; and it is a fact of the deepest
interest that, from the very outset, as we see in Genesis x, the
Creator and Governor of the world formed the nations and fixed their
bounds according to His own sovereign will, and with direct reference
to the seed of Abraham, and that narrow strip of land which they are
to possess, in virtue of the everlasting covenant made with their
fathers.

But in the second chapter of Deuteronomy, we find Jehovah, in His
faithfulness and righteousness, interfering to protect three distinct
nations in the enjoyment of their national rights, and that, too,
against the encroachments of His own chosen people. He says to Moses,
"Command thou the people, saying, 'Ye are to pass through the coast of
your brethren the children of Esau, which dwell in Seir; and they
shall be afraid of you: take ye good heed unto yourselves therefore:
meddle not with them; for I will not give you of their land, no, not
so much as a foot-breadth, because I have given Mount Seir unto Esau
for a possession. Ye shall buy meat of them for money, that ye may
eat; and ye shall also buy water of them for money, that ye may
drink.'"

Israel might imagine that they had nothing to do but seize upon the
lands of the Edomite; but they had to learn something very
different,--they had to be taught that the Most High is the Governor
amongst the nations--that the whole earth belongs to Him, and He
portions it out to one or another according to His good pleasure.

This is a very magnificent fact to keep before the mind. The great
majority of men think but little of it. Emperors, kings, princes,
governors, statesmen, take little account of it. They forget that God
interests Himself in the affairs of nations--that He bestows kingdoms,
provinces, and lands as He sees fit. They act, at times, as if it were
only a question of military conquest, and as if God had nothing to do
with the question of national boundaries and territorial possessions.
This is their great mistake. They do not understand the meaning and
force of this simple sentence, "_I have given_ Mount Seir unto Esau
for a possession." God will never surrender His rights in this
respect. He would not allow Israel to touch a single atom of Esau's
property. They were, to use a modern phrase, to pay ready cash for
whatever they needed, and go quietly on their way. Indiscriminate
slaughter and plunder were not to be thought of by the people of God.

And mark the lovely reason for all this. "For the Lord thy God hath
blessed thee in all the works of thy hand; He knoweth thy walking
through this great wilderness; these forty years the Lord thy God hath
been with thee, thou hast lacked nothing." They could well afford,
therefore, to let Esau alone, and leave his possessions untouched.
They were the favored objects of Jehovah's tender care. He took
knowledge of every step of their weary journey through the desert. He
had, in His infinite goodness, charged Himself with all their
necessities. He was going to give them the land of Canaan, according
to His promise to Abraham; but the self-same hand which was giving
them Canaan had given Mount Seir to Esau.

We see the same thing exactly in reference to Moab and Ammon.--"The
Lord said unto me, 'Distress not the Moabites, neither contend with
them in battle; for I will not give thee of their land for a
possession, because I have given Ar unto the children of Lot for a
possession.'" And again, "And when thou comest nigh over against the
children of Ammon, distress them not, nor meddle with them; for I will
not give thee of the land of the children of Ammon any possession,
because I have given it onto the children of Lot for a possession."

The possessions here alluded to had been, of old time, in the hands of
giants; but it was God's purpose to give up their territories to the
children of Esau and Lot, and therefore He destroyed these giants;
for who or what can stand in the way of the divine counsels? "That
also was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time;
... a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; but the Lord
destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in
their stead: as He did to the children of Esau which dwelt in Seir,
when He destroyed the Horims from before them; and they succeeded
them, and dwelt in their stead even unto this day." (Ver. 20-23.)

Hence, then, Israel were not permitted to meddle with the possessions
of any of these three nations--the Edomites, Ammonites, and Moabites;
but in the very next sentence, we see another thing altogether in the
case of the Amorites.--"Rise ye up, take your journey, and pass over
the river Arnon: behold, I have given into thine hand Sihon the
Amorite, king of Heshbon, and his land: begin to possess it, and
contend with him in battle."

The great principle, in all these varied instructions to Israel, is
that God's word must settle every thing for His people. It was not for
Israel to inquire why they were to leave the possessions of Esau and
Lot untouched, and to seize upon those of Sihon. They were simply to
do what they were told. God can do as He pleases. He has His eye upon
the whole scene: He scans it all. Men may think He has forsaken the
earth, but He has not, blessed be His name. He is, as the apostle
tells us in his discourse at Athens, "Lord of heaven and earth;" and
"He hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all
the face of the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed,
and the bounds of their habitations." And, further, "He hath appointed
a day, in the which He will judge the habitable earth [οἰκουμένην]
in righteousness, by that Man whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath
given assurance [given proof] unto all, in that He hath raised Him
from the dead."

Here we have a most solemn and weighty truth, to which men of all
ranks and conditions would do well to take heed. God is the Sovereign
Ruler of the world. He giveth no account of any of His matters. He
puts down one and sets up another. Kingdoms, thrones, governments, are
all at His disposal. He acts according to His own will in the ordering
and arrangement of human affairs. But, at the same time, He holds men
responsible for their actings in the various positions in which His
providence has placed them. The ruler and the ruled, the king, the
governor, the magistrate, the judge--all classes and grades of men
will have, sooner or later, to give account to God. Each one, as if he
were the only one, will have to stand before the judgment-seat of
Christ, and there review his whole course, from first to last. Every
act, every word, every secret thought, will there come out with awful
distinctness. There will be no escaping in a crowd. T

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