DEUTERONOMY 9
“Hear, Israel! Thou art to pass over the Jordan this day”, is a remarkable introduction to such a chapter as this. For it is a chapter which brings out in dark colours what the people had been according to the flesh. If God fulfils His promises and brings to pass His purpose it is not in any wise because His people are better than others according to the flesh. If “the land” is possessed it is by the power of God (verse 3), and because God will deal with everything that is opposed to the knowledge of Himself, and will fulfil the word sworn to the fathers (verses 4, 5). Entrance into the land is the fruit of divine power fulfilling divine purpose. Israel according to flesh was utterly unsuited to inherit the promises, and this is equally true of ourselves, and God would have us to know it. Hence the instruction of chapter 9.
There is a marked contrast between chapters 8 and 9, we have not read a word in chapter 8 about the wickedness or failure of the people in the wilderness;
“all the way” is regarded as having been come through by Jehovah’s leading and care. But in chapter 9 the stiffneckedness, provokings, and rebellion of the past are strongly brought out. The history of the people of God — our history — has, indeed, made manifest that it is not for our righteousness, or for the uprightness of our heart, that we enter in to possess the land. See verses 4 - 6. If it is brought about that we do so it is through God’s faithfulness to His own promises and purposes. As to ourselves according to flesh we are a stiffnecked people; on our side we have again and again “provoked Jehovah to wrath”. And this not merely as unconverted persons. “From the day that thou didst depart out of the land of Egypt, until ye came to this place, ye have been rebellious against Jehovah” (verse 7); this is since conversion, as we should say.
Every phase of our history has proved what we are according to flesh. It is humbling to think of it all, and God would have His people thoroughly humbled as to what they are in themselves. My flesh at the present time is the same flesh that has been the source of every bit of weakness, or wilfulness, or unbelief, or departure that has ever manifested itself in me. If I think of it I must feel that lowliness and self-distrust become me, and that dependence upon God is my only security.
At Horeb, within forty days of the covenant being made, they so provoked Jehovah to wrath that they owed their preservation from destruction entirely to the intercession of Moses. “And Jehovah listened unto me also at that time ... and I prayed for Aaron also at the same time”. Perhaps none of us have yet realised how much we owe to the intercessory service of Christ, to His advocacy. Not one of us would have continued in the divine way, or would have been brought through [p. 102] in any measure of faithfulness to the present time, but for that blessed service of faithful love. We thank Him for His finished work, but let us never forget His unfinished work — His ceaseless service as the Intercessor and Advocate! It is true of each believer, as well as of Peter, that Christ prays for him that his faith fail not. Every one who enters the land owes it to the faithfulness of God, and to the intercession and advocacy of Christ. There has been quite enough in our past history to convince us that it must be so. And this leaves all credit and praise where it rightly belongs. All the glory belongs to God.
If Israel quickly turned aside from the covenant, it reminds us how quickly we, in Galatia, changed from Him that called us in Christ’s grace to a different gospel! Horeb, Taberah, Massah, Kibroth-hattaavah, Kadesh-barnea have all had their corresponding features in our history. How soon we left our first love, and allowed idolatry and evil teaching! All that has been in the past history of the church, and in its present condition also, shews what we are. And have we not personally seen many sad cases of breakdown and departure, the fruit of worldliness and self-will, which have all exposed our own natural tendencies? If the failures of our brethren have not filled us with a deep sense of what we are they have not rightly affected us. And, to come more closely home, have we not discovered in our own hearts much unwatchfulness, lack of the spirit of prayer, lukewarmness as to Christ and His precious interests, hankerings after the world, a seeking of our own things, not the things of Jesus Christ, risings of fleshly pride and various lusts? And all these things have been known to God even if they have not been exposed to our brethren We are to “Remember” and “forget not”, all these things.
[p. 103] This is a very different remembrance to that of chapter 8: 2, but the same Voice calls us to both, and it is the Voice of the One who has not failed to exercise an unwearying intercession and advocacy which has prevailed on our behalf. “And I fell down before Jehovah, as at the first, forty days and forty nights, — I ate no bread and drank no water, — because of all your sin which ye had sinned, in doing what is evil in the eyes of Jehovah, to provoke him to anger” (verse 18). The Mediator of the covenant becomes the Advocate for those who so quickly depart from it! But for the intercession and advocacy of Christ where should we have been?
It is touching to see that our blessed Intercessor prays according to what is true in the mind of God concerning His people. If we lose all sense of it, He does not. Moses speaks of them as “Thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness ... . Remember thy servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ... . They are indeed thy people and thine inheritance, which thou broughtest out with thy great power and with thy stretched-out arm”. When the people of God behave badly we are apt to forget that they are redeemed, but Christ never does. It is impossible that what the flesh is, even in the people of God, could invalidate the divine redemption that has been wrought, or the election and calling of God, or the ancient promises, or the fact that God’s people “are indeed thy people and thine inheritance”.
But, the very fact that these things cannot be invalidated, and that they form the very basis of Christ’s precious advocacy and intercession, necessitates the judgment of that in which the flesh has manifested itself. “And I took your sin, the calf which ye had made, and burned it with fire, and crushed it, and ground it very small, until it became fine dust; and I cast the [p. 104] dust thereof into the brook that flowed down from the mountain” (verse 31). The people had to drink it: the bitterness of anything idolatrous is always brought home to us. Indeed the intercession of Christ is often, I believe, answered by the discipline of God in a corrective way. “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities” (Amos 3: 2). “Be not deceived: God is not mocked; for whatever a man shall sow, that also shall he reap. For he that sows to his own flesh, shall reap corruption from the flesh; but he that sows to the Spirit, from the Spirit shall reap eternal life” (Galatians 6: 7, 8).