From this we see two things-that a penalty once incurred is never revoked or annulled, and that the Lord has a method of bringing in something in the place of the forfeited blessing.
The inquiry then arises-what is the quality of this substituted good thing?
The general knowledge which we have of God might answer, that it is something far better than what has been lost or forfeited; for He is infinitely love and infinitely power. And the history of redemption might be pleaded as affirming this-because the glory bye-and-bye will be better than Eden at the beginning.
But beside these two witnesses, we get a voice from Moses on Pisgah, which utters, if I listen to it right, the same great truth.
Moses made the ascent from the plains of Moab up to the highest eminency of which the Lord had spoken to him. But now, a good and a glorious thing appears, of which there had been no notice whatever in the Lord’s previous words to him. The Lord Himself, and no less, not even Gabriel, the messenger on so many happy occasions, comes to bear him company, and to be his guide through the mystic scene, which now lies beneath him. It is an hour of more than human delight. It is divine joy which Moses now tastes, joy in which the Lord Himself shares. With His own finger, as it were, the Lord points out to His servant, all the promised land on either side of the river. He traces it from eastern Gilead across the Jordan to Dan, and from Naphtali in the north, through Ephraim and Manasseh, down to Judah-then westward to the furthest sea, and to the south from Judah to Zoar. And his guide is his interpreter. The Lord tells him the divine history of the land that it is the land of covenant and of promise, the land of the chosen of God. This was exceeding the promise. The half of this has not been told him, for he not only sees the land, but has it all shown to him and described to him by the Lord Himself. It became “a holy hill” to him, a mount of transfiguration. Pisgah was more to Moses, than Tabor was to Peter, James, and John. They, on Tabor, were below the Lord’s place, surveying, as above them, those upper regions of glory into which he entered-he, on Pisgah, was on an equal elevation with the Lord, surveying, as beneath him, those lower regions of blessing, at which, with equal eye he and his companion-Lord were gazing.