This chapter requires little in the way of note or exposition. It contains a most solemn and affecting record of the blessings of obedience on the one hand, and the terrible consequences of disobedience on the other. Had Israel walked in obedience they would have been invincible. “I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land. And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. For I will have respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and establish My covenant with you. And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of the new. And I will set My tabernacle among you: and My soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be My people. I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondsmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright” (vss. 6-13).
The presence of God should ever have been their shield and buckler. No weapon formed against them could prosper. But then the divine presence was only to be enjoyed by an obedient people. Jehovah could not sanction by His presence disobedience or wickedness. The uncircumcised nations around might depend upon their prowess and their military resources. Israel had only the arm of Jehovah to depend upon, and that arm could never be stretched forth to shield unholiness or disobedience. Their strength was to walk with God in a spirit of dependence and obedience. So long as they walked thus, there was a wall of fire round about them to protect them from every enemy and every evil.
But, alas, Israel failed altogether! Notwithstanding the solemn and appalling picture placed before their eyes in verses 14-33 of this chapter, they forsook the Lord and served other gods, and thus brought upon themselves the sore judgments threatened in this section, the bare record of which is sufficient to make the ears tingle. Under the heavy weight of these judgments they are suffering at this very hour. Scattered and peeled, wasted and outcast, they are the monuments of Jehovah’s inflexible truth and justice. They read aloud to all the nations of the earth a most impressive lesson on the subject of the moral government of God; a lesson which it would be profitable for these nations to study deeply, yea, and a lesson which it would be salutary for our own hearts to ponder likewise.
We are very prone to confound two things which are clearly distinguished in the word, namely, God’s government and God’s grace. The evils which result from this confusion are various. It is sure to lead to an enfeebled sense of the dignity and solemnity of government and of the purity, fullness, and elevation of grace. It is quite true that God in government reserves to Himself the sovereign right to act in patience, long-suffering and mercy; but the exercise of these attributes in connection with His throne of government must never be confounded with the unconditional actings of pure and absolute grace.
The chapter before us is a record of divine government, and yet in it we find such clauses as the following: “If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against Me, and that also they have walked contrary unto Me; and that I also have walked contrary unto them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: then will I remember My covenant with Jacob, and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land. The land also shall be left of them, and shall enjoy her sabbaths, while she lieth desolate without them; and they shall accept of the punishment of their iniquity: because, even because they despised My judgments, and because their soul abhorred My statutes. And yet, for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break My covenant with them: for I am the Lord their God. But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the heathen, that I might be their God: I am the Lord” (vss. 40-45).
Here we find God in government meeting in long-suffering mercy the very earliest and faintest breathings of a broken and penitent spirit. The history of the judges and of the kings presents many instances of the exercise of this blessed attribute of the divine government. Again and again the soul of Jehovah was grieved for Israel (Judg. 10:1616And they put away the strange gods from among them, and served the Lord: and his soul was grieved for the misery of Israel. (Judges 10:16)), and He sent them one deliverer after another, until at length there remained no hope, and the righteous claims of His throne demanded their expulsion from that land which they were wholly incompetent to keep.
All this is government. But by-and-by Israel will be brought into possession of the land of Canaan on the ground of unqualified and unchangeable grace — grace exercised in divine righteousness through the blood of the cross. It will not be by works of law, nor yet by the institutions of an evanescent economy, but by that grace which reigns “through righteousness... by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Wherefore, they shall never again be driven forth from their possession. No enemy shall ever molest them. They shall enjoy undisturbed repose behind the sure shield of Jehovah’s favor. Their tenure of the land will be according to the eternal stability of divine grace and the efficacy of the blood of the everlasting covenant. “They shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation.”
May the Spirit of God lead us into more enlarged apprehensions of divine truth, and endow us with a greater capacity to try the things that differ, and rightly to divide the word of truth!