‘ALL THE WAY’
‘These forty years.’
Deuteronomy 8:2
This is the lesson of our lives. This is God’s training, not only for the Jews, but for us. We read these verses to teach us that God’s ways with man do not change; that His fatherly hand is over us, as well as over the people of Israel; that their blessings are our blessings, their dangers are our dangers; that, as St. Paul says, all these things are written for our example.
I. ‘He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger.’—How true to life that is; how often there comes to a man, at his setting out in life, a time which humbles him, when his fine plans fail him, and he has to go through a time of want and struggle. His very want and struggles and anxiety may be God’s help to him. If he be earnest and honest, patient and God-fearing, he prospers; God brings him through. God holds him up, strengthens and refreshes him, and so the man learns that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
II. There is another danger which awaits us, as it awaited those old Jews: the danger of prosperity in old age. It is easy for a man who has fought the battle with the world, and conquered more or less, to say in his heart, as Moses feared that those old Jews would say,’ My might and the power of my wit hath gotten me this wealth,’ and to forget the Lord his God, who guided him and trained him through all the struggles and storms of early life, and so to become vainly confident, worldly, and hard-hearted, undevoted and ungodly, even though he may keep himself respectable enough, and fall into no open sin.
III. Old age itself is a most wholesome and blessed medicine for the soul of man.—Anything is good which humbles us, makes us feel our own ignorance, weakness, nothingness, and cast ourselves on that God in whom we live, and move, and have our being, and on the mercy of that Saviour who died for us on the Cross, and on that Spirit of God from whose holy inspiration alone all good desires and good actions come.
—Canon Kingsley.
Illustration
(1) ‘Historically these years are almost a blank. The Israelites made a prolonged stay at Kadesh ( Deuteronomy 1:45). Then journeying first of all towards the Red Sea ( Deuteronomy 2:1), they moved about from place to place in the great Wilderness of Wandering as circumstances demanded. A list of their encampments during this period of detention is given in Numbers 33:16-36, but scarcely one of the places mentioned can be located with certainty. The years thus spent were years of strict discipline but not of exceptional privation ( Deuteronomy 8:4). Through the necessity of defending themselves against hostile tribes the youthful generation learned to face danger and hopefully to await the future.’
(2) ‘If you have thus travelled in the way, there will be many uses of the memory. You will know more of God at the conclusion of your journey than you did at the commencement. You will behold both the goodness and the severity of God: the severity which punishes sin wherever it is to be found; the goodness which itself provides a Substitute and finds a Saviour.’
(3) ‘The religious temperament of the Lancashire people came out strongly, and was well illustrated, by an incident which happened towards the close of the cotton famine. The mills in one village had been stopped for months, and the first waggon-load of cotton which arrived before they recommenced seemed to the people like the olive branch, “newly plucked off,” which told of the abating waters of the Deluge. The waggon was met by the women, who hysterically laughed and cried, and hugged the cotton-balls as if they were dear old friends, and then ended by singing that grand old hymn—a great favourite with Lancashire people—“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.” ’
(4) ‘The last word of Charles I. to Juxon when he laid his head on the block at Whitehall (whatever he meant by it), was “Remember.” That may be said to be Moses’ parting word, again and again repeated, to his people. They were to remember from what they had come, through what experiences they had passed, what God had been to them, and done for them. The want and the supply, the danger and the deliverance, the terror and the triumph, were all, if they could read them rightly, a revelation of God to them, and there was to be a constant recollection of these things, as a means of preserving and deepening in them the sense of dependence upon Him.’