Bible Commentaries

Remarkable Things

Deuteronomy 1:6

This is the first remarkable thing in the opening chapter of the fifth book of Moses. God knows, then, how long we have been here or there. Our downsitting and our uprising, our going out and our coming in, are of consequence to him who made us. He keeps the time: he knows when we have been "long enough" in one place. He does not always consult us, saying, in terms of affectionate inquiry,—Would you desire to tarry longer here?—would it suit you to remain another year? Sometimes God seems to come down upon our life with a precision and an imperativeness which make us feel how little, after all, we have to do with what we call our own concerns. A blessed life, surely, and most sweet, and altogether tender and restful, is it when we wait patiently upon God and tarry until we receive his reply, and then go out and do his bidding with both hands and with the unbroken consent of the entire mind. From the way in which he speaks to us, God seems to take it for granted that no question will arise upon his instructions. Surely in the very method of approaching us, a tribute is paid to our noblest qualities. The Lord comes with an instruction as if we had been waiting for it; he tells us when to move and when to rest, as if our eyes were continually directed unto him in attitude of attention and expectation; his speeches are answers, not to questions but to prayers; his commands are not merely edicts, but translations of the spirit which he assumes to be in us. Infinite is the wisdom of God.

"Ye have dwelt long enough in this mount." We may get tired even of mountains. Wherever we live, we need change. The first happy impulse often commits itself to the doctrine that we could live here or there alway. God does not take us at our word, because he knows that our word is but a speech of ignorance or of impulse: it does but give utterance to the emotion of the moment; Deuteronomy 1:27). That is human nature. Do not suppose that human nature is incapable of baseness so complete. Whatever can be imagined can be done. The fiction is often the larger truth. We say, on reading sundry books,—These are inventions. So they are; but inventions are possibilities: inventions may be the larger facts. We must see in others where we are ourselves. We cannot separate ourselves from others, saying,—We should not have done so. Said a lady in the hearing of Thomas Carlyle,—"Do you think, Deuteronomy 1:19

There are some things that are never to be forgotten in life. There are troubles whose shadow is as long as life's whole day. The troubles are past, but the shadow is still there; the victory is won, but the battle seems still to be booming in the ear. We are miles and miles away from the desert—yea, half a continent and more—but who can ever forget "all that great and terrible wilderness"? Yet life would be poor without it. The memory of that wilderness chastens our joy, touches our prayer into a more solemn and tender music, and makes us more valiant, because more hopeful, in reference to all the future. There cannot be two such wildernesses in the whole universe. If there were another like it, it would not be equal to it, because our experience in the first would enable us to go through the second with a firmer step and a more cheerful courage. We are the better for the wildernesses of life, and we cannot escape them. No evasion is possible here. Apparent evasions have been accomplished, but they have been apparent only. You cannot get your children through life without passing through the wilderness at some time and in some way; and you are foolish when you think you can pay for their passage by some other and happier road. There is only one road—rough, cavernous, uphill, where the wind has full scope for its roar and cold assault; and we are the better for passing through it patiently, steadily, and religiously. I know it may seem hard to you that that dear little boy should have to go through the wilderness; but he must go. I know how you take him into your arms and say that you have had to suffer and he shall not but you cannot help it; and if you postpone his suffering too long, he will suffer the more for the postponement. There is a chronology of discipline; there is a time-bill written in heaven, and hung down from the skies, by which all chastisement is administered, all discipline is undergone, all burdens are imposed, and all strength is given. It is folly, it is cruelty, to suppose that you can find out some road in which there is no wilderness—some method of education in which there is no chastisement. Oh, that great and terrible wilderness! It comes after us now like a ghost; it darkens upon our vision in the dream-time; we repeat the journey in the night season, and feel all the sleet and cold, all the dreariness and helplessness of the old experience. How many a joy we have forgotten, how many a glad laugh has left no memory behind it, how many a salutation has been but a beating of the air and an instant descent into oblivion; but we cannot play with "that great and terrible wilderness." The very pronouncement of the words makes us cold. It was "great," it was "terrible," it was a "wilderness." But, rightly trodden, its barren sand made us men; taken in the right spirit, we thought we saw in it the beginning of the garden of God.

Every man does not pass through exactly the same wilderness; it is not needful that he should do so in order to confirm this doctrine—viz, that in all lives there are great dreary spaces that we would gladly jump—great and terrible wildernesses that we approach with fear and traverse almost with despair.

There was that great business wilderness that you passed through—when all was loss and no profit; when your friends forgot you, or when their smile was not followed by any substantial blessing; when you dare not tell the tale to your wife at night, because you had no wish to make her cry and bear a heavier burden. You were not dishonest, nor deceptive; you were not guilty of a culpable secretiveness in keeping the state of affairs from her; you wanted to tread the winepress alone. You said it would be better to-morrow, and then you would tell her all about it. You listened to her laugh and said, "Poor thing! did she but know how near the bankruptcy court is that laugh would be choked in her young throat." But you would not tell you were passing through a great and terrible wilderness. I am not prepared to blame men who wish to keep the length and the terribleness of the desert as secrets in their own hearts; that secretiveness may be born of love and tender sympathy and real manliness. You remember the time when you had no night, if night be time for sleep; when you had no day, if day be time for joy and triumph. You remember the time when you dare hardly look into your own books, they were such blanks. You have not forgotten your old companions—Poverty that walked on the right hand, and Friendlessness that walked on the left. It was a great and terrible wilderness. If you could have talked of it as a wilderness, you might have found some garden patches in it, but you dare not tell exactly where you were—everything was so dark, so hard, so sterile; no hint of green thing, no sound of bird-music, no glint of subtle and unexpected light. The wilderness was great and terrible; but it is past. You are in fairer lands now; your property is accumulating, your speculations are paying, your adventures are crowned with success. Do not forget the wilderness: other men are in it. The man sitting next to you now, with an apparently jocund face and bright eye, is in the very middle of the wilderness which you have escaped. "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ;" bear them prayerfully, sympathetically. It is not needful that you should know them in name and detail, in date and actual locality; you must fall back on the solemn and perpetual facts of human history, and always consider that your comrades, friends, companions, neighbours, are undergoing chastisements and bearing burdens the very memory of which is no small part of your own individual training and spiritual education. Let prayer be made for all men. Never offer a prayer without thinking of the heavy-laden, the broken-hearted, the wounded spirit, the tired wayfarer.

Yours, on the other hand, was no business trouble, it was a long and painful affliction—the more painful because of a conscious strength that could not assert itself. Oh, that is pain! to know that you have great strength and yet to be pinned down, as it were, at one point. It is humiliating, it makes one impatient. We could sometimes almost tear the pinned filament away and claim opportunity for the exercise of our conscious power. To stop there and to say: "It is right that I should so suffer, be so mocked; Father in heaven, not my will, but thine be done"—that is the last accomplishment of our spiritual culture. When we can say Deuteronomy 1:32

Note the possibility of partial faith.—There may be very considerable credence in divine promises, yet there may be one weak point.—In this as in other respects the law holds good: he that offends in one point offends in all.—Faith is no stronger than its weakest point.—We must not expect to realise divine blessings if we bring a crippled faith to the exercise.—It is sometimes supposed that faith is one Deuteronomy 1:39

God's purposes are not to be broken off.—Wherever they appear to be broken off it is only in detail and momentarily: the great line still stretches onward towards the completion of the eternal decree.—It is not in the power of man to frustrate the purposes of heaven.—Why do the heathen rage?—The generations are one as to the divine intention, though multitudinous in their particular details; the divine thought, therefore, cannot be judged here and now or at any particular break in history, it must be judged when all is completed and sealed.—The first shall be last and the last shall be first.—Those who are little now may be great hereafter,—The little are not condemned because of the sins of their ancestors.—Our fathers have failed, but that is no reason why we should not succeed.—God's regard is continually fixed upon character, and never upon mere personality.—Heaven is for the good and for none else, so all wealth, power, fame go for nothing in view of that grand realisation.—There is always a promise laid up for humanity. Better things are yet to grow upon the earth, and fairer lights are yet to shine on human history.—The future has a continual influence upon the present.—Posterity ought to do something for contemporaries, where the mind is alive to the influence of actions and the certainty of harvest coming after seedtime.