Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2345
“And you shall remember all the way which the LORD your God led you these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you, and to prove you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments, or no.” Deuteronomy 8:2.
These are the words of Moses, the man of God, when he was near his departure. They make up a part of what has been called his “swan song.” He did not often sing—he did give us at least one song, but when he came near the time he was to die, like the fabled swan, he began to sing—and most sweetly did he sing!
Notice the intense earnestness of this address. It is, every way, that of a saint who has spent his life in loving anxiety for the people committed to his charge. And the ruling passion is very strong upon him to the last. He knows that he is about to depart from them, for he has had his marching orders—“Get you up into the top of Pisgah and lift up your eyes westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold it with your eyes, for you shall not go over this Jordan.” Knowing that he is about to leave the people, he is very anxious about their welfare and he addresses them with this deep earnestness.
Note, also, how practical his earnestness is—it is concerning their lives that he speaks to the children of Israel. He knows how liable they are to fall into the superstitions of their neighbors, how likely they, who made a golden calf and angered the Lord and His servant, will be to turn, again, unto graven images and strange gods. And so he beseeches them, as with his dying breath, to observe all the Commandments of the Lord and to cleave closely unto Jehovah, their God.
Then, like an old man, again, for this is a point that would be sure to come out in a venerable, soon-departing saint, he talks about the past. He has been preserved by his God for 120 years and, during the last 40 of those years, he has been king in Jeshurun and the Lord has made him ride upon the high places of the earth in the wonders that he has worked by His hand. And he cannot help reminding the people that the marvels God has accomplished must not be dead things to them, not things to be laid by like mummies wrapped up in sere clothes—and hidden away in a sarcophagus—but they must be living mercies to them, still, since they came from a living God and they must continue to produce in them living gratitude and living service. I like this thought—it seems to teach us how, as we mature in life, we shall become more and more anxious about practical holiness and we shall, more and more, draw the argument for it from our own experience of the goodness of God. With the Psalmist, we shall cry, “Bind the sacrifice with cords, even with cords to the horns of the altar,” and what cords can be stronger than the cords of love and the bands of a man, even gratitude at the remembrance of all the loving kindness of the Lord? I cannot imagine that the iron chains of necessity, or the steel bonds of fear can ever hold men so firmly to duty and virtue as these silken bands of thankfulness at the recollection of all the Lord’s Grace and mercy to us. May we feel these love-bands about us as we meditate upon these words of Israel’s great leader!
I invite you, then, first of all, to consider the leading of God which is to be remembered. And, secondly, the objectives of that leading, which also are well worthy of remembrance.
I. First, then, consider THE LEADING TO BE REMEMBERED—“You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God led you these forty years in the wilderness.” Some of you can knock out that word, “forty,” and put in, “fifty,” or, “sixty.” I know some here who can say, “seventy!” I can even see some who can put in, “eighty,” years, not of life, merely, but of Divine leading, for there are some, here, who have been led of the Lord, in their own experience, no less a space than that longest period I have named!
The first thing that we note, here, about the children of Israel is that they had a God. And the first thing for us to remember, tonight, is that God ever had anything at all to do with us, that we ever had a God. “You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God led you.” We have not been led by a stranger, but by our own God! And we have not been led by a human shepherd, but the Lord has been our Shepherd! Though He counts the number of the stars and calls them all by their names, and leads the hosts of Heaven in their marches through illimitable space, yet has He not disdained to lead us! Unhappy men, who have no God! Saints are poor, sometimes, but they do not know the poverty of the man who has no God! No gold, no silver—this is an inconvenience, but no God—this is death in the midst of life! Glory be to God, there are some of His people who, though they have barely sufficient food and raiment, and though scant is the portion of their lot below, yet they have a God—and he who has a God is rich to all the intents of bliss! There are infinite mines of unfailing wealth just beneath his feet—he has but to dig a little to find all that he needs in God. It is a blessed thing to have God when you have all things beside, and to find God in all things, but it is an equally blessed thing to have God when you have nothing else and to find all things in God! There is but a slight change in the order of the words and I think there is not much change in the real sense as to true happiness.