Deuteronomy 6:11

‘WHAT HAST THOU THAT THOU HAST NOT RECEIVED?’

‘Houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not.’

Deuteronomy 6:11

In the Chapter s of Deuteronomy which we read to-day, Moses is doing for the Israelites as a nation what we might do for ourselves or for others in respect of our smaller lives—helping them to anticipate experience, to paint beforehand their coming responsibilities, lest they should fall short of them. This is to be one feature of their life and their responsibility, and it is one that finds echoes and analogies in our own experience.

I. They were not pioneers, going to break up virgin soil, to make homes in a wilderness where human life had never yet found resting-place. They were going to inherit the toil of others.—It is a condition which if faced and realised must bring with it some solemn thoughts. In their case there was an additional consideration. They were not succeeding, as by the law of nature all succeed, to the heritage of predecessors. Their wealth was to be founded on the disgrace and disinheritance of others. God was dispossessing in their favour an ancient people with the accumulated stores of a long civilisation. Moses warns them of the dangers of this position. It imposes upon them high obligations; but it might not only fail to make them conscious of these, it might actually minister to base impulses, to pride, ingratitude, sloth. As a protection against these, he exhorts them always to remember how and why they had been put in possession of these good things—not for their own merits. Three thoughts are suggested to the Israelites as to this bountiful provision of comforts and instruments, which they were to find ready to their hands in the Promised Land.

1. They were all God’s undeserved gifts to them. They had not earned them any more than they had provided them for themselves. They must receive them as at His hand, to be used in His service.

2. So far as they were owed at all, they were owed not to them but to pious ancestors, another item added to the debt not to be discharged, another link to bind generations together.

3. They had changed hands once because their possessors had misused them. The new possessors could not remember this without having the reflection forced home to them that they too held God’s gifts on trust and might forfeit them.

II. Is not this a type and parable of all human life?—‘Houses full of good things, which thou filledst not, wells digged, which thou diggedst not.’

What a tiny fraction of all that makes life pleasant or interesting or beautiful is what any one generation adds to it by its own energy or deserves by its own virtues. We are the heirs of the ages. And yet how hard we find it to put ourselves back and realise that what comes to us so easily, comforts that we can hardly imagine foregoing, knowledge that seems to us elementary, ideas which seem to lie at the bottom of all our thinking, are the earnings of the hard toil, brave effort, patient thought, of years long gone by. ‘Others,’ very many others, ‘have laboured,’ the forgotten workers and thinkers of long centuries, and ‘we have entered into their labours.’

And yet once more—of our individual lives. There after all is the root. It is there that the mischief is first found, the pride and ingratitude and sloth which mar afterwards the life of societies.

What have we ‘that we did not receive’? And why did we receive it? ‘Houses full of good things that ye filled not!’

Think especially of the greatest and most sacred of human societies to which we were admitted in the first hours of our life—taken into Christ’s arms, blessed by Him, given back to our earthly parents to be brought up for Him as sons of God, with all the riches of His grace around us, the sense of forgiveness, the promise of His help, perpetual access to Him in prayer and communion, the comfort of His word, the sure hope of His Resurrection.

Why has God given us all these blessings? Not for anything that we have done; for be our lives good or bad, the gifts are, most of them, antecedent to any conduct of our own that could explain them.

But surely we do owe them in great part, under His good providence, to the prayers and efforts and high unselfish purposes of those who have gone before us—to loving, faithful, Christian parents, to ‘founders and benefactors,’ not in the narrower senses, but in the larger sense, of all who in their time and sphere have worked for the permanent good of men, and done their part, large or small, in building up the fabric of ordered and Christian life.

Dean Wickham.

Illustration

‘Moses exhausts all his resources in the way of persuasion. His one grand object is to move the people to obedience; and as he argues from their past history, their present blessed condition, and what God has shown him of their future, it seems sometimes as though, were it possible, he would, in his great yearning over them, lift the whole nation in his arms up to the high spiritual level on which he himself lived. But they cannot rise to it. They are like children beside Moses. When he would seek to have them realise the high privilege and honour of being God’s chosen ones; when he pours forth his spiritual ardour and impassioned appeal, there is no response—his words fall on dull ears. Times and again he is compelled to fall back to the dead level of material considerations, which alone will move them.’