Deuteronomy 8:1,2

Remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee.

Remembering and forgetting

(with Philippians 3:13):--Thou shalt remember, and thou shalt forget. We need a good memory and a good forgettery.

I. First, then, the past; we are to remember it. The old lawgiver sought to make the nation’s great history sacramental. Much might well be forgotten. The old rebellions, the old murmurings, their lapses from loyalty, and the heavy, hard work they had made for their great spiritual leader--they had better break with much of this unsavoury record. But they must remember the lessons of history. Unfortunate is the man or the nation without the memories of great providences, that has never known the discipline of heaven. We are never to forget the past: the fact that we are the product of the past, that the ground on which we stand is made soil; that if you sink your pick into it you cut into the layer of forty or fifty centuries; that all our sowing is upon the prepared ground and top dressing contributed by all the older periods. God has been working and good men have been building at all the substructures that are the foundations on which we start the work we have in hand. Providence is not the mintage of yesterday, and God has not been waiting for us to appear on the scene before He set His plough in the furrow. We had better not be too ready to quit with the past. Foundations have been made for us; we are ourselves the creations of the past, and most of the instruments with which we work are contributions from the past. We may easily exaggerate our abilities and resources, especially our originality. We are a little inflated just now with our physical resources. The greatest moulders of men, the greatest teachers of the world are not any of them above ground, when we come to think of it. The mightiest forces that reach forth their transforming energies to mould human life come to us from sources back of all contemporary history. For our greatest literature, for the most truly constructive, forces for shaping history, and for our religion we must go to the past. The history of the great peoples of the world is a veritable mine of wealth if we could better afford to throw all our gold into the sea than to lose our past and the past of the divinely led nations among whom God has been so visibly working. We had better remember all the way the Lord hath led us,--remember it because it has made us what we are, and because God’s footprints are visible upon it. God has been here before us; has been forehanded with us; has wrought at the basis of all our individual and national life.

II. The first word is remember, the second is forget. We are to remember the past and we are to forget it. The made soil on which we sow is an inheritance from the past, but we are to add a new layer of soil on which others are to sow. Our best use of the past, Phillips Brooks tells us, is to get a great future out of it. Many people and many nations overwork their past, give themselves in excess to retrospection, build the sepulchres of the fathers, and give themselves to criticism of their own age and time. They behold God and nature through older eyes alone, forgetting the individual relation of each personal soul. “Why,” asks Emerson, “should we not enjoy our original relation to the universe and demand our own works, laws, and worship? The past is for us, but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the present.” And so one way of forgetting the past and leaving the things that are behind is to go and do better things. Good precedents are good, but we ought to improve on them. We ought to swing clear of the mistakes of predecessors, and do a better work than they did. We need in the interests of personal growth to forget many things which we insist on loading ourselves with. It is very human to blunder, but it is a Divine thing in imperfect people not to repeat blunders. Past sins too, if repented of, are good things to forget. And old sorrows we had better leave with the dead yesterdays: the tomorrow of hope is already kindling in the east. Even old successes had better be left with the past, if we are making them the limit of responsibility and the end of duty. The future should be reserved in all eases for constructive work: for new undertakings, for larger tasks, for better fidelities. Learn new things; do new things every week you live. Our life stagnates when poised on the older standards of duty or achievement. (S. H. Howe, D. D.)

Looking backward

I. The divinely governed life. “Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness.” Now, it is not difficult for us to believe in the Divine government when we look up into the midnight sky. Ten thousand times ten thousand stars moving in their orbits, and pursuing from age to age their march of light, compel us to believe that this is a divinely governed cosmos. It is also easy to believe in the government of God when we look upon this world in which we live. This planet is evidently a rational and ordered sphere. The form of the argument for design may change, but the conviction of design persists in the consciousness of mankind. They feel that at the back of earth and sea is an Architect building with a plan; an Artist working out a distinct ideal and purpose; a Dramatist fitting perfectly each act of the drama. Looking on the beautiful world, it is easy to believe this, it is almost impossible to disbelieve it. Again, it is not difficult to believe in the Divine government when you consider the history of the human race. It is as difficult to resist the idea of order, progress, purpose in contemplating the course of human history as it is to resist that idea in surveying nature. There is a doctrine known as the doctrine of purposelessness, a doctrine that maintains the inconsequence and irrationality of nature and history, but it has found few defenders. And, once more, it is not difficult to believe in a Divine government when we mark the career of extraordinary men. When we consider Cyrus and Caesar, St. Paul and Luther, it is easy to believe in the divinity that shapes men’s ends. The real difficulty of believing in a supernatural order arises when we begin to think of a Divine government ordering the individual lives of such obscure and mediocre beings as we are. Any unbelief here is fatal indeed. We must believe that the same infinite knowledge and power which shape the destinies of orbs, races, and heroes, shape the life history of the lowliest man and woman on the face of the earth. What did our Lord teach us on this very matter? “If God so clothe the grass of the field, shall He not much more clothe you?” And certainly the science of the day helps us to the same conclusion. The world is built upon the atom; the microbe in many ways teaches the grandeur of insignificance. We may be very obscure and ordinary people, but it is our joy to remember that we are certainly embraced by the government of God, and that He ever seeks to lead us and guide us as a shepherd guides his sheep. And have we not many of us a very vivid consciousness of this overshadowing Providence? Do you say, “I am the architect of my own fortune”? If you are, you are the architect of a precious jerry building. If your life is really rich and successful, ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building. And if God has blessed us marvellously, has He not also wonderfully kept us amid the temptations and perils of the pilgrimage? The man who congratulates himself upon his character and standing, and imputes all to his own strength, and caution, and skill, is strangely blind and forgetful. What would you think if an ocean liner were to flatter itself because it had found its way from New York to Liverpool? “How cautiously I crept through that fog; how skilfully I kept clear of those icebergs; how cleverly I piloted myself past those sandbanks; what a wide berth I gave those rocks; how delicately I threaded my way along the Mersey!” Forgetting all the time the captain on the bridge. We must not forget the Captain on the bridge, the Captain of our salvation. How wonderfully God has disappointed our fears and misgivings! We have often looked forward with solicitude and even anguish to impending, threatening trials, and yet God has brought us safely through. God has been with us through all the years, filling us with good things, delivering us in the evil day, scattering our fears, bringing us onward to the appointed rest.

II. The Divine purpose in our life. “To humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no.” The moral idea is the grand end to which God governs the race, the nation, and governs us. God seeks to bring men to the knowledge of Himself, to purify them from false love and lusts, to teach them obedience, to make them fit for their great and holy inheritance. The Egyptian historian, the Greek historian, the Roman historian simply gave a series of grand pictures of kings, cities, marches, battles won and lost, and ended with such pictures; but the Jewish lawgivers and prophets grasped the fact of the moral character and aim of the Divine government. The aim of God’s government is not the material enrichment of men. The great symbols of His final purpose are not L.S.D. He does not rule the world to create rich nations or individuals. He has not led you for forty years that you might make a big pile, and get at length an embroidered shroud. And the final idea of God is not intellectual. He is not satisfied with genius, scholarship, taste. Some seem to think that the ultimate purpose of the governing Power of the universe is to produce a sensual race with a magnificent environment of palaces and pictures, like Victor Hugo’s devil fish in the enchanted cave. The great end of God’s government is stated in the text. For forty years God disciplined Israel in the wilderness, that they might pass from being a nation of coarse slaves into a nation of saints, losing their sensuality and wilfulness, being weaned from idols, growing into righteousness and spirituality; and it is precisely for the same great end that God disciplines us today. He anticipates, disposes, adjusts, rules, and overrules, so that we may taste His love, keep His law, reflect His beauty, and be prepared to see His face. How far has this great end been answered in us? God has greatly blessed us, humbled us; what is the result? How do we bear the moral test? Some of us are in many worldly respects far worse off than we were forty years ago. Life is a wonderful process for spoiling dreams and frustrating hopes, and some of you feel that your life has not been the success you expected, that you have been sorely disappointed, that life ends in frustration, if not in a general breakdown. Are you at last humble, spiritual, godly, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life? Then glorify God with all your ransomed powers. Blessed humiliation! You are no failure. You are a splendid, Divine, eternal success. (W. L. Watkinson.)

Looking backward

Memory is said to be sometimes quickened to an unusual activity at the end of life. The dying, and especially the drowning, are said to have set before them in swift panorama view the varied experiences of the life which is hurrying to a close. “Son, remember”--is the thrilling admonition--“that thou, in thy lifetime, receivedst thy good things.” It is in a more merciful and hopeful way that we are called upon to exercise our memory today. While we still live and the result of our life may be influenced, we are required to pass it in review. Occasionally circumstances arise which seem to set us upon this duty in an altogether special way. You pass along a road where you have not been for fifteen or twenty years. You see a face that you have not seen since you were a child, or you meet a man that was your friend in youth. Or perhaps it is some particular crisis in life, or the return of some birthday, that sets the past in review. Life is here regarded as a discipline, and we have set before us first of all--

I. The agent of this discipline. “The Lord thy God.” Think of the multitude of influences to which these Israelites were exposed in their great migration. Moses to lead them, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram to mislead them, Aaron to do sometimes the one and sometimes the other; the Red Sea to bar their way at the beginning of their journey, and the Jordan at the end; famine and pestilence, quails and manna; Caleb and Joshua to encourage, the unfaithful spies to discourage, the Egyptians to drive them, Moabites, Amorites, and the rest to harass and hinder them. Yet as they look back they are taught to see One Hand at work, and that the hand of the Lord their God. The great lesson which this old Hebrew history has to teach us is the clear recognition of God in everything. There is no lesson, surely, which our strained and worried modern life more urgently requires than this. If our lives, and lives dearer to us than our own, are to be the sport of every malign influence, and every wilful or foolish person; if we are at the mercy of all those varied calamities and deaths which ride upon the breeze and lurk in the dust and lie in wait at every point, we may well be driven to distraction.

II. The sphere of this discipline. “In the wilderness.” The place in which the discipline was conducted was not without its bearing on the result. It was a place in which the influence of things seen was as weak almost as it could be upon the earth. If you wish to teach a child a specially important lesson you will take him into some quiet room, where he shall not be interrupted, and where in the room itself there shall be as little as possible to distract attention. Such a school room was this desert place, where God took the nation to Himself, and taught them the great lessons in regard to His nature and character which, through them, in after ages have been taught to the world. Our life, as a whole, is not a wilderness; it is rather a garden, which ever tends to become richer and more fruitful as generation after generation toils upon it. Yet there is in many of our lives what may be termed a wilderness experience--a time of affliction, bereavement, disappointment, perplexity; in which God is doing for us in a briefer period what He did for the Israelites during this long forty years. If God does give us a taste of the wilderness life, let us remember that He is not doing it without a purpose.

III. The definite term of this discipline. “These forty years.” The Israelites were not to be on trial forever. At the end of forty years a result had been arrived at and ascertained which would not now be materially altered. There is a loose idea, only too common nowadays, that probation is to be extended indefinitely into the future. People allow themselves to think that if a man does not come right at first he is to be kept on with till he does come right, so that the drunkard, the Pharisee, and the miser, though they grow worse and worse, and pass out of this life drunken, pharisaic, or miserly, are yet by some unexplained process in the indefinite future to become saints. Now, such an idea not only sets itself squarely against the main body of Scripture teaching, but altogether fails to commend itself to common sense. Indeed, a wide observation will lead us to this, that even within this life character tends to final permanence, so that forty years, for example, do not pass without leaving a mark, and setting character into a form. Professor Drummond has said that a man cannot alter his collar after he is forty, much less his character.

IV. The purpose of this discipline “To humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no.” It was to humble them, that is, to bring them by means of privation and distress to feel their need of His help, and their dependence upon Him. To prove them, to put them, that is, in such positions as would drive them to show what was in them. Times come to us also when we are obliged to speak out, and to take our stand, and to do distinctly either right or wrong. Young people at the beginning commonly regard life mainly or chiefly as a sphere or opportunity of enjoyment. And we must not be unsympathetic. It is natural, and perhaps unavoidable, that they should take this view at first. This aspect of life, however, very soon turns out to be utterly unsatisfactory. Then, after the thought of enjoyment there often comes with earnest young people the higher and better thought of achievement. They say: I will accomplish something; I will make a mark; I will get to the top of the tree. But the top of the tree is so hard to reach, so few can reach it, those who do reach it have to pay such a heavy price, and find it, after all, such a barren and comfortless elevation, that this view of life frequently ends in disappointment too. Then it is that the Divine view of life comes to our rescue. Enjoyment is not left out of the account. It comes in, not as the object of life, but as the divinely given accompaniment of service. Achievement also finds its proper place. The faithful servant shall have the “Well done.” But above the thought either of enjoyment or achievement there rises the thought of discipline. In forming our estimate of a man we ask, What has he done? God asks, What has he become? There is no subject on which greater mistakes are made than in the matter of getting on in the world. We all want to get on, and for our children to get on, but few have the right idea of what getting on really is. A man thinks he is getting on when his business prospers, and everything turns to gold in his hands. Not necessarily. He may be losing ground all that time. No! When he can stand in the presence of temptation without yielding to it; when he can bear humiliation and disappointment without murmuring; when he can see the unscrupulous competitor go in front of him, and yet refuse to be unscrupulous himself, and let the best bargain he ever saw in his life go past him, rather than secure it by doing or saying that which is unworthy; when he can toil all day and accomplish very little, and go home at night and neither scold the wife nor be angry with the children, that’s when he is getting on. When we get into such a position that our word is always listened to with respect and deference, and “when we ope our lips no dog durst bark,” we think we are getting on. No! When we can bear hard and cruel speech, and not resent or retaliate; when we can give the soft answer that turneth away wrath, or even be reviled and not revile again, that’s when we are getting on. A woman thinks she is getting on when she is moving into a bigger house, when her drawing room is splendid and crowded, and she a gay and brilliant queen in the midst of it. But it is quite possible that she may be suffering loss at such a time as that. No! When she can move into a smaller house, and make every corner of it radiant with her smile; when she can work in narrowed circumstances without becoming soured, or meet affliction and distress and bear it like a heroine, that is when she’s getting on. (Sidney Pitt.)

The power of memory

I. The agency of memory and its attendant faculty recollection in the work of spiritual advancement.

1. Among the faculties with which God has beneficently endowed man, memory ranks with the most important. It is a gallery lined with the pictures of past events, and with scenes on which we have gazed--a gallery sometimes vocal with sounds that fill the heart with gladness, or pierce it with keenest pain. It is memory that makes the record to which conscience points when it speaks in tones of menace. It is in memory that there is stored up the treasures knowledge has patiently amassed, and it is with memory we take counsel when we would investigate, or must decide.

(1) If the record is so perfect, how necessary to avoid sin! One of the greatest blessings a man can possess is an unspotted memory. How many of us are humbled at the record of our memory!

(2) The indestructibility suggests one pain of perdition. He who passes into hell with a record of sin, and of opportunities wasted, will carry with him his own chamber of torture. There is an attendant faculty called recollection. The curator at a museum or library searches for the object you want. So recollection.

2. Illustrate the influence on spiritual work. These are not merely intellectual faculties. These have a moral work to do. It may be illustrated in the aid given to convince Joseph’s brethren (Genesis 42:21). It ever presents to us the teachings of God’s dealings with us. To lead to avoid past errors, and to show that the purpose was to do us good at our latter end.

II. The Israelite who thus remembered would perceive that God’s purpose had been to humble.

III. To prove thee, to know what was in thine heart. Not to show God, but to show us our faults. The great gun is taken to a proof house, and tried with the great charge, and if some crack is revealed men say it was well it did not burst and spread dismay at some crisis of the fight. The anchor and chain is tested link by link, to see if any flaw should be revealed. If it had gone untested, how great the peril! (J. R. Hargreaves.)

The advantages of a devout review of the Divine dispensations

I. Explain the solemn charge.

1. The object of remembrance is extensive: the way--all the way which the Lord our God has led us; that is, the whole tenor of the Divine dispensations toward us--their nature, means, seasons, relatives, tendencies, and actual effects.

2. It supposes that this exercise, interesting and beneficial as it is, we are prone to neglect

II. enforce obedience to the charge.

1. An enlightened and devout retrospect of the dispensations of God to you will present you with many impressive displays of His glory.

2. This devout retrospection will supply us with many affecting displays of our own corruption.

3. This remembrance will supply the saints with pleasing discoveries of the sanctified tendencies of their souls.

4. This remembrance will confirm our faith in the Scriptures as the Word of God, and improve all our practical views both of things seen and unseen. (James Stark.)

Remembrance of God’s dealings

I. On the duty of remembering the dealings of God towards us. Look back to the earliest period of your history--the time and place of your birth--the varied circumstances of your education--the business or the profession in which you have been engaged--the measure of prosperity or adversity you have experienced--the various connections and engagements you have formed--the sicknesses, accidents, and dangers you have encountered, and the merciful deliverances which you have received;--all these come under the general idea of the dealings of God with you, which it becomes you to remember. But this review of the providential dispensations of Almighty God should lead us to contemplate also that grace and mercy with which we have been favoured. Ever let us remember that we were not born in Egyptian darkness, or consigned from our birth to a waste, howling wilderness. We were born in a highly favoured land, brought by Christian parents and pious friends to the house of God; early baptized in the Saviour’s name; accustomed to worship God in His house. And has not God graciously vouchsafed to meet with and bless us in His house, and under those ordinances which through His mercy have been administered among us?

II. The means to be adopted in order to remember the Divine dealings towards us. We are prone to forget the God of our mercies, to lose sight of His dispensations, to sink into carelessness and neglect, to regard passing events as matters of course, not calling for any special recollection or acknowledgment. Now, to guard against this forgetful disposition it becomes us ofttimes to stir up ourselves, and all with whom we are connected, to record and remember God’s mercies; and especially to improve those times and seasons which He hath set apart for this purpose. And while we carefully observe seasons which are especially set apart in commemoration of the Divine dispensations, we should also diligently improve the ordinances which are appointed for the same important end.

III. The end which this remembrance of the Divine dispensations is calculated to produce:--Namely, “to humble us, to prove us, to show what is in our hearts.” When we observe the conduct of Israel in the wilderness we are compelled to feel how foolish, perverse, and ungrateful that people were; but when we review our own conduct, must we not too often pronounce the same sentence upon ourselves? The remembrance, therefore, of the dealings of God with us should deeply humble us under a sense of our unprofitableness and ingratitude. When duly considered, it will show us what has been in our hearts, how foolish, how vain, how deceitful they are, and how often our own conduct has been inconsistent with our profession, and what need we therefore have of pardon. It will teach us the fallacy of many of those excuses which we have made for the neglect of duty, and evince that God has been merciful and gracious to us all our journey through. This remembrance of God’s dealings with us is especially calculated to bring us afresh, as sinners, to our gracious and merciful Saviour. (T. Webster, B. D.)

A protecting providence

This is emphatically a day of remembrance. Parted families meet, and recount the course of providence since they were last together. The monuments of Divine love are crowded so closely together that we are prone to pass them by unnoticed. The experience of all of us is so much alike that we cease to marvel at it.

I. In helping you in the performance of this duty, I would first ask you to reflect on the amount of happiness which you as an assembly represent. There is probably not one of you to whom, in the sight of God, this is not a happy day; not one whose glad do not outnumber his regretful thoughts. How many sources of happiness flow for us! In a thousand ways must an incessant providence watch, guard, and guide, avert peril, and bestow aid, in each of our households, with every new day, to make health the rule, disease and death the rare exception,--joy the current, grief the transient ripple on its surface. I have spoken of common blessings. Have we not each special mercies which we would own with devout gratitude,--mercies adapted to our peculiar wants, as distinctly marked, so to speak, with our names, as keepsakes from a friend might be? How often have we received the very favours which we most needed, and dared not anticipate, sent in at the only moment and in the only mode in which they could have been availing! In this connection it is well for us to consider how little we can do for ourselves. We are too prone to feel as if our own industry, energy, and forethought could accomplish much. But think how many sources of joy must all flow together, how many departments of nature and of being must all be brought into harmony, in order for us to pass a single hour in comfort.

II. What are the duties to which this review calls us? Does it not make the gratitude of the most thankful seem cold? What but unceasing praise can worthily respond to this incessant flow of mercy? And yet, do not some of us live without thanksgiving? Oh, that every soul might feel the love in which it is embosomed, and might send heavenward the blended anthem of all its powers and affections, “Bless the Lord, and forget not all His benefits!” In these mercies, hear we not also the voice of religious exhortation, “My son, give Me thy heart”? (A. P. Peabody.)

The common levels of life

The forty years’ wanderings! What remains of them? A list of unknown names, no more. The dust of time has settled on the stations; and the events, big at the time with interests to millions, are without a note in history. What weary years of plodding marches through a dark, unheavenly country; what dreads and dangers, what wants and distresses, what keen agonies and fierce complaints, that oblivious silence covers! They are all there, days of fighting, nights of weeping, years of trudging. They seemed at the moment as if they were burning an indelible mark deep into life records; but they are already behind us, dim in the distance, a softening veil has fallen over the whole pilgrimage; a broad sense of pain conquered, shame endured, duty done; the consciousness that we have come out of the wanderings richer, braver, stronger, more earnest, but sadder, than when we entered the desert, is all that is left to us. In order that we may better understand the method of God in ordering our wilderness marches let us consider--

I. The reason of “the wanderings.” Why is so large a portion of our years spent under the yoke of undistinguished duties, leaving no record but “the wanderings” behind? Briefly, because a few critical experiences do not make a character; a few impassioned, enthusiastic moments do not make a life. The inevitable falling off of the common hours and experiences seems to me to be the great teaching of this passage of Israel’s history. It is a broad fact in the history of every life; in a measure, of every day’s life, for the great cycles repeat themselves in little, as the organs of the body are present potentially in every part. But these narratives gather up the scattered incidents of our moral life into one grand incident, and show us with a large dramatic point and emphasis what we are daily doing under the eye of the great Leader, which makes these long, dry, unnoted wanderings inevitable; what it is which compels Him to impose what I have called the yoke of undistinguished duty, and to lead us up and down in the wilderness, that we may, if we will yield ourselves to His hand, work the sublime lessons, which we cannot learn and practise in a moment, into the common daily texture of life, that is, of eternity.

II. The purpose of the wanderings. Briefly, again, to work godly principles of action into the common texture of our daily lives. To make it a matter of perpetual, quiet choice and habit to square every action by the rule of the mind of God.

III. The “wanderings,” in view of their eternal results. They, obscure and unprofitable as they may seem are the builders for eternity. The quiet, undistinguished years decide the matter for the moments when the election is finally and openly made. It takes years to give a form and bent to a character. Temperament we are born with, character we have to make; and that not in the grand moments, when the eyes of men or of angels are visibly upon us, but in the daily quiet paths of pilgrimage, when the work is being done within in secret, which will be revealed in the daylight of eternity. Habits, like paths, are the result of constant actions. It is the multitude of daily footsteps which go to and fro which shapes them. Let it light up your daily wanderings to know that there--in the quiet bracing of the soul to uncongenial duty, the patient bearing of unwelcome burdens, the loving acceptance of unlovely companionship--and not on the grand occasions, you are making your eternal future. (J. B. Brown, B. A.)

The journey of life

I. Life is a journey. “All the way.”

1. Intricate. Perplexities and difficulties in every stage and turn.

2. Eventful. Changes in every step. All is shifting.

3. Unretraceable.

4. Perilous. Poisonous streams, noxious herbs, venomous serpents.

5. Solemn. Leads body to grave and spirit to heaven or hell.

II. Life’s journey has a guide. “The Lord thy God led thee.”

1. The guide thoroughly understands the way.

2. The guide has resources equal to all possible emergencies.

III. Life’s journey can never be forgotten. “Thou shalt remember.”

1. Some memory of it is a matter of necessity.

2. A right memory is a matter of obligation.

Remember it so as to awaken contrition for past sins, gratitude for past mercies, resolutions for improved conduct. (Homilist.)

Human life

I. A Divine superintendence of human life.

1. The fact of this superintendence. “The way of man is not in himself.”

2. The purpose of this superintendence. Moral discipline.

II. A symbolic representation of human life. Morally, we are all in a wilderness, intricate, perilous, privational. It is only as we get the true manna from heaven that we can live spiritually in the wilderness of our present life.

III. A solemn obligation of human life. “Remember.”

1. Man does remember the past. Cannot help it; linked to it by a necessity of his nature.

2. Man does not always remember God in the past. This is the duty here commanded--to see God in the past, to see Him in all, in the tempest and the calm, the darkness and the sunshine.

IV. An eternal necessity of human life. Bread is not more necessary to support material life than the Word of God to sustain spiritual. The soul can only live as it receives communications from the Great Father of spirits. (Homilist.)

The Christian called to review the dealings of God with him

I. The way in which we are led.

1. The way of providence.

2. The way of grace.

II. The end for which we are led in this way.

1. “To humble thee.” Consider the vast importance of this in order to our obtaining, retaining, and increasing in grace (Matthew 5:3; Isaiah 57:15; 1 Peter 5:5; James 4:6; James 4:10).

2. “To prove thee.” God tries the genuineness of our repentance when He permits temptations to assault us, and suffers sin to wear a pleasing dress. Of our faith, when difficulties seem to arise in the way of His fulfilling His declarations and promises. Of our trust in Him when dangers, wants, enemies, distresses, assault us. Of our resignation to His will, in reproach and affliction, and in the death of those we love. Of our patience, in long-continued pain, or in a succession of calamities. Of our contentment with our lot in poverty. Of our meekness, gentleness, and forgiving spirit amidst provocations and injuries. Of our long suffering amidst the follies and sins of those round about us. Of our love to mankind, and to our enemies, amidst the hatred and ill-will of others. Of our love to God, when the world courts us, and we must of necessity abandon one or the other. Of our obedience when difficult duties are enjoined, and we are called to deny ourselves and take up our cross. Of our hope of everlasting life, when both the wind of temptation and the tide of our corruption are strongly against us.

3. “To know what was in thy heart.” God, who searches the heart and knows what is in man, infallibly knows what is in thine heart; but thou must know thyself, and discover to others what is in the heart.

4. “Whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no.” Whether thou wouldest be brought to love Him with all thy heart, as thou art commanded; to serve Him with all thy strength; to make His will thy rule in all thy actions; to make His glory thy end, and not thy own honour, or interest, or pleasure. (J. Benson.)

The way of the past

I. The way of providence.

1. This we have experienced nationally.

2. Socially.

3. Personally.

II. The way of privilege.

1. We have possessed the Word of God.

2. All have been welcome to the house of God.

3. As Christians we have enjoyed fellowship with the people of God.

III. The way of experience.

1. Each of us has had his share of conflict.

2. To each has come deliverance in times of perplexity.

3. Even in the midst of trial we have, through faith in Christ, realised a measure of peace.

4. To every believer there has been vouchsafed spiritual joy.

Application: The past should thus be remembered

(1) with humility;

(2) with gratitude;

(3) with confidence. (Lay Preacher.)

Remembrance of past trials

I. The duty of remembrance. The world likes to forget. There is so much that is self-humiliating in the past, so much that is disagreeable, that men would like to get it out of their thoughts. But not so the Christian. He is taught that it is his duty to bear in mind all the incidents of his past. It is an important duty. The way has been rough and varied, but it has been fraught with momentous issues. Have all the varied experiences been given us in order that they might at once pass from our ken? Some forget from indifference; they never can remember. Go through what they may, they never learn experience. Some forget from loose habits of mind; from long indolence. Others forget because they want to avoid the pain of remembrance. But none of them realise that remembrance is an important duty, an absolute command of God. It is important in worldly things, for it does much to form our human character. But it is still more important in spiritual things, for it does still more to form our spiritual character.

II. The profit to be derived. Our past lives have been directed for two ends--

1. To humble us. How insignificant we appear to ourselves in the light of the past! How our plans have been thwarted, our ambition damped, our desires crushed! Where is our pride at the end of the journey of life?

2. To prove us. There is much alloy in the best of our services, much sin even in holy things.

III. The comfort to be imparted. At first sight it seems that no affliction for the present seemeth light. It is always painful. Nevertheless it worketh out an abundant weight of glory. Persecutors mean evil, but God causes it to be good. Consider--

1. The future good more than counterbalances the present evil. When the rod is removed the purified soul will rejoice in the eternal presence of God.

2. Trials by the way are proofs of Divine love. “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. God sees better and further than we do. (Preacher’s Analyst.)

To bring to remembrance

I. Why we are to remember the beginning. It was almost the first business of Moses, in giving this long address which we have in Deuteronomy, to show that the Israelites, for want of remembering all the way the Lord had led them, lost the promised land. Let us, then, take a three-fold view of the beginning, as applicable to us spiritually.

1. What is the first thing that we shall call the beginning? That which the people of God as a general rule come to last, and that which is almost everywhere despised. The beginning was a manifestation of the pure sovereignty of God. In Exodus 11:1, the Lord said that He would put a difference--as the margin reads it, a redemption--between the Egyptians and Israel; referring to the paschal lamb. Now, how did the Lord begin with you? Why, by making a difference, not only between you and others, but by making us something very different from what we had been before.

2. Then the second thing in the beginning was that beautiful circumstance as a type of the Saviour. “When I see the blood I will pass by the house, and the sword shall not come near to hurt you. Oh, let us remember that the original way of escape was by Jesus Christ; if we were left of the sword, it was by the blood of the Lamb.

3. Then the third thing in the beginning was the victory which was wrought. Look at the victory the Lord gave to the Israelites; see how He divided the sea. God did in that case what none but God could do. Now apply this closer home. Who but the God-man Mediator could have divided a greater sea? Who but the God-man Mediator could bring in such a victory as Jesus Christ hath brought in? Who but Jesus Christ could penally bear our sins?

II. Why we are to remember the present. How much wilderness experience the people of God have! what solitude! “Like an owl of the desert,” “like a sparrow alone upon the house top”; and “that He will hear the prayer of the destitute, and not despise their prayer”; and “they wandered in a solitary way, and found no city to dwell in.” I dare say some good Christians think that ministers have not much of this wilderness experience; but I can tell you this, if they have not, they will not be of much use to the people. They may pretend to weep with the people, but they cannot feel as they would if they had these experiences. The doctor may be very sympathising over the dying patient, but the doctor cannot feel what the parent feels, the doctor cannot feel what near and dear relatives feel. The apostle saith, “We have ten thousand instructors, but not many fathers.” For a minister, therefore, to be of that sympathising nature that he shall strengthen file diseased, heal the sick, bring again that which is driven away, he must from time to time know what this wilderness experience is; and then he will think when he comes into the pulpit, and say to himself, I am a poor, dark, helpless creature, no more fit to preach the Gospel than to create a world; and thus the man is humbled down like a little child, and the Lord knows that is just the time for Him to come; so in the Lord steps, the man’s heart is warmed, his soul is enlarged, Satan flies off, and the man is astounded how it is he is so strong; and one thought comes, and another; and the man that one half his time perhaps is little more than a stammerer, all at once becomes eloquent, and pours forth torrents of thoughts, and blessing after blessing, until the people lose their troubles and their sorrows, and he loses his.

III. How we are to look at the future. With confidence in Him who has been so gracious to us up to the present. (J. Wells.)

The retrospect

I. The call to remembrance. If knowledge is important, memory is important in precisely the same degree; for knowledge is nothing unless it be applied, and it cannot be applied unless it be remembered. But there are many who resemble the workmen in the days of Haggai, who received wages to put them into a bag of holes. And therefore says the apostle to the Hebrews, “Give the more earnest heed to the things you have heard, lest at any time you should let them slip”; for we are now considering memory not in reference to the scholar, or the man of business, but with regard to religion; and it is remarkable that the whole of religion is expressed by the word, “Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.” One thing, however, is worthy of consideration--that in all these instances the remembrance is to be considered, not as a speculation, but as experimental and practical. The sacred winters never regard remembrance as an end, but as an instrument; to call forth such feelings, and to produce such actions as will correspond to the things we are required to remember. As they consider knowledge without practice to be no better than ignorance, so they consider remembrance without influence and efficiency as no better than forgetfulness.

II. The subject to be reviewed.

1. The place--“the wilderness.”

2. Their conductor--“the Lord thy God.” God guides the people with His eye, He leads them by His word and His Spirit and His providence. He is a very present help to them in every time of trouble, and He will never leave them nor forsake them till they have entered the promised land.

3. The passages--“all the way.” Not that everything in their journey was equally important and interesting; this could not be; but all had been under the appointment and discipline of God, and all would be rendered profitable.

4. The period--“these forty years.” (W. Jay.)

The advantages of a frequent retrospect of life

I. The way which we are here called on to remember, is, “all the way which the Lord our God has led us”; the whole course of His dispensations towards us from the day of our birth to the present hour. Even the most minute occurrences in our history have had some influence on our condition and character; they are affecting us now, and will continue to affect us through an endless eternity. But while all the events of our life ought to be preserved in our memories, those events ought especially to be treasured up there which are more immediately connected with the way that is leading us to heaven.

1. And among these the means by which we were first brought into this way should hold a chief place.

2. We are called on to remember also the afflictions with which we have been visited since we have been walking in the path of life.

3. Neither must our mercies be forgotten in the retrospect of our lives.

4. The sins we have committed in the midst of our afflictions and blessings must also be often retraced; not merely viewed in a mass, but, like our mercies, contemplated one by one with all their aggravations.

II. The remembrance of these things, however, in order to be beneficial to us, must be accompanied with a lively conviction of the overruling providence of God in all that has happened to us, and as lively a sense of His close connection with us. The text points out to us the ends which God had in view in afflicting the Jews, and it consequently affords us the means of ascertaining the reasons of His diversified dispensations towards ourselves.

1. They are intended to humble us. All is humility in that kingdom where God dwells. Here, in this fallen world, the meanest sinner lifts up himself against Him; but there the loftiest archangels cast down their crowns before His footstool. Before we can enter that glorious world we also must learn to abase ourselves.

2. The various changes in our condition have been designed also to prove us.

3. They have a tendency to teach us the insufficiency of all worldly things to make us happy, and the all-sufficiency of God to bless us.

III. These, then, are the immediate purposes for which the Lord has led us through so many trials and mercies in our way to heaven. There are, however, other ends which they have been designed to answer; and that these may be accomplished He commands us to look back on the course in which we have walked, and has connected with the retrospect many spiritual benefits.

1. A review of the past is calculated to confirm our faith in the Bible. Our lives are practical illustrations of this blessed book. Indeed the whole world and all that is passing therein is one continued commentary on it, and confirmation of its truth.

2. A retrospect of the past has a tendency also to increase our knowledge of ourselves.

3. The remembrance enjoined in the text is calculated also to strengthen our confidence in God. It brings before our mind the help we have received in our difficulties, the supplies in our wants, the consolations in our troubles; and reasoning from the past to the future, we are naturally led to infer that He who never has forsaken us never will forsake us; that the goodness and mercy which have followed us all the days of our life will follow us still; that no vicissitudes in our condition, no tribulation, no distress, no persecution, no peril, “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (C. Bradley, M. A.)

The lesson of memory

I. What we should be mainly occupied with as we look back. Memory, like all other faculties, may either help or hinder us. As is the man, so will be his remembrance. The tastes which rule his present will determine the things that he likes best to think about in the past. There are many ways of going wrong in our retrospect. Some of us, for instance, prefer to think with pleasure about things that ought never to have been done, and to give a wicked immortality to thoughts that ought never to have had a being. Such a use of the great faculty of memory is like the folly of the Egyptians who embalmed cats and vermin. Then there are some of us who abuse memory just as much by picking out, with perverse ingenuity, every black bit that lies in the distance behind us, all the disappointments, all the losses, all the pains, all the sorrows. And there are some of us who, in like manner, spoil all the good that we could get out of a wise retrospect by only looking back in such a fashion as to feed a sentimental melancholy, which is, perhaps, the most profitless of all the ways of looking backwards. Now here are the two points in this verse of my text which would put all these blunders and all others right, telling us what we should chiefly think about when we look back. “Thou shalt remember all the way by which the Lord thy God hath led thee.” Let memory work under the distinct recognition of Divine guidance in every part of the past. That is the first condition of making the retrospect blessed. Another purpose for which the whole panorama of life is made to pass before us, and for which all the gymnastics of life exercise us, is that we may be made submissive to His great will, and may keep His commandments.

II. And now turn to the other consideration which may help to make remembrance a good, namely, the issues to which our retrospect must tend if it is to be anything more than sentimental recollections.

1. Remember and be thankful. If it be the case that the main fact about things is their power to mould persons and to make character, then there follows, very dearly, that all things, that come within the sweep of our memory may equally attribute to our highest good.

2. Remember, and let the memory lead to contrition.

3. Let us remember in order that from the retrospect we may get practical wisdom.

4. The last thing that I would say is, Let us remember that we may hope. The forward look and the backward look are really but the exercise of the same faculty in two different directions. Memory does not always imply hope; we remember sometimes because we do not hope, and try to gather round ourselves the vanished past because we know it never can be a present or a future. But when we are occupied with an unchanging Friend, whose love is inexhaustible, and whose arm is unwearied, it is good logic to say, “It has been, therefore it shall be.” (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

A call to remembrance

When Charles I was executed, January 30, 1649, the last word he was heard to utter was “Remember.” Memory is a power that may be vivid to the last moment on earth; it may echo its terrors in hell, or carry its blessed lessons and reviews to the heavenly world. It is a mighty faculty of the human mind. It is meant to be useful as a storehouse of information and a granary of knowledge. Again, it is intended to remind us of the lessons gathered by experience and observation. These lessons may have been dearly learnt, but may be all the more precious as they serve to correct our pride, and to reveal our sinfulness and weakness.

I. Mark the stages of Israel’s journey.

1. Border of Red Sea.

2. March.

3. Elim.

4. Wilderness of sin.

5. Rephidim.

6. At foot of Mount Sinai.

II. Mark the suggestiveness of that journey to us. It is a parable of the journey taken by God’s children by faith in Jesus Christ.

1. They also leave the slavery and sin of Egypt.

2. They too must go forward in the way of repentance and faith, in discharge of Christian duty, in cultivation of Christian graces, and in the path Providence and grace has ordained.

3. They often drink the bitter waters of sorrow and trial; but these waters are sweetened by Christ.

4. They drink of the waters of Elim, where they find joy and refreshment.

5. They also have to learn lessons of Divine care and Divine trust.

6. What rich supplies of the water of life flow around the camp of the spiritual Israel.

7. Where Israel encamps before Sinai, it reminds us that the law written on tables of stone is by the covenant of grace written on the tables of our hearts, and we are to remember those commandments of Jehovah that are a rule of life for all time, even the Ten Commandments.

III. Great facts Israel would remember.

1. Surely Israel remembered they had a glorious Guide.

2. Surely they would remember their full supplies. No good thing will God withhold from them that walk uprightly.

3. Israel would remember with sorrow their sins, and so must we.

4. They were to remember their rebukes and chastisements.

5. They were to remember their conflicts.

6. Surely they would remember the devious way they took.

7. Surely Israel might say, Mercy has ever been mingled with judgment.

8. Would not Israel remember all the way in the light of the glorious end then in view?

IV. The purpose to be served by the way that Israel journeyed.

1. To humble the people.

2. To prove the heart.

3. To lead to God and heaven. (F. A. Warmington.)

Divine leading

I. The way in which the Lord led His people.

1. A way not chosen by themselves. Grace--freely bestowed (John 5:16).

2. A trying way. Walking by faith, not sight (1 Peter 1:7).

3. A mysterious way.

(1) To the unregenerate world, who know nothing of the secret dealings of God with the quickened soul.

(2) To the Christian. How dark sometimes!

4. A discouraging way (Numbers 21:4). So the Christian is often discouraged. He wants to feel that he is going on spiritually; but he feels, more and more, his own helplessness. Some days he has most cheering and delightful thoughts of God; on others he feels bereft of faith, love, joy, hope, comfort, and every spiritual gift.

5. A way of tribulation (John 16:33).

6. A way in which God went before them (Exodus 13:21). He is with every one of His people every moment, to keep them by His Almighty power, in the way of grace.

II. The place in which the Lord led His people His people into the wilderness.

1. To humble. In order that He may magnify Christ in them.

2. To prove. That He may convince them of their own weakness.

3. That He may know what is in his heart--its secret corruptions, etc. (J. J. Eastmead.)

Human life a pilgrimage

I. The wandering of the Israelites through the wilderness to Canaan is a lively image and representation of a Christian’s passage through this world to heaven.

1. The passage of the Israelites through the wilderness was a very unsettled state; so is ours through this world. If we do not continually wander about from place to place as the Israelites did, yet we are far from having any fixed and constant abode. The perpetual alterations we see about us, either in our friends, our neighbours, or ourselves, our persons, tempers, estates, families, or circumstances, and in short, the vast change which the compass of a few years makes in almost everything around us, is sufficient to convince us that we are in no settled condition here.

2. The travel of the Israelites through the wilderness was a troublesome and dangerous state. Now, here is another fit emblem of a Christian’s pilgrimage through this world which to him is not only a barren but a hostile land. From the very nature of things, and the circumstances of his present state, he meets with many inconveniences and sufferings, and from the malice of his enemies more. Setting aside the natural evils which he bears in common with others, sickness, pains, crosses, disappointments, personal and family afflictions, he is exposed to many spiritual evils and dangers as a Christian which create him no small concern; particularly frequent instigations to sin, from a depraved nature, from an ensnaring and delusive world, and from a wily and watchful enemy going about indefatigably seeking whom he may devour.

3. In the wilderness through which the Israelites travelled to Canaan, there were many by-paths or devious tracts by which they might be in danger of going astray. And how much this resembles a Christian’s walk through this world is very apparent.

4. Notwithstanding all the by-paths and windings in the wilderness, the Israelites had an infallible Guide to lead them in the way they should go.

5. Though the Israelites travelled forty years in the wilderness, yet they were all that while not far from the promised land. We have here another circumstance of similitude to a Christian’s state in this world. If he be in the right way to heaven, he is never far from it; he lives on the borders of it. A very little and unexpected incident may let him suddenly into the eternal world, which should every day therefore be in his thoughts.

6. The reason why the children of Israel wandered so long in the wilderness before they reached the promised land is given us in the text. Now, whether it be not sometimes by way of punishment that God is pleased to detain some of his people from their state of rest and happiness for a long time, as He did the Israelites from the land of Canaan, I will not take upon me to say. But without all doubt, this world is a state of trial and temptation to them all; in which they are detained the longer that they may be more fit for and more ardently desirous of the heavenly Canaan when they are well wearied with the labours and difficulties of this their earthly pilgrimage. And there are three graces which the trials of life are very proper to cultivate, and to the exercise of which the Israelites were more especially called during their passage through the wilderness. And they are faith, hope, and patience: all proper to a state of suffering and mutually subservient to each other. Faith keeps its eye on God in all we suffer; looks beyond the agency of second causes; views the direction of the Divine band and adores it. Patience, under the influence of faith, submits to the hand of God in all. And hope, enlivened by faith and confirmed by patience, looks beyond all to that future and better state of things where we shall meet with an unspeakable recompence for all we can go through to obtain it.

7. In order to keep up the faith, patience, and hope of the Israelites, full and frequent descriptions were given them of the goodness of that land to which they were travelling. Nor are our faith and patience and hope without the like supports in respect to the heavenly Canaan. Oh, what great and glorious things are told us of the city of the living God, the metropolis of the universal King!

8. When the Israelites were come to the end of their pilgrimage, before they could enter the promised land, they were obliged to pass over the river Jordan which separated the wilderness from Canaan. Here lay their greatest difficulty at the very end of their journey. Now to apply this part of the history to the Christian’s life and pilgrimage. The last enemy he is to overcome is death. And as it is the last, so to some Christians it is the most terrible of all their trials; and all their faith and hope and patience is little enough to support them under it. But there is no arriving at the heavenly Canaan without first passing through the fatal Jordan. And as the Israelites by the long and frequent exercise of their faith and hope and trust in God were better prepared for this last difficulty of passing over Jordan, so the more these graces are wrought into a lively habit, the more composed will the soul be under the apprehensions of approaching death.

I shall now conclude this with a few reflections:

1. Let these thoughts, then, be improved to abate our desires after the pleasures of the present life and excite them after those of a better.

2. What reason have we to be thankful that we have so sure a Guide through this dangerous desert! The Israelites themselves had not one more safe.

3. Though our state and condition in this world be much the same as that of the Israelites was in the wilderness, let us however take care that our temper and disposition be not the same. They are set up as our warning, not as our pattern.

4. Whilst we are in this wilderness let us keep the heavenly Canaan always in our eye. The frequent thoughts of it will speed our progress towards it, quicken our preparations for it, and be a sovereign support under all the trials we may meet with in our way to it; will soften our sorrows, and reconcile us to all our earthly disappointments. And indeed, what is there which a man need call a disappointment whose heaven is secure? (John Mason, M. A.)

The way to improve past providences

I. I am to specify some of those providential dispensations which we ought in a more especial manner to recollect and consider. And this review ought to be universal. We should not willingly let pass any of the ways and dispensations of Providence towards us without a serious remark. But as we cannot remember them all, we should take the more care to retain the impression of those that are more remarkable, as a testimony of our dutiful acknowledgment of God and our dependence upon Him in all our ways.

1. Then we should often call to mind God’s afflicting and humbling providences. Have we been afflicted in our bodies? let us remember how it was with us in our low estate; what thoughts we then had of our souls and another world; what serious impressions were made upon our minds which we should endeavour to renew and retain. Again, have we been afflicted in our spirits? By sore temptations, grievous dejections, severe conflicts with sin and Satan, little hopes, great fears, dreadful doubts, and terrifying apprehensions concerning the state of our souls, and what is like to become of them hereafter. These kinds of troubles ought by no means to be forgotten. And when they are remembered, our proper inquiry is, How we got rid of them? For there is a very wrong and dangerous way of getting rid of such spiritual concern of mind. If stupidity and indolence, neglect or worldly-mindedness, carnal security or prevailing vanity, have contributed to overbear and drown those convictions, and banish that serious thoughtfulness and religious sorrow we once had, our state is really worse than it was then; and we have more reason now to be concerned than we had before. Again, have we been afflicted in our family or friends by the death of some, or the sickness and distress of others, let us not soon forget these kinds of afflictions when they are past. It is possible we may know very well from what immediate cause they flowed, yet let us not overlook the sovereign hand of God therein. And if they have in any degree been owing to some neglect or fault in us, they should especially be remembered, to humble us and make us more wise and cautious for the future.

2. We should likewise remember the merciful providences of God towards us. For instance, our temporal mercies should be frequently remembered--the health, the peace, the prosperity, and the worldly advantages we enjoy above so many others. Again, our spiritual mercies and religious advantages should be thankfully recorded by us, and especially that invaluable one of a good and pious education. Again, family mercies should be often remembered by us--family health, peace and prosperity, the comfort of relations, the blessing of children, especially if they be found walking in the way of truth. And so should public mercies; especially the signal interpositions of Providence in preserving us from our enemies and restoring to us the blessings of national prosperity and peace.

II. Let us now consider in what manner the past providences of God are to be recollected and considered by us.

1. We should review them very intently and seriously, call to mind as many particulars as we can, reflect upon them, dwell upon the reflection till the heart be deeply impressed with it.

2. We should review past providences with thankfulness (Ephesians 5:20). What! are we to give thanks for afflictions, pains, and crosses; for those humbling providences under which we mourn? Yes; there is no providence, though ever so adverse, in which a Christian may not see much of the Divine goodness, and for which, upon the whole, he will not see abundant cause to be thankful. He hath reason to be thankful that his afflictions are not greater; that when some of his comforts are gone he hath so many others left; that some honey is thrown into his bitter cup; that there is such a mixture of mercy with judgment; that his supports are so seasonable and effectual; that under these strokes he can eye the Father’s hand and look upon them as the effect of His love, for He chasteneth every son He loves. But especially are kind favourable providences to be gratefully recorded. It is not to be supposed but that every one of us may call to mind many a merciful providence which has contributed greatly to the comfort of our lives, and laid the foundation of our present happiness and future hopes.

3. Our remembrance of the past providences of God should be improved for the confirmation of our hope and trust in Him. By what God hath done for us we see what He is able to do. Our experience, then, should support our hope, and past mercies establish our trust in God for future.

4. When we call to mind the past ways of God towards us, we should seriously reconsider in what manner we behaved under them and what good we have gained from them. Every providence hath a voice, some a very loud one calling us in a more especial manner to practise some particular duty, or forsake some particular sin. Have merciful providences made us more active, diligent, and steadfast in the service of God? and together with greater power given us a better heart to do good? Again, what effect have providential afflictions had upon us? And all afflictions are to be deemed such excepting those that are the genuine effects of our own sin and folly. Have they humbled us? mortified our worldly-mindedness? checked our false ambition? or subdued any secret lust that before too much prevailed? Have they fixed our hope and dependence on God? and made us think more seriously of death and another world? and, in a word, been the means of making us more circumspect and better Christians?

III. I am now to lay before you some of those considerations that are most proper to induce us hereunto.

1. The express command of God should be a sovereign motive to this duty.

2. The duty recommended in the text is necessary as subservient to the great end for which such providences are intended--namely, to do us good in the latter end. So that if we seldom or superficially reflect upon them, we frustrate the chief design of them, and lose the benefit intended thereby.

3. This is a very pleasant as well as useful employment of the mind; and a very happy way of filling up those leisure minutes which, through the vagrancy and dissipation of thought, do so frequently run to waste.

4. Such a serious reflection on past providences may be of use to direct us in our future conduct.

5. The shortness and uncertainty of life makes this duty more especially necessary. What is past we know, what is to come we know not. For anything that we know, by far the most important periods and occurrences of life may be past with us. If the hand of Providence therein hath not yet been properly attended to and improved by us, it is high time it were. (John Mason, M. A.)

Remember the way

I. What it was that God did.

1. God kept the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness ten times longer than would be necessary for a man’s passing through it. We hasten because we are impatient, distrustful, and uncertain. “He that believeth shall not make haste.” We do not believe, and therefore we are in a hurry. We see only brief time before us as our day in which to work. God does not hasten, for eternity is before Him as His working day, and He has no misgiving about accomplishing His purposes: for He saith to Himself and of Himself continually, “I am that I am”--“I am the Almighty God.” The great question with our God is not our getting through so much of our course as quickly as possible, but our so passing through it as that all things shall work together for our good. A man is in a hurry to secure a certain object and to get to a certain position; and God hedges his way with thorns and there he stops, and a voice from heaven saith to him, “Be still,” and he is obliged to “be still.”

2. God exposed the people to much difficulty and hardship, but He did not suffer them to sink under their troubles. They were long kept back from Canaan, but God did not forsake His people. The glory, the pillar of cloud and fire, and every Divine ordinance were as so many tokens and symbols of His presence.

II. What did God mean by dealing thus with the people? God has a meaning in everything. You know one great design embraces our whole life, from the beginning to the end; and then a still larger design takes in the lives of all living things: so that God is not only dealing with me in His dispensations toward me, but He is dealing with all His creatures in dealing with me. There is an end to which everything that happens is subjected. What did God mean by dealing as He did with the people before us?

1. He treated them in this way to humble them. They thought of themselves more highly than they ought to think. They had been accustomed, some of them, to stand by Him as though they were on a level with Him, and to ask Him what He did this for, and what He did that for--not, mark, as an obedient and trustful child, but as a rebel would inquire of some ruler against whom he had risen up. Well, the people had been accustomed in this way to ask God, “Why?” and God brought them down from this. And we say that this is a sublime spiritual spectacle, a man injuring himself by pride, and God lowering that man’s estimate of himself. There is something sublime in this--in the great God occupying Himself with one of us men, having our abasement for His object, and so ordering all things as that our pride shall be laid low.

2. God dealt with the people thus to show them what material they were made of. He knew them, but they did not know themselves, and He would have them know themselves. Is the eye evil? Is the ear deaf? Is the tongue fired by hell? Is the neck an iron sinew? Is the heart stone? God knew: they did not--and He dealt with them as He did to show them what they were.

3. God dealt thus with them to show them further what He could do. “That He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.”

4. God’s end in His dealings with Israel was instruction and correction, and all the spiritual advantages to be derived from that instruction and correction.

III. What God requires in respect of this instruction and correction. What a mighty effect upon life memory has! It adds the past to the present. Now among the several moral and religious advantages of memory is your being spared the toil of learning the same lesson over and over again. (S. Martin, D. D.)

The duty, benefits, and blessings of remembering God’s commandments

I. The duty of remembrance. “Thou shalt remember,” etc. Here we have the same form as in the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt have none other God but Me”; “thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath,” etc. It is, therefore, a positive duty, an obligation insisted on, to remember God’s dealings with us and those before us. But now what is the general course of the world about this important duty? Altogether opposed to it. Some persons we see and know never do remember. Go through what they will, suffer what they may, they never learn experience, or what is called common sense. They continue the same thoughtless, headstrong, violent people they ever were. They never remember. Some there be, however, whose habit of mind is so loose from long indolence, that they really find it difficult so to do; others because it is painful--the thoughts of past years have so much pain in them. There are the false steps that we wilfully made, the neglected opportunities of both doing and getting good, old instances of influence abused, courses of sin persevered in, misgivings of conscience disregarded. To look back on all these is contrary to that peace which we strive to say to ourselves when there is no peace. Instead of meditating and examining themselves, and praying for God’s grace to become altered characters, these men shut out all such reasonings as far as they can, and go on with self-willed eagerness in their old plans: sometimes, if driven from them, they go on only in other courses of the same character, and these, too, with their old eagerness. But if this duty of remembrance is important in a worldly point of view, as it regards our mutual relations on earth, it is of far greater consequence in heavenly things. It is possible to get through our earthly career, though never happily, without remembering; but heaven, the city of our God, we never shall attain unless we do remember all the way the Lord our God hath led us. We must remember Him in our ways, bear in our minds our old sins, and what led us into them. Thence we shall think of what befell us in consequence; and, calmly weighing these over in our minds, we shall pray to God for grace in the future, and will avoid those occasions of sin which previously tried us.

II. In remembering all the way which we have been led, we shall find it highly profitable; because each of our lives is so directed, sooner or later, for two ends--to humble us, and to prove us whether we will serve God or no.

1. Here we see, first, that all events are ordered for our humiliation. Is it not so? Have you had no remarkable turns in your lives, when, yourself or your friends intending one thing, another has come to pass? Have you had no answers to prayer, when, in your helplessness or agony, you besought God and He hearkened? Look back to your youth; how He controlled your self-wickedness, overruled your ignorance, directed your forwardness. It may be, He answered your prayers and punished your inventions; or that what you were so eager for and prayed to obtain so earnestly, as thinking it would without fail make you happy, He refused, and you now find greatly to your comfort. You must bear these in mind; they were so ordained to humble you. We hear men say of their troubles that they are humbling; how they will try in consequence to remove them, to fling themselves out of them. They are thwarted: this causes irritation; it shows them a glimpse of what they really are, poor and weak, blind and naked, and humbles them. God sends these troubles for this purpose--to humble you. Let no Christian therefore try, for it is a vain work, to shake them off; God sends them to humble him. Let the prayer of this man rather be, Let me be humbled. God exalteth the humble, but casteth away the proud.

2. But in discussing this branch of our subject we have another end also laid open to us; this is to prove us. Christ, by Malachi, says, that His coming will have the same effect on the world as the fire of the refiner on silver. And as all the multiplied complications of our chequered lives are ordered to fit us for Christ’s kingdom, we may well suppose they are calculated to produce this same effect--that of refining or proving. We are told that God will do this in several passages: “I will refine them as silver is refined: the Lord your God proveth you.” Now there is so much alloy, even in our best services, that all this is necessary.

III. Do these things seem hard? Listen to the great comfort to be derived from our subject. It is all--if you turn to verse 16--to do thee good at the latter end. It is true, enemies mean mischief; false friends wish confusion of face: but, as Joseph said to his brethren who had sold him, and instrumentally had brought on him the miseries he suffered in Egypt, “Ye meant it for evil; but lo, God hath brought it to good,” so with Christians; the different tribulations and unevenness on their road, are the spurs which should quicken their pace to Jerusalem above, the mother of us all. (J. D. Day, M. A.)

Past recollections

I. Those words were addressed by God Himself to the Israelites. God has a right to call on each one of us to remember His guidance. Observe--

II. These words were spoken to a people, the great majority of whom were ungodly, wicked people. God has been leading them. They do not think so.

III. In calling us to remember, God has the most important practical purposes to answer. There is a moral purpose to every man’s life.

1. Humility.

2. Experience.

3. Freedom.

IV. There are many things we ought to remember. Infancy. Childhood. Opportunities of receiving truth. Trifling with religious impressions.

V. There must come a time when we shall be obliged to remember.

VI. Remembrance now will save us from all this. VII. The first effort to remember will be owned and blessed by a gracious Saviour. “I will arise,” etc. (W. G. Barrett, M. A.)

A New Year’s meditation

I. Let us emphasise the all, for on that word the emphasis of the sentence truly lies. Survey one part, and then not only the whole, but even that particular portion will inevitably be misunderstood. Take it all together. The very principle of it implies a wholeness, a continuity of purpose, which can only be fully comprehended in the result. It is a way somewhither. No way explains itself at every step. And believe that a Being of unerring wisdom laid the plan of your life course, the nature and conditions of your journey, and the certainty that that was the straightest way to your home. Believe that a Father’s wise and loving eye has surveyed the whole of it; and that not a quagmire, not a perilous passage, not a torrent, not a mountain gorge, not a steep, rocky path, not a bare, sandy plain, has been ordained that could have been spared. Thou shalt consider all the way. Consider--

1. That it is a way. That the character of the path is to be estimated not by the present difficulty or danger, but by the importance of the end. God says to you, as you would say to every traveller along a difficult path, “Look up; leave caring for the track at thy feet; look on to the end that is already in sight.” Full little cares the weary pilgrim for the roughness of the path or its peril; his heart strains on--Rome, Jerusalem, will reward it all. Is the end worth the toil? That is always the one question.

2. Consider the infinite variety of the way, the many rich elements and influences which it combines to educate your life. A dead and dreary monotony is no part of the plan of God in the education of His sons. If you want to see vast monotones, broad sand tracks, boundless plains, go to Asia and Africa, the continents of slaves and tyrants. If you want to see rich variety, hill and valley, tableland and plain, lakes, rivers, inland seas, and broken coastlines, come to Europe, the home of civilisation, the continent of freeborn and free-living men. And manifold in beauty, in variety, in alternations of scenes and experiences, is this wilderness way by which God is leading His sons. The valley, remember, is part of the mountain. If you will have the height of the one with its exhilaration, you must have the depth of the other with its depression. It is the memory of the depths that makes the heights so grand and inspiring.

II. Thou shalt consider the beauty of the way. I believe the wilderness to have been only less beautiful than Canaan. In many points, if not more beautiful, more striking and grand. It was a bright contrast to the dismal monotony and fatness of Egypt. And through the forty years’ journey that people had spread round them all the pomp and splendour of Nature, her grandest aspects, her most winning, witching smiles: “And thou shalt consider all the way by which the Lord thy God hath led thee.” Lift up thine eyes and take in all the beauty and goodness of the world. “O Lord, how manifold are Thy works, how beautiful; in wisdom and in goodness hast Thou made them all.” We none of us take half joy enough, the joy we have a right to take, in the goodly world which our God hath built. Poor we may be and struggling, and all the higher interests and joys of life, art, literature, music, may be tasted but rarely, and in drops. But the Great Artist has taken thought for the poor. He wills that their joys shall not be Song of Solomon. The beauty, the glory, which art at its highest faintly adumbrates, is theirs in profusion Thou shalt consider the good world through which the Lord thy God hath led thee.

III. Thou shalt consider the bread of the wilderness (Exodus 16:11). This miracle of the manna is a very wonderful miracle, repeated every day before our eyes. The God who made the manna their food makes bread of corn your food. It is good sometimes to get behind all the apparatus of laws which hide the hand of the living God from us, and take our daily bread, our daily breath, as the sparrows and the lilies take their food and their beauty, direct from the hand of our Father in heaven.

IV. Thou shalt remember the perils of the wilderness. It is distinctly by a perilous path God leads us, that we may see as well as dimly guess at our dependence, and ascribe our deliverances to the hand from which they spring. Life is one long peril. Physiologists say that if we could but see the delicate tissues which are strained almost to bursting by every motion, every breath, we should be afraid to stir a step or draw a breath lest we should rupture the frail vessels and perish. “Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long.” But it does keep in tune; it is in full tune this day. Remember the perils of the way. Remember the moments of sickness and agony, when death seemed to stand over you. There are deadlier perils than death around us each moment, perils which threaten the second death. Temptations of no common strain. Some of you, by a wonderful chain of providential agencies, have been delivered from positions which you felt to be full of peril, in which, had you continued, you must have fallen; but the net was broken and you have escaped. Thou shalt remember the sins of the wilderness.

VI. Thou shalt remember the chastisements of the way, and consider “that as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee.”

VII. Thou shalt remember the Elims of the way, the sunny spots, the living verdure, the murmuring fountains, the rustling, shadowing palms, where not seldom you have been permitted to lie down and rest. The wilderness had nooks as fertile, as beautiful as Canaan. Earth has joys, though rare, pure and deep as the joys of heaven. We are ever moaning over our sorrows. We take our mercies as a thing of course. “The people came down to Elim, where were springs and palms.” I do not catch the notes of a song of praise. Remember the way and count the Elims by which it has been gladdened, the moments of rapture in which the full heart, swollen almost to bursting, has murmured out its thanksgiving, and realised that “it is a blessed thing to be.”

VIII. Thou shalt consider the end of the way. Forget that, and it is all a mystery. “Be patient, brethren, and see the end of the Lord” (7-11). “The Lord doth bring thee in.” Every sorrow, toil, pain, chastisement He sends is to bring thee in with joy, with glory; to make thee rich for eternity. (J. B. Brown, B. A.)

Retrospect exhilarating

The face which the sculptor chisels or the artist paints as looking backwards is usually expressive of the extreme of sadness. Yet the recollection of the past which such a countenance suggests need not be full of gloom. There is a retrospect which only adds to the keenness of enjoyment. A few years ago a party crossed the backbone of Europe by one of the most picturesque of the passes that cleave the Alps. It was a steep pathway. Reflected by the rocky walls, the sun flung into his glances a heat like a tropic day. But at last they reached the summit. Before descending the other side they stopped and looked back upon the way they had already climbed. Winding far below, the difficult road was mapped out upon the shaggy slope. There were the cliffs they had scaled, the precipices along the edge of which their path had led, the dizzy chasms spanned by bridges seemingly as fragile as that the spider builds. And to stand upon that breezy elevation, to look back on such a pathway, and to know that over such obstacles they had triumphantly gained the very summit, was to drink the wine-cup of mental exhilaration. So do men generally look back from the summit of success. Such a retrospect is the ripest sheaf in the harvest of life. (Bishop Cheney.)

Memory a scribe

Aristotle calls it the scribe of the soul. (T. Watson.)

God’s leading

However quiet your life may have been, I am sure there, has been much in it that has tenderly illustrated the Lord’s providence, the Lord’s deliverance, the Lord’s upholding and sustaining you. You have been, perhaps, in poverty, and just when the barrel of meal was empty, then were you supplied. You have gone, perhaps, through fire and water, but in it all God’s help has been very wonderful. Perhaps you are like the Welsh woman, who said that the Ebenezers which she had set up at the places where God had helped her were so thick that they made a wall from the very spot she began with Christ to that she had then reached. Is it so with you? Then tell how God has led you, fed you, and brought you out of all your troubles. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

To humble thee and to prove thee.

The stages of probation

I. There has ever been a struggle between good and evil proceeding in the world--a struggle in which some have arrayed themselves on one side, some on another.

II. Again, the world grows in experience, increases its stores of knowledge, and its power over matter.

III. But now to come to a more definite illustration of the truth, that the individual is but the species in miniature. Ever since the creation of man, God has been proving His rational creatures by various dispensations.

1. Man, when ejected from Paradise, had a certain limited degree of light and help.

2. Man was next put under the restraints of human law--the warrant for the whole compass of human law being contained in that sentence, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” This was a new help, a new light. Did man recover himself under it from the ruins of the fall? Alas, no! Consider that one saying to Abraham, “The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” It shows that mighty nations had sprung up upon the earth’s surface who were forgetful of God, and among whom stalked oppression and lust, such as called down vengeance from heaven.

3. So a law was henceforth to be revealed from heaven, and to be made plain upon tables of stone, so that he who ran might read it. Surely when it was so explicit, when it had so manifestly the attestation of heaven, man’s evil propensities would not dare to break through its restraints. But the third dispensation failed, as the two preceding ones had done.

4. Subsequently the precepts of the law were expanded and spiritualised by the prophets, those inspired preachers raised up in orderly succession to bear their testimony for God in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. Still, man was unreclaimed: walked, as ever, in the way of his heart, and in the sight of his eyes. The servants who were sent to receive of the fruits of the vineyard were sent away empty, beaten, stoned, slain.

5. A pause, during which the voice of prophecy was hushed, and then full of augury and hope, the new dispensation, with its covenant of pardoning mercy and sanctifying grace, broke upon a world, which had as yet been stricken down and foiled in its every conflict with evil. A revealed Saviour, joining, in His mysterious Person, man with God--this was the new Light. A revealed forgiveness through His blood, of every transgression--this was the new encouragement. A revealed Sanctifier, who should take up His abode in the abyss of the human will, and there meet evil in its earliest germ--this was the new strength. In the long-suffering of God this dispensation is still running its course. (Dean Goulburn.)

Divine providence a moral discipline

I. Let us regard the text as indicating an enlarged experiment upon human nature, and illustrating the morality of Divine providence. The moral ends of providence are manifested--

1. In overruling the curse pronounced at the fall of man. Affliction, pain, and all the various ills that flesh is heir to are the means of bringing men to their right mind, of showing them the vanity of earthly things, and of maturing moral virtues and Christian graces. How few would regard their spiritual destitution but for this discipline! Even death itself is made a moral blessing. Its terrors lead men to seek Christ and a preparation for heaven; its uncertainty induces watchfulness.

2. There is a moral lesson in the present usual consequences of vice and virtue. The vices which are most injurious to society being poverty and shame, the virtues which are most conducive to the welfare of society are most favourable to the temporal welfare of individuals. Filthiness of the flesh usually has its fit punishment in the diseases of the flesh; filthiness of the spirit, its appropriate penal visitation in the disappointments and vexations of the spirit. The largest amount of temporal misery may be traced to idleness, indecision, improvidence, and transgression. And neglects from inconsiderateness, not looking about us to see what we have to do, are often attended with consequences altogether as dreadful, as from any active misbehaviour from the most extravagant passion. The consequences tread upon the heels of the fault; and indeed, vice generally becomes its own punishment.

3. Observe, also, the encouragements which providence furnishes to seek pardon at the hand of God. We are sinners, and have forfeited every blessing and enjoyment but such things as are essential to us as accountable beings--necessary to endow us with that responsibility in which the law of God contemplates us. Nevertheless, God continues to us innumerable forfeited blessings; and the continued bestowment, notwithstanding that they are abused, and converted into occasions of unthankfulness, or weapons of rebellion, marks a forbearance admirably calculated to “lead men to repentance.”

II. The particular ends of God’s providential dispensations towards the Church.

1. Since humility is the proper counter working of the fall, the first design named by Moses is “to humble thee.”

2. A second great object of the discipline of providence over the Church is here specified: “To prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no.” Not that the principles and fluctuating feelings of the heart are not fully known to God, but that we know not our own hearts. It belongs essentially to probation that we should be proved. Something must ever be left as a test of the loyalty of the heart. Every day offers a test to some part of our character. Some duty is required which is painful or disadvantageous to our temporal interests; or we are placed in such circumstances that our precise duty is involved in considerable obscurity, and requires patient thought and a conscientious balancing of reasons and scrutiny of motives. Thus God proves what value we set on acts of disobedience as such, and shows us that our virtue is to be estimated by the amount of temptation and the difficulties of obedience. (F. A. West.)

The blessing of temptation

It is the privilege of God’s people “that all things work together for their good.” St. Paul, when speaking of this, speaks of it as a certain and well-known truth. He does not say, “We know that all things are good”; but, “that all things work together for good.” Pain and sickness, poverty, contempt, provocations, wrongs and injustice, these are evils to the believer as much as to the unbeliever. But though evil in themselves, they work together for his good; like the storms and tempests, the cold frosts and piercing winds--they are often as necessary and useful to the harvest as the warm dews and gentle sunshine. It was so with God’s Israel of old. The words of the text show us this. It may seem strange to the carnal ear to affirm that temptation may be a great blessing; and even the believer, when hardly tried, may scarcely think it can be so; yet it is certainly true that temptation is a source of blessing to the real Christian. And thus, through the goodness and mercy of Almighty God, even Satan himself is made an instrument of good to His believing people.

1. We will consider how God proves us, and what we are to understand by this part of our subject. We at once see that by proving us the Lord must mean, not the finding out what we are, but the showing it. Man’s heart is not like a boxed mainspring of a watch, all but wound up from God’s sight, as it is from ours, and of which only a part of the chain, a few links now and then, may be seen moving across and over it, as the chain works round; but there is no covering over the mainspring of our hearts to God’s eye: glass is transparent, and hearts are glass to God. When God is said to have led His people “forty years in the wilderness, to prove them and know what was in their heart,” it was to show them and others what was in their heart, and not to know and find out for Himself. During these forty years He suffered them to pass through a variety of trials and temptations, all calculated to prove and show which among them would keep His commandments and which would not. So is it still with the professing Church of Christ. We must be proved as Israel was; for only they that are proved shall enter the heavenly rest. And temptations alone can prove us. Our honesty is proved when we were tempted to be dishonest, and through God’s grace resisted the temptation. Our truth is proved when we might have gained by untruth, and yet were enabled to overcome the temptation. Our chastity is proved when the allurements to sinful lusts were thrown in our way, and we shrank from the snare. Our trust in God is proved when we were in want or difficulties. But further, “They also help to make known what is in our hearts.” When God’s grace first comes into the Christian’s soul it is as when the windows of some old ruined house, long shut up in dust and neglect, are opened, the light is let in upon the rooms. It is as when those who have undertaken thoroughly to repair it, take up the floor, and take down the skirtings, and examine the timbers, and lay bare the drains. No one could have thought, even from the outward appearance, that such a mass of rotten timber, such a heap of dust and filth, and so many vermin, could have got together. And it is not till the work of repairing begins in our hearts that we begin to know anything of their real condition. While there is no light of God’s Spirit shining in us, we know nothing of our inward corruptions. We are like persons long used to the close, foul, and unhealthy air of some sick room; it, is not till we have left it, and felt the freshness and sweetness of the air of heaven, that we know what the other was. We cannot know what our heart is till we know what is in our heart; and we cannot know what is in our heart till that which is in is drawn out; and temptation alone can draw it out. It is temptation which shows us what is in our hearts--that brings out in various ways the miserable pride and self-conceit, the hypocrisy and dissimulation, the vain self-confidence, the impurity and uncleanness, the fear of man’s shame and love of man’s praise, the envy and jealousy, and all those other evil tempers and dispositions which are in every soul of man by nature, but which man only learns to know and feel by grace; and the great object of all the various trials and circumstances through which the believer is made to pass, as Israel through the wilderness, is “to show him what is in his heart.”

II. The effect of all this is “to humble him.” The self-righteous sinner is always a proud man: he has, indeed, nothing to be proud of, and everything to be ashamed of; but because he is blind to his sins and faults, blind to the real character of his heart, and ignorant of himself, he is proud, Now, no proud man ever came to Christ--no man that thinks himself righteous ever came to Christ. He may call himself a miserable sinner; but he does not feel or really believe what he says. The Christian wishes to be humble; but he is not what he wishes to be. He wishes “to learn of Him who is meek and lowly of heart,” and he is a learner in Christ’s school; but he is often humbled for his want of humility. Still, the growing experience of his heart is humbling him: he is becoming daily better acquainted with himself, and likes himself every day less and less. He once thought that, excepting a few faults (and those very few and very excusable and natural), there dwelt in him many good things. Now he can say, even from what he already knows, “that in him” (that is, in his flesh) “there dwelleth no good thing.” (W. W. Champneys, M. A.)

The moral discipline of man

I. It is a humbling work. To bring the soul down from all its proud conceits, vain imaginations, and ambitious aims, and to inspire it with the profoundest sense of its own moral unworthiness.

II. It is a self revealing work. “The evil principle sleeps in the spirit as the evil monster in the placid waters of the Nile; and it is only the hot sun, or the sweep of the fierce tempest, that can draw or drive it forth in its malignant manifestations.”

III. It is a divine work God alone is the true moral schoolmaster; He alone can effectually discipline the soul.

1. By the dispensation of events.

2. By the realities of the Gospel.

3. By His influence on conscience.

IV. It is a slow work. Goodness is not an impression, an act, or even a habit; it is a character, and characters are of slow growth. It is a growth, and requires cultivation--planting, nourishing, and seasonal changes. (Homilist.)

God “proves” His children

The suffering you see around you hurts God more than it hurts you, or the man upon whom it fails. But He hates things that most men think little of, and will send any suffering upon them rather than have men continue indifferent to them. Men may say, “We don’t want suffering: we don’t want to be good.” But God says, “I know My own obligations, and you shall not be contemptible wretches if there be any resource in the Godhead.” The God who strikes is the God whose Son wept over Jerusalem. (George Macdonald.)

The discipline of life

A touching story was told of a young man whose mother and father died, leaving him in the care of a guardian. He was put to work at a trade, and worked faithfully for years. When he was eighteen a companion said to him, “Why do you work so hard? Your father was rich, worth $500,000 and your guardian is keeping the money.” The young man then began to entertain hard feelings towards his guardian, and stopped calling upon him. But he kept on working. The day before he was twenty-one he was invited to take tea with his guardian and his wife. Just before supper his guardian called him aside and said to him, “Before your father died he asked me to be your guardian, and to withhold from you a knowledge of his circumstances. He wished you to learn a trade and to earn your own subsistence. I was only to assist you when you were in real need. He wished you to acquire industrious habits.” The young man was broken down. He wanted to explain. But the guardian would not permit it; no explanation or forgiveness was needed. So we are to pass through the discipline of life patiently, faithfully, industriously, until we enter into the inheritance above.

That He might humble thee.--

Afflictive dispensations of providence

I. The afflictive dispensations of providence are intended to humble believers by teaching them absolute and constant dependence on God for everything that they enjoy.

II. The afflictive dispensations of providence are intended to prove the sincerity and to increase the strength of religion in the heart of the godly. ‘Tis the battle that tries the soldier, and the storm the pilot. How would it appear that Christians can be not only patient, but cheerful in poverty, in disgrace, and temptations, and persecutions, if it were not often their lot to meet with these? He that formed the heart knows it to be deceitful, and He that gives grace knows the weakness and strength of it exactly. The Word of God speaks to men; therefore it speaks the language of men. “Now,” said the Lord to Abraham, “I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me.” In the wisdom of God, believers are thus put in possession of an undeniable evidence of their own sincerity, and which goes further to assure them of their final salvation than a thousand inward feelings, which are often the effect of imagination alone. It is of importance, besides, to observe that every such trial is a means not only of proving the reality of their religious principles, but of confirming and increasing them. It is with the mind as with the body. Exercise and exertion increase its vigour and strength.

III. Consider the ultimate desire and effect of all these dispensations. “To do thee good at thy latter end.” When entered into heaven, their knowledge will be enlarged and perfected; and what is at present concealed from them will burst on their view as a necessary part of the discipline of grace in conducting and completing their everlasting salvation. They will then perceive that by poverty they were guarded from the dangers to which wealth would have exposed them, or that the meanness of their station preserved them from the snares of ambition, or that sickness was the means of correcting their tendency to the pursuit of sensual pleasures and worldly joys. Penetrating into the counsels of the Lord, they will see the mercy even of His heaviest judgments, and the wisdom of His most unsearchable ways. At present they may be in heaviness through many tribulations, but the trial of their faith being much more precious than that of gold which perisheth, though it be tried with fire, shall be found to praise and honour and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (D. Dickinson, D. D.)

The design of affliction

There is a two-fold design of chastening. The first is self-revelation, “to know what was in thine heart.” Some things can only be got at by fire. There are depths in our consciousness that nothing can sound but pain, anguish, bitterness, sorrow. And these are not all bad; sometimes pain works its way down to our better nature, touches into gracious activity our noblest impulses, and evokes from our heretofore dumb lips the noblest prayer. Sometimes we see further through our tears than through our laughter. Many a man owes all that he knows about himself, in its reality and in its best suggestiveness, not to prosperity, but to adversity; not to light, but to darkness. The angel of trouble has spoken to him, in whispers that have found their way into the inmost hearing of the heart. The next design of affliction given in this quotation is “whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no.” Obedience is the purpose which God has in view. There can be no grand life until we have learned to obey. It is good for a man to have to obey. It is a continual lesson, a daily discipline. He gathers from it a true consciousness of his own capacity and his own strength, and he begins to ask questions of the most serious intent. From the beginning God’s purpose was that we should obey. You cannot obey in any good and useful sense the spirit of evil. You only get good from the exercise of obedience when that exercise goes against your own will and chastens it into gracious submission. Self-revelation and filial obedience--these are part of God’s design in sending afflictions upon us. Take another explanation: “I will forsake them, and I will hide My face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will say in that day. Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us?” Sometimes God’s withdrawments evolve from the heart, conscious of His absence the most poignant and eager prayers. He says, “I will go away that they may miss Me.” He says, “I will withdraw and cause the walls of their security to tremble and the roof of their defence to let the storm pour down through it, in order that they may begin to ask great questions.” He will not have us fretting the mind with little inquiries and petty interrogations. He will force us to vital questionings: “Are not these things come upon us because our God is not among us?” Why deal with symptoms and not with real diseases? Take another answer: “They shall bear the punishment of their iniquity. .. that the house of Israel may no more go astray from Me.” Punishment--meant to bring men home again. That is God’s weapon, and you cannot steal it. You do wrong, and the scorpion stings you. You cannot bribe the scorpion, or tame it, or please it. Do what you will, it is a scorpion still. You say you will eat and drink abundantly, and grow your joys in your body, and the blood saith, “No!” And every bone says, “No!” And the head and the heart say, “No! we are God’s, and not in us shall you grow any joy that is not of the nature of His own purpose and will.” The bones, the joints, the sinews, the nerves, the whole scheme of the physical constitution of man, all fight for God. What is God’s purpose in this? To bring you home again, and nothing else. Take another statement of the cause and purpose of God in this matter of afflicting men: “I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant,.. .there shall ye remember your ways, and all your doings, wherein ye have been defiled; and ye shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for all your evils that ye have committed.” There, again, is the internal mystery. It is not the heart that needs must be revealed. You cannot argue with a man who is running down to hell with the consent of all his powers. Argue with him! Your argument and eloquence would be thrown away upon him. You must so show the evil of his doings as to work in the man self-loathing. You may show him pictures of evil, and he will gaze upon them--nay, he will buy them and hang them up in his rooms at home and point them out to his friends as works of vigour and power and wondrous artistic skill. He will not regard them as mirrors reflecting his own image. The work must be done in his soul He must so see evil as to hate himself--self-disgust is the beginning of penitence and amendment. We all have affliction. Yours seems to be greater than mine; mine may seem to be greater than yours. But let us know that there cannot be any affliction in our life without its being under God’s control, and He will not suffer us to be tried above that we are able to bear, and with every trial He will make a way of escape. He does not willingly grieve the children of men. He is pruning us, cutting us, nursing us, purifying us by divers processes to the end that He may set us in His heavens--princes that shall go out no more forever. Let us next consider how variously, as to spirit and interpretation, affliction may be received at the hands of God. By “affliction” do not narrowly understand mere bodily, suffering, but trial of every kind, yea, the whole burden and discipline of life. We must go to history for our illustration, and, turning to history for my first illustration, I find that the discipline of life may be received impenitently. Hear these words in solemn and decisive proof: “If ye will not be reformed by Me by these things, but will walk contrary unto Me, then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.” I warn you, God will not give way--God cannot give way. The one thing God can do is to multiply your affliction seven times, and to cover up the arch of the sky with a night denser than has yet blackened the firmament. Turning to history again, I find that affliction may be received self-approvingly or self-excusingly, and so may fail of its benign purpose. The proof is in these words: “In vain have I smitten your children; they received no correction Thou sayest, Because I am innocent, surely His anger shall turn from me.” The correction has been administered, but has not been received. It has been misunderstood. It has been taken in hardness. It has been resented as an injustice. It has been treated as if it came from an enemy, and not from a friend. The deadly sophism of your innocence must be rooted out before you can be cured. The Pharisee must be destroyed before the man can be saved. Will you understand that? Turning again to history for illustration and argument, I find that affliction may be received self-deceivingly. The proof is in these words: “They have not cried unto Me with their heart, when they howled upon their beds.” Heart crying is one thing, and mere howling is another. Men come to us with sad stories of distress, and they make long moans about pain and fear, about poverty and uselessness. They use the words which penitents might use, but not in a contrite spirit. It is the flesh that complains; it is not the spirit that repents. When a bad man complains of his head, is he complaining of his sin? Is he not only waiting till he can gather himself together again that he may renew the contest against heaven, and endeavour to find on earth a root that was never planted there? One more point there is which I dare scarcely touch. How few know that the passage is in the Bible. It is a passage that proves that affliction may be received, in the fourth place, despairingly. Are there in any poems made by men such words as these? Tell me if any poet dare write such words: “They gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.” “My soul, come not thou into their secret.” Some man wrote these words who had seen hell. Do not trifle with the idea of future punishment. Whatever it be, it is the last answer of Omnipotence to rebellious man. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” This is not a question to be argued. When logician and speculist have accomplished their task there remains the unexplained word--hell! How are we receiving our afflictions? “Come now, let us reason together.” Ephraim of old was described as a “bullock unaccustomed to the yoke.” In some countries the bullock is used for ploughing and for drawing vehicles. The poor ox is yoked, and, being unaccustomed to the yoke, it chafes under it. Its great shoulders protest against the violation of liberty. By and by the bullock becomes accustomed to the treatment, and submits itself to the service to losses. It is not natural that we should do so; but, seeing that we have incurred them, we must receive them at God’s hand, and become accustomed to the discipline, and eventually submit ourselves to the service of God, which is the true liberty. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Development and discipline

The point of comparison brought to view in the text is between God’s treatment of the Israelites in the wilderness and His treatment of His peculiar people--or, if you please, of all mankind--in this world of probation.

I. We have here God’s providential treatment of men in this world set forth as a process of discovery. “God led them forty years in the wilderness, to prove them, and to know what was in their heart.” Under God’s providential economy earthly and practical life is but practical development. Man’s business on this sublunary platform is to work out his hidden character in the face of the universe--to make manifest his secret thoughts even in forms of materialism. The fashion of the man’s garments, the furniture of his dwelling, the pictures he hangs upon his walls, the volumes he places in his library, the places of his favourite recreation, the style of men with whom be delights to associate; yea, his very bearing as he mingles with men and walks in the market place--are all but the visible expression of the quality of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And this practical manifestation of character in life is with a great Divine purpose. In the case of the Israelites it was to show who, of the wanderers in the Exodus, were proper men to go over to Canaan; and in our case it is to show who, of these dwellers upon earth, are becoming meet for the heavenly inheritance. Not that God needs to learn this, but that He would have His universe know that He is just when He judges and clear when He condemns. And this, this is life! The development in actual forms of the hidden things of the spirit! This making known to a universe what there is in the heart! Oh, then, how awfully solemn a thing it is to live--just to live!

II. And it brings us to consider this other providential design--a process of discipline. “The Lord God led them forty years in the wilderness to humble them.’ Here, by a common scriptural figure, the great grace of humility is put metonymically for all the distinguishing graces of Christian character. And the meaning is, that God led them about in the wilderness as in a state of pupilage and preparation for the civil and ecclesiastical immunities of Canaan. And in illustrating this thought we only ask you to observe how earthly trials and affliction are the finest means of sanctification. You perceive at once, in the case of the Israelites, that if God had allowed them to pitch a permanent encampment in some fair oasis of the desert, then, instead of becoming more humble, they would have waxed worse and worse in arrogance and carnality. And it needed the burning sun, and the hot sand, and the fiery serpents, and the constant assaults of the fierce men of Amalek and Moab to humble them before God, and make them meet for a citizenship in the theocracy of Canaan. And so of Christians on earth--a moment’s consideration will show you how afflictions are, after all, the finest discipline of sanctification. Yes, yes, it is thus God sanctifies--He takes away the earthly, that the heart may rise to the heavenly; He tears the bark from its mortal moorings, that it may launch forth toward the eternal haven; He stirs up the nest of the slumberous eagle, that, with exulting pinion, it may soar to the sun! (C. Wadsworth.)

God’s training of men

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. (C. Kingsley, M. A.)