We ought to recall our life and to recall it in this way — as the demonstration of God's omnipresent, fatherly, providential care. We should have an autobiography in our minds, if not on paper, of the influences, and especially the personal influences, whicli
DEUTERONOMY viii. 2 9
Lave entered into our lives. We should recall the occasion when we met our best friend, or when we encountered the successful rival who snatched some prize from our hand, because that is in God's providence too. We should remember the time when we came across the book that opened a new world to us. We should remember the purposes that have been crossed, the hopes that have been frustrated, the aspirations that have been fulfilled, or that have not been fulfilled, and think to what all that has led in the providence of God. Nothing is more certain, whenever we begin to look back upon our life, than what the prophet Jeremiah says — " 0 Lord, ... it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." It is not we who have made our life what it is. It is not we ; it is God.
(4) " Remember the Lord thy God, for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth " (Deut. viii. 18).
The tendency of success is to make us forget God. The Psalms are full of that teaching, and so are the words of our Lord. Prosperity engenders the feeling that we are equal to anything. The rich man's wealth, as Solomon says, is his strong city. He entrenches himself in it, he fortifies himself in it, he feels secure in it. He is secure against chance, secure against accidents, secure against any reasonable or unreasonable kind of bad fortune, secure against Providence, secure against God. His very sense of being independent overleaps itself, and falls, before he knows it, into a kind of practical atheism. Well, here is a direction for the use of memory by prosperous and successful-f^^j^ men. "Eemember the Lord thy God, for it is he that giveth '^.Jjk thee power to get wealth." It is only when we remember God > that the getting of wealth ceases to be an end in itself. It is only when we remember God that the sense of responsibility attaches to success and to the possession of wealth.
The man who is making money almost unconsciously begins to feel as if he were independent. Of course there is a legitimate sense in which independence is to be aimed at. Burns speaks of " the glorious privilege of being independent." But how little, when we think of it, can independence really amount to ! The most prosperous man is not independent of his neighbours, of his servants, of the forces of nature ; and still less is he independent of God.
lo REMEMBER ALL THE WAY
(5) "Kemember what Amalek did unto thee by the way" (Deut. XXV. 17).
" By the way." Amalek had followed on the rear of Israel and cut off the stragglers, and shown every kind of inhumanity to the defenceless people. So what this suggestion means is Bomething like this : life abounds in illustrations of human character, even of inhumanity; as we live and come through things we see what men are capable of, and we are not to forget it ; it is to be remembered, not for vengeance, but for wisdom.
Now, perhaps that may seem an uncharitable, an unchristian counsel to some, but it is not really so. Have you noticed how often our Lord says, " Beware of men " ? There are persons and institutions that have shown their character, and are not to be trusted any more. They are thoroughly, and consistently, and in principle bad, and we should be false to what experience can teach if we forgot that and trusted them again. We know that there are institutions and movements which in the very soul of them are powers of darkness and of bondage, and can never be anything else, and that the Lord will have war with them from generation to generation. And it is not uncharitable to remember that, and to hold no terms with them. It is just gathering the heart of wisdom that God means us, by our experience, to get.^
II.
^*
Eemember all the Way. [^
1. The circumstances under which this exhortation was delivered were solemnly impressive. It was the speaker's purpose to hearten the people for the future by an appeal to the past ; he grounded faith and hope in experience. Glancing at the chapter which follows, we see that he does not allow his hearers to harbour any illusions as to what is about to be required of them. They are to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than themselves ; a people great and tall, of whom it had been said, Who can stand against the sons of Anak ? It is to nerve and animate them for this momentous and critical enterprise that he rehearses in their ears the experiences of the days gone by.
* J. Denney.
uV DEUTERONOMY VIII. 2 ii
The great leader of Israel in this memorial service made the memories of history sacramental. Thou shalt remember, he said ; and he forced it upon the worst man there, the man of narrowest and meanest intellect, the man of most selfish character, that he, too, had been hedged about with divinity, and that, however he might have rough-hewn them, an overpowering Providence had shaped his ends. Somehow he had to make valiant men, heroes, knights, out of tribes of craven and mean-spirited people, and infuse into a servile and pusillanimous host the spirit of con- querors. And he did it by these means. He read them chapters from their past, elucidated and interpreted them, until God's will, God's hand, God's presence became so manifest that the dullest laggard among them must have felt the lift of a great destiny. " Thou shalt remember."