(Fairbairn).
us
God Who is our Home.
The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms. — Deut. xxxiii. 27.
These words, while almost the last, are also among the most memorable, in the psalm so fitly described as " the blessing, wherewith Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death." They express one of the sublimest truths of faith — a truth Moses himself had realized in the court of Pharaoh, on the peak of Sinai, in the hurry of flight, and in the calm and glory of the Divine Face. He had finished his work, the law was given, the wilderness traversed, the goodly land in sight, and now he had but to be led by the hand of God to the top of Nebo, and thence into great eternity. The voice he knew and loved so well had said to him, " Get thee up into this mountain of Abarim unto Mount Nebo, and die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people." That was a very sweet and soothing command to the weary soul of the old man. His had been a long day; and now, travel-sick, toil-worn, in its mellow autumn twilight, he was to set —
As sets the morning star, which goes not down Behind the darkened west, nor hides obscured Among the tempests of the sky, but melts away Into the light of heaven.
But before he goes to the point of evanishment into the everlasting light, he pauses to bless the people; and as he stands on the border-land between time and eternity, feeling his soul in the hands of God, he utters this truth of highest, holiest import, " The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the ever- lasting arms."
The two lines of the text are not identical. The second line
is not a mere repetition of the first. It is the usual manner of
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6o GOD WHO IS OUR HOME
Hebrew poetry to run in couplets, but the second line of the couplet usually carries the thought a stage further than the first, or gives it a closer application. The thought of the first line is that God is the dwelling-place of His people, their home — with all that the word "home" carries or can carry to our hearts and minds. Then the second line arrests a possible doubt. Is there no danger that we may slip away from the Divine shelter ? We need not fear ; " underneath are the everlasting arms."
I.
The Eteknal God is thy Dwelling-place.
The children of Israel had need to be reminded of the eternal refuge and support when they were about to lose the presence and guidance of the man who had been their leader and companion in their toilsome and troubled march through the wilderness for forty years. Moses was leaving them, but leaving them with God. They were homeless, and their national future was un- certain and hidden ; but to-morrow, as to-day, from generation to generation, they would be in the presence and care of the Eternal, in the arms of the everlasting power and peace.
L The Eternal God. "I feel that if I can believe in God I believe in all that I need," wrote an eminent Presbyterian divine in the record of his private reflections. To believe truly and fully in God may be all that we really need to inspire and sustain our hearts, but this most necessary thing is the most difficult thing in the world. It is the hardest and rarest attainment of life. Oh blessed soul! that has reached and realized through its own experience this ancient and sublime trust : " The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms."
^ " The eternal God " is the God of old, literally aforetime. The word denotes what is ancient rather than what is eternal. It is often used of the Mosaic age, or other distant periods of Israel's past (Ps. xliv. 1, Ixxiv. 2, 12 ; Isa. li. 9 ; Mic. vii. 20), and even of a former period of a single lifetime (Job xxix. 2). It is used also of mountains (Deut. xxxiii. 15), of the heavens (Ps. Ixviii. 33). Besides the present text it is used of God in Hab. i. 12; Ps. Iv. 19 (where the RV. is "he that abideth of old").
DEUTERONOMY xxxiii. 27 61
1. What does a man mean when he says, " I believe in God " ? " God " is a most elastic term, capable of narrowing to suit the meanest capacity, of expanding to fill the largest. It seems to have a sense intelligible to the simplest mind, while to the pro- foundest it becomes the symbol of thoughts too high to be spoken, too immense to be comprehended. But though it may signify very different things to different minds, what it signifies does not thereby become unreal. It stands as the symbol of the best and highest Being man can conceive, his idea of the Being rising with his thought of the good and the high.
2. The notions of the men who first called the Being they worshipped God do not bind the latest; the word may remain while its contents are transfigured, as it were changed from one degree of glory to another. But while later ages may outgrow the ideas earlier ages expressed by the term " God," they do not outgrow the idea which the term represents. The symbol widens to their thought as the firmament has widened to the telescope, telling, as it widens, secrets before undreamed of, showing such infinite reaches of Space, such multitudes and varieties of star clusters, of worlds beyond worlds, as to awe the imagination in its loftiest mood.