wicked Canaan should occupy that land, and prepare it, as it were, for Israel ; and that the Israelites should be just ready to possess it when the inhabitants should have filled up the measure of their iniquities, and become ripe for the execution of the curse of God upon them. It was in reference to the children of Israel that " the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance," and set the bounds of each peculiar people b.
The manner also in which he had brought them to it is parti- cularly specified. He had brought them through a waste howling wilderness, where he had preserved them by an unin- terrupted series of miracles, and had instructed them in the knowledge of his will, and had kept them as the apple of his eye, and had made them the objects of his tenclerest solicitude, like the eagle fostering, instructing, and protecting her help- less offspring0.
The richness of the provision which he had made for them is also described in animated and appropriate terms. The fer- tility of the land, the stores administered even by its barren rocks, the countless multitudes of its flocks and herds, together with the abundance of its produce in corn and wine, all are set forth, in order that the nation even to their latest posterity might know how to appreciate the goodness of God to them, and be suitably impressed with a sense of their unbounded obligations'1.]
2. Prophetic —
[God had before declared what the ultimate fate of that nation would be : but here he states it in a compendious way. He foretells both their sins, and their punishment. Notwith- standing all that he had done for them, they would soon forget him, and would stupidly worship the idols of the heathen, which had not been able to protect their own votaries. Thus would they entirely cast off their allegiance to him, and provoke him to execute upon them his heaviest judgments e. Even for their past abominations he would have cast them off, if he had not been apprehensive that their enemies would have exulted, and taken occasion from it to harden themselves in their atheistical impiety. But by effecting his purposes in the first instance, and delaying his judgments to a future and distant period, he should cut off all occasion for such vain triumphs, and should display at once his mercy and forbearance, his power and justice, his holiness and truth f.
The terms in which his judgments are predicted necessarily carry our minds forward to the times of the present dispersion.
b Deut. xxxii. 8. c Deut. xxxii. 10 — 12.
d Deut. xxxii. 13, 14. e Deut. xxxii. 15 — 20, 22 — 25.
f Deut. xxxii. 26, 27.