3335. The Divine Discipline

A Sermon Published On Thursday, January 2, 1913.

Just as an eagle stirs up her nest, flutters over her young, spreads abroad her wings, takes them, bears them upon her wings: so the Lord alone led him, and there was no foreign god with him. {De 32:11,12}

1. Moses in this chapter is speaking concerning Israel in the wilderness. When the great host came out of Egypt, they were, through the debasing influences of slavery, — which are not easily or quickly shaken off, — not much better than a mere mob. They were not at all prepared to march at once to take possession of Canaan, nor to take part in the compacts of organized social life. Therefore God, instead of taking them by the short way along which they might have passed in a very few days, ordained it so in his providence that they should wander around for forty years in the wilderness — partly, it is true, as a punishment for their unbelief, but also in order that the nation might be trained and educated for its future destiny; made as fit as it could be, to be the custodian of the oracles of truth, and to be the receiver of the revelation which God intended to give to men.

2. If you will carefully read over the history of the children of Israel in the wilderness, I think you will see that the practical training which God adopted was, if they had been right-minded men, splendidly adapted to bring them to the very highest state of spiritual life. In some respects it was weak through their flesh, but the method itself was superlatively excellent. Here was a people taken away from the multitude of gods which they had been accustomed to see on every hand in Egypt, and they were taught to reverence an unseen God for whom they had no symbol whatever for some time; and afterwards, when symbolic worship in some form was ordained, yet there was still so little of symbol that Moses could say, “They saw no similitude.” They were trained to worship a spiritual God — in spirit and in truth. They never saw him, but every morning they had the best testimonies of his existence, for all around the camp lay the manna like hoar-frost, or dew, on the ground. Their feet did not become weary, neither did their garments become old all those years, and so about their very clothes on their bodies, and the food before them on their tables, they had constant proofs of the great God existing and caring for the sons of men. All of their training, while it educated and developed their patience and their faith, also had the high purpose of teaching them gratitude, and to bind them by the cords of love and the bands of a man to the service of God. It was not because the training was not wise in the highest degree, but because they were children who were corrupters, and, like ourselves, an evil and stiff-necked generation, that they did not learn, even when God himself became their Teacher.

3. Now in drawing a parallel between the children of Israel and ourselves, we shall invite you to notice, first, in the text: the Divine Instructor, “the Lord alone led them”; and then the method of instruction illustrated: they were trained as an eagle trains the eaglet for their flight.

4. I. First, then, we have — A DIVINE INSTRUCTOR.

5. The Israelites had for their guide, instructor, and tutor, in order to prepare them for Canaan, none other than Jehovah himself. He might employ Moses and Aaron, and he also made use of those marvellous picture-books, if I may so call them, of sacrifice, and type, and metaphor, but still God himself was their guide and their instructor. And it is so with us. The Holy Spirit is the teacher of the Christian Church. Although he uses this Book, of which we can never speak too highly, although he still uses the ministry of the Word, for which we are thankful as for a lamp which we trust may never be taken out of its place, still our true teacher is God the Holy Spirit. He instructs us in the truth, and, meanwhile it is also God who in the rulings and guidings of providence, is our Instructor if we will only learn; teaching us sometimes by sweet mercies, and at other times by bitter afflictions, instructing us from our cradles to our graves, if we will only open our eyes to see and our ears to hear the lessons which he writes and speaks. We, alas! are often as the horse and as the mule which have no understanding; and will not be taught by the providential teachings, but still we have God to be our Teacher, and it is none other than our heavenly Father who is daily training us for the skies. If we are indeed his children, and can say, “Our Father, who is in heaven,” we may also go to him as our Teacher, believing he will yet, notwithstanding all our folly, make us “fit to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.”

6. The text speaks of “the Lord alone.” Brethren, it is good for us that in providence we are led by “the Lord alone.” There is an overruling hand after all, notwithstanding our follies and our wilfulness, so that God’s purposes are ultimately fulfilled. But I wish this were more true to our consciousness, that we are led by “the Lord alone”; I mean that we waited on him at every step of life. I am persuaded that the holiest of characters take more matters to God than you and I are accustomed to do: I mean they not only consult him, as we do, on certain great and critical occasions; but those saints who live nearest to Christ, go to him about little matters, thinking nothing to be too trifling to tell into the ear of Christ.

7. Some things about which they will not even consult their kindest and wisest human friends will be matters of consultation between them and their Saviour. Oh, what mistakes we should escape, what disasters we should avoid, if “the Lord alone” guided us: and if we watched the signs of his hands in guiding us, if our eyes were to him as the eyes of the handmaidens are to their mistress, anxious to know the Lord’s will, and always saying to our own selfishness, “Down, down, busy will; down you proud spirit! What would you have me to do, my Master, for your will shall be my will, and my heart shall always give up its fondest wish, when once I understand what your will is concerning me.” Beloved, I am afraid that some foreign god is often with us, even with us who are the people of God. We are united to God, and he will gladly teach us, and we should only learn from him; but we often harbour in our heart idolatrous thoughts. All selfishness is idolatry; all repining against the providence of God has in it the element of rebellion against the Most High. If I love my own will, and if I desire my own way in preference to God’s way, I have made a god of my own wisdom, or my own affection, and I have not been true in my loyalty to the only living and true God, even Jehovah. Let us search, and look, and see if there is not some foreign god with us. It may be hidden away, perhaps, and we may scarcely know it; it may be hidden, too, in that very part of us where our dearest affections dwell. Some Rachel may be sitting in the tent on the camel’s saddles under which the false gods are concealed. Let us, therefore, make a thorough search, and then invite the Great King himself to aid us. “Search me, oh God, try me, and know my ways, and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

8. The great truth which I want to bring forward, if I can, is this: that God in his providence and in grace, as far as we have been made willing to learn of him, is educating us for something higher than this world. This world is the nature in which we dwell. Sometimes we who love the Lord mount up from it with wings as eagles, but we do not keep on the wing. We drop again: we cleave to earth. It is our mother, and it seems as though we can never rise permanently above our kinship to it. It is very powerful in its attraction over us. Down we come again. We have not yet learned to keep up there, where the atmosphere is clear, and where the smoke of the world’s cares will not reach us. But God is educating us for the skies. The meaning of these trials of yours, the interpretation of your sorrows, is this: God is preparing you for another state, making you fit to dwell with angels and archangels, and the spirits of the just made perfect. If this earth were all, then, your teachers at school, or your tutors when you passed through college, might have sufficed; but this world is only the vestibule to the next, and if you know, as well as man can teach you, how to play your part here with a view only to secular advancement, yet you are not educated at all in the highest sense. God himself must teach and train you, so that you may be fit to sit among the princes of the blood-royal before his throne, and to have communion with those celestial spirits who —

         With songs and choral symphonies

   Day without night circle his throne rejoicing.

God is teaching you. Only God can do it, and he will do it, but take care that you put away all foreign gods, and give yourselves up entirely to his guidance, submitting your will and your affections, and all parts of your spirit and nature to his teaching; so that you may be found fully ready when he shall say, “Come up here to dwell with me for ever.”

9. II. Now, passing from that, we shall notice very briefly indeed — THE METHODS OF THE DIVINE INSTRUCTION.

10. These methods of divine instruction are given to us under the very poetic picture of the eagle training its young ones for flight. God, to accommodate himself to our poor understandings, sometimes compares himself to a father with children; at other times to a mother with her little ones; sometimes even to an animal. In this case, even to a bird of prey, so that we may only learn no depths of condescension are too great for the Great Teacher. He compares himself here, then, to the eagle. I suppose that Moses was well acquainted with the eagle’s natural habits. He describes it, first of all, as stirring up its nest, as though the young birds were loathe to stir from their pleasant home. Having from the time of their birth been quiet and happy there, they had no anxiety whatever to try the blue unfathomable oceans of the air. They had no wish to leave the rocky refuge where they had been raised. They feared, perhaps, lest they might fall over the precipices and be dashed in pieces. Therefore it is said, “The eagle stirs up her nest.” She makes it uncomfortable for the little ones, so that they may be willing to leave it, and what would have been obnoxious and burdensome to them, they may come even to desire, namely, to be out of the nest. Someone has quaintly said, that the eagle puts thorns into the nest, which prick the fledglings, so that they are anxious to get away.

11. It is certain that God does this with those he would train for the skies. He stirs up their nest. Cannot some of you remember times when your nests were stirred by providential dealings while you were in sin? All things went well with you for a time, but you forgot God, and his son Jesus had no attractions for you. But suddenly the child sickened or the wife was struck with death, or your business failed, or you yourselves were ill, or there was a famine in the land. Then it was, when you were in poverty, your nest being thoroughly stirred up, that you said, “I will arise and go to my Father.” The land of Goshen was like a nest to the Israelites. They had no desire to leave it, but God stirred them up by means of Pharaoh, who kept them in heavy bondage, put them to brickmaking, and then to make bricks without straw, and then killed their male children. In all kinds of ways they were made to cry out under the bitter yoke. We know that they loved that nest, for they often longed to be back in it. They talked about the leeks, and the garlic, and the onions, and the cucumbers which they ate when they were in Egypt, so that the nest seems to have been a tolerably downy one for them at one time. But God so stirred it up, that they longed to be away, and even the howling wilderness seemed a paradise compared with the house of bondage. So it was with you. You found that the world was not what it seemed to be. Troubles increased, providential afflictions trod on each other’s heels, and then you turned to your God, and remembered your sins. And so he stirred up your nest, by inward trouble under conviction of sin. I know my soul’s nest was very soft once. I thought I had done no great evil, that I had kept God’s commandments from my youth up. But when conviction of sin came, then I discovered that my heart was deceitful more than all things, and desperately wicked. Then my sins, like so many daggers, were at my heart, my soul was torn: I could say with gracious George Herbert, —

   My thoughts are all a case of knives,

      Wounding my heart.

There was no rest, no peace, no joy, no comfort to be found. Well, that was God stirring up the nest. If there are any of you in that condition now, — uneasy and troubled about sin, I am glad of it. Your nest is being stirred, and may God grant that you may fly from it and never come back to that nest again!

12. If all had gone smoothly with you, if sin had always been a sweet morsel to your tongue, we might despair of your ever being saved; but now you feel the smart of it, I trust it is, in order that you may be delivered from its guilt, and led to find a Saviour. Well, since that, dear friends, how many times we have had our nests stirred up! I do not know your history, but you do, and I ask you now to look it over. Oh, you planned, and planned, and planned, and said, “Now I shall live in this house for the next twenty or thirty years; I shall live here, certainly, as long as I live anywhere,” and now you find yourselves, perhaps, fifty or a hundred miles from it. You were in the employ of a certain kind man, and you felt very happy in it, but the firm has been dissolved, and where are you now? There is that dear child you have set your heart on; you have said, “What a mercy it will be to see him growing up! What a comfort he will be to me!” He is not a comfort to you, but just the very opposite, for he is your greatest sorrow. It is God stirring up your nest. Whereas a few years ago you were in good, sound health, now the eyes begin to fail, or the ears are giving way, or there is some internal complaint, or some constant pain. Whereas years ago you were a master, you are now a servant; whereas years ago everyone looked up to you, now everyone looks down on you. It is all the stirring up of the nest, because you have no permanent city here; because you were too prone to say, “My mountain stands firm; I shall never be moved,” therefore God has stirred up your nest, and he will do it yet again and again. Between now and heaven how many times will the nest of ours be stirred? Oh, blessed be God for it! “Moab is settled on his lees: he has not been emptied from vessel to vessel”; and then comes a curse on him. Sometimes these long periods of prosperity, and rest, and ease are very unhealthy for us poor unworthy and sinful beings. If we were more like Jesus, if we were more pure and heavenly, we could handle prosperity; but because we are so sinful, I question if any of us can handle it for long. If the Master shall give some of us outward prosperity, he will have to whip us behind the door in private, to keep us right. We must have some thorn in the flesh, some secret grief: there must be some skeleton in the cupboard, some spectre in some room of the house, or else we shall say, “Soul, take your ease, you have many goods laid up for many years,” and when we do this we shall be modern fools, like the great fool of old. But the gracious Lord will not let his people get into that state. Again and again, and yet again, against their wishes, and contrary to their expectations, he will stir their nest, and they shall cry out against it, but if they only knew the meaning of it, or could read it all in the light of eternity, they would bless the hand which tears away their comforts, seeing divine wisdom and infinite affection in it all. That, then, is the first thing: God instructs his people to mount aloft by stirring up their nests.

13. The next picture is the eagle fluttering over her young. What is that for? She wants them to mount, my brethren. Well, then, in order to teach them to mount she first mounts herself, “she flutters over her young.” She moves her wings to teach them that they must move their wings like this, that they must mount like this. There is no teaching like teaching by example. We always learn a great deal more through our eyes and ears than we do merely through our ears, and those of us who cannot preach with our mouths would do well to preach with our lives, which is the very best kind of preaching. So God preaches to us. If he would have us holy, how holy he is himself! “Be holy for I am holy.” Would he have us generous? How generous is he! “He did not spare his own Son, but freely delivered him up for us all.” Would he have us forgive our enemies? How he delights in mercy himself! If we want a picture of perfection, where can we get it but in God? “Be perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.” God shows us his law in his holy actions, he being himself the very mirror and paragon of everything that is absolutely pure and right. Above all, the Lord has been pleased to set us an example of mounting above the world, in the person and life of his own dear Son. Oh, how the eagle flutters when I look at the Saviour!

   Such was thy truth and such thy zeal,

   Such deference to thy Father’s will,

   Such love and meekness so divine

   I would transcribe and make them mine.

   Cold mountains and the midnight air

   Witnessed the fervour of thy prayer:

   The desert thy temptations knew,

   Thy conflict and thy victory too.

   Be thou my pattern: make me bear

   More of thy gracious image here,

   Then God the Judge shall own my name

   Amongst the followers of the Lamb.

14. Beloved, see how our Lord Jesus mounts to heaven today. He is there: he has gone there so that our hearts may follow him. He fluttered to the skies so that we might also follow, and might rise above the world, setting our affections no longer on the things of earth, but on things above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God. What way could there be of teaching us tenderness like the tenderness of the Saviour? What method of teaching us love, like the display of the love of God in Christ Jesus? Would you learn? If you will not learn with Christ for your pattern, in what school shall you be trained? Brothers and sisters, I commend you to the picture of the eagle fluttering and by doing so setting an example to its little ones. You also may see before your eyes the great incarnate God teaching you how to mount above the trials and temptations of this mortal life, and living a celestial life even on earth.

15. This, however, is nor all the eagle does. We read in our text that she then spreads abroad her wings, takes them, bears them on her wings. I suppose this means just this, that spreading her wings she entices her young ones to get between her wings on her back, and then she mounts and flies towards the sun. It may be a fable or not, I do not know, that she flies towards the sun to teach her eaglets to bear its blaze. Then, when she has mounted to a good height, she suddenly shifts her wings and throws the young eaglets off, and there they are on their wings. They begin to descend to earth, not able to keep themselves up, but compelled to fly, but before they fall on the rock she makes a swoop and comes under them, and catches them on her wings again, gives them a little rest; bears them up once more, and then throws them off again, so that they must fly. But she takes care that these early trials, for which they are scarcely able, shall not end in their destruction, for again she makes another swoop and catches them between her wings once again.

16. This is the picture of what God does to us again. We must speak of him according to the metaphor which he himself uses — he takes us up between those mighty wings, and bears us as high as we dare go, and only pauses because he knows we cannot bear more now. Then, when we have had full fellowship, and looked the sun in the face, and have had bright enjoyment of heaven, as far as we could bear them, he throws us off suddenly and makes us try our own wings, and alas! they are very feeble and weak indeed. We discover then our own impotence, and we think we shall fall like stars, and be dashed in pieces, but lo! he comes, and underneath us are the everlasting wings, and just when we thought we should surely come to destruction, we find ourselves safely sheltered between the mighty pinions of the Eternal God. Up, again, we mount, and before long we are thrown off again — cast away, as it were, for a time; his face is hidden from us, or else by some outward trial of providence we are made to try our wings again to see whether our faith will keep us up, and by degrees it comes to pass that we learn to fly until we love flying, and are not satisfied to come back to earth any more, loving to fly, and often sighing and longing for the day when we shall be permitted to —

      Stretch our wings and fly

   Straight to yonder worlds of joy.

Do you not feel sometimes as if your wing-feathers were come, my brethren? Surely you must sometimes feel as though your faith were growing stronger, and your communion with Christ getting clearer; as though you anticipated and felt that the time must be drawing near when you could mount to dwell where Jesus is. I am thankful if such is your experience, but I should not wonder if you find that all the wing-feathers which you have will be all too few for you, for you may yet be made to have another descent from between the almighty wings, and be made once again to see how great your weakness is. One other thought, however, occurs to us. There is no doubt that the idea of security as well as of teaching is here, because when the eagle bears her young ones on her wings, if the archer, or in these modern days the hunter with his rifle, should seek to destroy the eaglets, it is plain there is no reaching them without first killing the mother bird. So there is no destroying possible for the true people of God. “Greater is he who is for us, than all who can be against us.” God puts himself between his people and the danger which threatens them, and unless the foe should be mightier than God himself — which is inconceivable — there is no soul that trusts in him which shall know eternal harm.

17. Oh, how glorious a thing it is to feel, when the light air is all around me, and I know that if I fall I should perish, that yet I cannot fall, for God’s wings bear me up, and to feel that though there are hosts of enemies able to destroy me if they can get at me, yet they cannot, for they must first get through God himself before they can get to the weak soul that hangs on Jesus and rests only in him. Well did David say, “In the time of trouble he will hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me: he shall set me up on a rock.” You know the threefold metaphor. The “pavilion” stood in the middle of the camp, and all the armed men kept watch around the royal tent. There was no killing the man who was hidden in the royal pavilion unless the king himself were destroyed. And unless divine sovereignty is overthrown not one of the elect can perish. Then, again, there was “the secret of the tabernacle.” That was the most holy place, into which no one entered but the high priest once a year, and there God said he would put his child, so that they must first break through and dare the very Shekinah, and come before the brightness, the destroying brightness, of Jehovah’s face, before they can reach the soul that trusts in the mercy seat on which the blood was sprinkled. Then, there is the third figure — “he shall set me up on a rock” — so that the rock itself must shake; the immutability of God itself must cease to be, and God’s everlastingness must die before it shall be possible for a soul to perish that rests in him. The eagle takes up the eaglets on her wings, and bears them, so in this way God leads, and trains, and guides us for the skies.

18. Dear brothers and sisters, I shall not detain you longer, except to say that if God is training you for the skies — oh, let your hearts go up. Do not grovel below.

   Go up, go up, my heart,

      Dwell with thy God above;

   For here thou canst not rest,

      Nor here give out thy love,

   Go up, go up, my heart,

      Be not a trifler here:

   Ascend above these clouds,

      Dwell in a higher sphere.

   Let not thy love flow out

      To things so soil’d and dim;

   Go up to heaven and God,

      Take up thy love to him.

   Waste not thy precious stores

      On creature-love below;

   To God that wealth belongs,

      On him that wealth bestow.

You are a stranger here. If you are God’s child, then, you are a citizen of another country. Are there any bands to bind you here? I thought he had broken them. Have you never said —

   The bands that bind my soul to earth

      Are broken by his hand:

   Before his cross I find myself

      A stranger in the land.

19. Are there loved ones to bind you here?

   Thy best-beloved keeps his throne

   On hills of light in worlds unknown.

All the love you dare to give, if you are true to Christ, to everything below, can be as nothing compared with the love which you give to him. Do you not feel your soul now drawn towards him? At least, if you cannot fly on the wings of confidence, fly on the wings of desire. A sigh will mount to him, or he will come down to it. Only do not be fond of this world. Do not let this thick clay cleave to you. You are not earth-born now; you are born from above. This corruptible world must not claim you, for you are born again from incorruptible seed. You are not this world’s property; you are bought with a price by him who prays for you that you may be with him where he is and behold his glory. I am ashamed of myself that I who talk like this with you should so often grovel here; but this one thing I must say — I am never happy except when my soul is up with my Lord. I know enough of this to admit that it is my misery to feed on the ashes of this world, to lie among the pots, to serve the brick-kilns of this Egypt. There can be no peace between my soul and this world. Oh, I know this, for this painted Jezebel has mocked me too often, and she has become so ugly in my esteem that I cannot endure her. But yet — what shall we say of our nature! — we go back again to the Marah, which was bitter for us to drink, and try to drink from it again, and the broken cisterns which previously held no water we flee to, again and again. Oh, for more wisdom! The Master has taught us, but he has been so long a time with us, and we have not known him. Yet may he have patience with us, until he has taught us to mount above the world and dwell where he is!

20. Ah, dear friends, there are some of you to whom I cannot talk in this way because you cannot mount. You have nowhere to mount to. Oh, may the Master stir up your nests! I pray that he may put the thorns of conscience into your pillows tonight. May you remember those sins which God hates and which God will punish, and if you do remember them and feel bowed down under their weight, then remember that there is one who can help you and who will help you, even the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to him in the hour of trouble, and he will be your deliverer. May the Lord bless these thoughts to all our souls for Jesus’ sake.

Exposition By C. H. Spurgeon {De 29:1-21}

1. These are the words of the covenant, which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, besides the covenant which he made with them in Horeb.

That is the preamble, just as in legal documents there is usually some statement of the purport and intent of the indenture before the matter is proceeded with. These covenants with God are solemn things, and therefore they are given in a formal manner to strike attention, and command our serious thoughts.

2-4. And Moses called to all Israel, and said to them, “You have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land; the great temptations which your eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles: yet the LORD has not given you a heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, to this day.

You saw all that, and yet did not see it; you saw the external work, but you did not perceive the internal lesson. A very mournful statement to make; but God’s servants are not sent to flatter man but to speak the truth, however painful the speaking of it may be.

5, 6. And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandals have not worn out on your feet. You have not eaten bread, neither have you drunk wine or strong drink: so that you might know that I am the LORD your God.

Either there had been means of frequent renewal of their clothing, or else by a miracle these clothes had never worn out; and the very sandals that they put on their feet on the Passover night were still on their feet; if not the same yet still they were shod, though they trod the weary wilderness which well might have worn them out until they were bare. “You have not eaten bread, neither have you drunk wine or strong drink”: — a nation of total abstainers for forty years. There was no bread in the wilderness for them, and there was no wine. It may have been obtained as a great luxury, as it probably was, for we have reason to believe that Nadab and Abihu were slain by fire before the Lord because they were drunk when they offered unauthorised fire; but taking all the people as a whole, anything like wine had not crossed their lips for forty years, yet there they were, strong and healthy. “That you may know that I am Jehovah your God.”

7. And when you came to this place, Sihon the king of Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, came out against us to battle, and we conquered them:

People not used to war either, and feeble folk, yet they conquered the great kings and killed mighty kings, for the Lord was with them.

8, 9. And we took their land, and gave it for an inheritance to the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to the half tribe of Manasseh. Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, so that you may prosper in all that you do.

This, then, was the covenant made with the nation, that God should be their God and he would prosper them: as he had done, so he would do: he would be their protector, defender, strength, and crown and joy.

10, 11. All of you stand today before the LORD your God; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, and your stranger who is in your camp, from the hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water:

This national covenant embraced all the great men, the captains, the wise men, all who were in authority, “your elders, and your officers.” It took in all their children, for it was a covenant according to the flesh, and their children according to the flesh are included. “Your wives,” too, for in this matter their was no gender. “The stranger also.” Here we poor Gentiles get a glimpse of comfort, even though we seem to be excluded from that old covenant. “Your stranger who is in your camp” is included. And the poorest, and those who performed the most menial service, were all to be made partakers of this covenant, “from the hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water.”

12-15. That you should enter into covenant with the LORD your God, and into his oath, which the LORD your God makes with you today: that he may establish you today for a people for himself, and that he may be for you a God, as he has said to you, and as he has sworn to your forefathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; but with him who stands here with us today before the LORD our God, and also with him who is not here with us today:

With the sick who were at home, with the generations that were not yet born, for this was intended to be a national covenant in perpetuity to their children and their children’s children to the end of time. Had they kept it, it would have continued.

16, 17. (For you know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt; and how we came through the nations which you passed by; and you have seen their abominations, and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them:)

Now you have seen how they worshipped idols; you have seen so that you may avoid; you have beheld their folly so that you may escape from it.

18. Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that bears gall and wormwood;

For the worship of false gods is the cause of untold mischief and evil: wherever it is found it is a root that bears gall and wormwood, and God would not have it in a single individual, man nor woman, no, not in a single family or tribe.

19. And it may not happen, when he hears the words of this curse, that he blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of my heart, to add drunkenness to thirst’:

For there were some who so hardened themselves against God that they said, “We shall have peace: let us do what we like: let us worship these idol-gods more and more and more: let us add drunkenness and idolatry to our thirst.”

20. The LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie on him,

Not light on him, but lie on him, rest there and stay there.

20, 21. And the LORD shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the LORD shall separate him out from all the tribes of Israel for adversity,”

Just as a huntsman separates a stag from the herd that he may hunt it all the day, so shall God with any idolater who should come among his people with whom he made a covenant that day. Oh, how God hates that anything should be worshipped by us but himself: how indignant is he if anywhere anything takes the supreme place in the human heart which ought to be occupied by God alone.