A Faithful God And a Corrupt People
October 27, 2022
Commentary
Moses was a great prophet, but he was also a song leader. After three sermons, he changed the presentation of his message to singing. This song gives a brief history of Israel. It reminds the people of their mistakes while warning them to avoid and repeat from them. It offers hope that comes only by trusting God. It tells how God will bless His people when they are faithful and how He will punish them when they reject His love. It was a song given to them by God. It was to be something like national anthem for them. Every Israelite was to learn it and teach it to their children. It begins with a description of God’s character and works (vv. 1-3). Anyone following the teaching of Moses in this song would become fruitful and prosperous in the way rain and dew refresh the new grass and tender plants. Our songs today should follow this pattern by revealing the greatness and goodness of the Lord and thus encouraging us to live for Him (v. 3). God is described as a rock (v. 4). The Lord is stable and dependable in a changing. He is faithful and always does what is morally right. In contrast His people could almost always be counted on to do wrong (vv. 5-9).
The Lord taught Israel about His protection using the metaphor of an eagle teaching it’s young how to fly (vv. 10-12). The mother eagle will push her little eaglets out of the nest, and when they don’t succeed, she catches them in her wings, putting them back in the nest. In the same way God pushes us out of the nest because he wants us to learn to fly. The song repeats how God had blessed and prospered Israel in the wilderness (vv. 13-14). Prosperity is more dangerous than adversity (v. 15). Adverse circumstances remind believers how desperate they are for God’s help, but it’s easy to forget God in times of prosperity. This song predicts the coming judgment on Israel because of their apostasy (vv. 18-21). If (and when) Israel sinned against the Lord by worshipping idols, God would withdraw his favor from them, and He would chasten them according to His promises. He would use hunger, pestilence, wild beasts, poisonous serpents, and war to carry out this destruction (vv. 22-27). The devastation would be so great that Israel would be nearly annihilated (v. 26).
Application
I thank the Lord for His tender watchful care over me just like the mother eagle teaching her young eaglets to fly. In many ways I am still learning to fly in the Christian life.
Deuteronomy 32:1– 27 (NET)
1 Listen, O heavens, and I will speak; hear, O earth, the words of my mouth.
2 My teaching will drop like the rain, my sayings will drip like the dew, as rain drops upon the grass, and showers upon new growth.
3 For I will proclaim the name of the Lord; you must acknowledge the greatness of our God.
4 As for the Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are just. He is a reliable God who is never unjust, he is fair and upright.
5 His people have been unfaithful to him; they have not acted like his children —this is their sin. They are a perverse and deceitful generation.
6 Is this how you repay the Lord, you foolish, unwise people? Is he not your father, your Creator? He has made you and established you.
7 Remember the ancient days; bear in mind the years of past generations. Ask your father and he will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you.
8 When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he set the boundaries of the peoples, according to the number of the heavenly assembly.
9 For the Lord’s allotment is his people, Jacob is his special possession.
10 The Lord found him in a desolate land, in an empty wasteland where animals howl. He continually guarded him and taught him; he continually protected him like the pupil of his eye.
11 Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that hovers over its young, so the Lord spread out his wings and took him, he lifted him up on his pinions.
12 The Lord alone was guiding him, no foreign god was with him.
13 He enabled him to travel over the high terrain of the land, and he ate of the produce of the fields. He provided honey for him from the cliffs, and olive oil from the hardest of rocks,
14 butter from the herd and milk from the flock, along with the fat of lambs, rams and goats of Bashan, along with the best of the kernels of wheat; and from the juice of grapes you drank wine.
15 But Jeshurun became fat and kicked; you got fat, thick, and stuffed! Then he deserted the God who made him, and treated the Rock who saved him with contempt.
16 They made him jealous with other gods, they enraged him with abhorrent idols.
17 They sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods they had not known; to new gods who had recently come along, gods your ancestors had not known about.
18 You forgot the Rock who fathered you, and put out of mind the God who gave you birth.
19 But the Lord took note and despised them because his sons and daughters enraged him.
20 He said, “I will reject them. I will see what will happen to them; for they are a perverse generation, children who show no loyalty.
21 They have made me jealous with false gods, enraging me with their worthless gods; so I will make them jealous with a people they do not recognize, with a nation slow to learn I will enrage them.
22 For a fire has been kindled by my anger, and it burns to lowest Sheol; it consumes the earth and its produce, and ignites the foundations of the mountains.
23 I will increase their disasters; I will use up my arrows on them.
24 They will be starved by famine, eaten by plague, and bitterly stung; I will send the teeth of wild animals against them, along with the poison of creatures that crawl in the dust.
25 The sword will make people childless outside, and terror will do so inside; they will destroy both the young man and the virgin, the infant and the gray-haired man.
26 “I said, ‘I want to cut them in pieces. I want to make people forget they ever existed.
27 But I fear the reaction of their enemies, for their adversaries would misunderstand and say, “Our power is great, and the Lord has not done all this!”’
Illustration: Franz Schubert Adoration For His Great Work
In 1818 Franz Schubert was in the midst of his greatest work when suddenly he died. But today the world still stands in reverence and adoration when the violins and the organ and the harps and the flutes play The Unfinished Symphony! (Encyclopedia of Illustrations #7362).