The passage: Moses prays that God not destroy Israel, His people and inheritance, whom He redeemed and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. He asks God to remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and not look at the people’s stubbornness, wickedness, and sin — lest Egypt say that the Lord brought them out only to kill them in the wilderness, because He could not bring them into the promised land, or because He hated them. Yet, Moses says, they are still God’s people and inheritance, whom He brought out by His mighty power and outstretched arm.
This prayer brings out at its sharpest a contrast running through Deuteronomy and the whole Bible: the Israelites are God’s people, His inheritance, redeemed by His hand — and they are stubborn, stiff-necked, wicked. We grow so used to passages containing both descriptions that we attach little meaning to either. When we study the history with real, practical interest, the sins denounced become plain enough, since they resemble our own. But while we dwell on those sins, how can we also think of this people as righteous, holy, chosen out of all the earth? The words come to feel technical in our minds. The holiness ascribed to the nation, we suppose, cannot be the same holiness ascribed to Moses, or Elijah, or Jeremiah — the word must carry a different force in each case. We are afraid to believe that Scripture’s language is as strict and honest as the language of fallible men; by tampering with it a little we hope to avoid calling evil good and good evil.
This state of mind cannot be right. A seed of insincerity lies in it, bound to bear fruit later in contradictions of belief and conduct. It cannot be cured by stifling the doubts it breeds — those doubts will work their way into the innermost corners of our minds. So long as we suspect that Righteousness and Holiness are merely conventional words in the Bible, we will not regard the Bible as a true book, however much reverence we seem to pay it. We have every interest, then, in resolving this difficulty rather than glossing over it. It touches closely on what I have lately been discussing. Last Sunday I spoke of Christ’s call to a Church to remember, hold fast, and repent, and applied it to the Nation and Church of England — Christ speaking to us as to the Sardians. I said that if we heeded this we might bind different classes together, reconcile some who are most hostile and suspicious of us, appeal to Protestants and Romanists alike, and make them fellow-workers instead of foes.
I knew this language would sound unreal to some whose faith and earnestness I would most wish to share fellowship with. “What,” they will say, “do you mean by national righteousness, national repentance? We know something of individual righteousness and repentance. There was a time when visible things attracted us without limit, when we thought the highest end of life was to gain the largest share of them or the greatest enjoyment from them. These charms were taken away, or proved hollow. Vacancy and dreariness followed; then a vision of a higher good appeared. We tried to grasp it and could not. An evil in ourselves, till then hidden, was revealed to us. We cried to be delivered from it. At last we perceived that there was a Deliverer. We prayed to be admitted into His household, if only as menials, and learned that He was far more willing to grant that than we were to ask it.”
These experimental records bear the clearest stamp of truth, and are as beautiful and comforting as they are true. They explain moral facts as scientific discoveries explain physical ones — facts we all want to understand, some almost desperately. But from them, it is supposed, we can deduce the nature of righteousness and repentance itself. Taking them as the starting point, it is concluded that a righteous society is one containing a great number of such righteous penitents. “Strictly, it should contain nothing else,” it is said, “but that is an ideal we must do without here — a rough, distant approximation must satisfy us. A nation’s sword may cut off its worst members, a Church’s discipline may remove more; but those in direct personal relation with God, more than merely decorous, must remain an insignificant minority. The comfort is that, though of little account in men’s eyes, they alone draw the Divine favor; for their sakes the whole order of Nature and policy of Nations is allowed to exist; and in time these will pass away, leaving the chosen Saints the sole possessors of blessings the ungodly had briefly seized.”
That such conclusions about God’s ways sound revolting at first, and clash with what we thought Scripture taught of His character, may be no reason to reject them or the facts behind them. But it would be a serious objection if they clashed with the principles and method of the very Book they claim as their authority. A little reflection, I think, will show that this is exactly the case.
One crucial contrast appears the moment we open Scripture: it is not the record of a man seeking God, but of God seeking men. Exodus gives us clear records of Moses’ life, but no one could think its purpose was to be his biography. Moses is called out by God to know His name and do His work — that is his own account of himself. This was his holiness: he was set apart by God to be His minister. The One who set him apart revealed His own character to him, showing that Righteousness, not Self-Will, governs the universe. Moses was to display this Righteousness to his countrymen and to Pharaoh — to say that God had seen their affliction and heard their cry, and to command Pharaoh to let them go. Moses the righteous man cannot be separated from Moses the deliverer of Israel. He could not have been righteous without fulfilling that task, without testifying that God, not he, was the Deliverer. The whole meaning of the story — his very saintship — disappears if we try to imagine him apart from his people. Was he not, during his forty days with the Lord, receiving a law meant for every Israelite as much as for himself, and pleading for them as though he shared every one of their privileges?
This is the very point we were seeking light on. If we see the true ground of Moses’ holiness, we must admit that the nation of which he was a member was holy in exactly the same sense and for the same reason as he was — indeed, with a prior title, from which his own was derived. It was a holy nation because God had called it out, chosen it, put His name upon it. Scripture explains what it means by this. It never teaches that God created men as a set of separate individuals; it says He created everything after its kind, and made man in His image — “male and female created he them.” No language could more plainly show Society as essential to the very idea of Humanity. It is not the separate man who bears God’s image, but man as a kind, the individual only as a member of that kind. The first man and woman refused to own themselves as made in God’s image and tried to be independent of Him, and so, necessarily, became suspicious of each other and servants of a lower creature. But God’s purpose could not be defeated by their unbelief: they multiplied according to the blessing originally given, and became a society. In that society the fallen tendency showed itself; and had the Adam-nature fully worked itself out — had man seized the dreadful privilege of being left to himself — that society must have perished in endless strife and hatred. But iniquity cannot make itself a law: men cannot cut themselves off from their unseen Lord or from each other. They feel and know they cannot; the struggle to do so only contradicts their own lives. How simple and consistent, then, is the Scripture narrative, which takes God as the author and upholder of social life, and affirms that society becomes irregular and disorderly only when it loses sight of Him.
The family of Abraham was marked with God’s covenant and declared holy. Was it holy only because Jacob was its head, or Joseph a member of it? Scripture guards us against any such feeble notion. It shows us that Joseph was better than his brothers precisely because he identified himself with the family while they acted as though they did not belong to it — because he believed God had chosen it, and they forgot that He had; because he believed it holy, and they did not.
Israel was told that the Invisible God was actually their King, who had brought them out of bondage, was with them in the wilderness, and would be with them in the promised land. An Israelite who believed this was strong, brave, and free, able to overcome his enemies. One who lost this faith longed again for Egypt’s flesh-pots, was without heart or hope, and cried for a golden calf because the Lord seemed absent. Did strength and freedom come from believing a lie, and cowardice and idolatry from believing the truth? Yet that must be so, unless the believing Israelite had the right to call his nation holy in the full, strict sense — to say, “We are individually holy because we are members of it, and God has given each of us the same privilege He gave the whole people: to call Him our God, to know His name, to trust Him.” Could the unbelief of five-sixths of the people make God’s truth of no effect, or change the reality of His Word and Promise, except to prove its truth all the more by contrast with those who despised it?
See, then, how reasonable Moses’ prayer was. Because he regarded the Israelites as a holy, chosen people, redeemed by God’s hand, and believed this belonged to the whole covenant people at all times, he felt with intense anguish their stubbornness, wickedness, and sin. Had they not been a holy people, he could not have known what their sin consisted in. It was their forgetfulness of their holy state, their choosing another way, that he confessed with such shame — because each preferred a selfish path of his own, as though he had an interest apart from his neighbor and from the body he belonged to, that they needed his intercession and God’s renewing mercy. Moses could ask for that mercy because he was certain he was asking according to God’s will, asking that what resisted that will be removed. His prayer, in effect, ran: “Remember not their wickedness, stubbornness, and sin — these came from their unbelief in Thy love, from forgetting that Thou art their King and they Thy subjects. But remember Thy covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! Maintain Thy own truth against their falsehood! Prove Thou art their King! Teach them that Thou hast redeemed them, though they deny it and bow to tyrants instead of clinging to their Deliverer! Grant them the full effects of their redemption, unworthy as they are, lest the heathen doubt Thy love and power, and Thy Name be mocked through our distrust rather than hallowed through Thy grace!”
Here surely is prayer according to its true nature. Moses asks in faith, nothing doubting; he asks according to God’s will, and so is sure of being heard, whatever form the answer takes. Had he instead begun by regarding the Jews merely as sinners with some possibility of becoming holy, his prayer would have been an uneasy struggle for a favor perhaps inconsistent with the very nature of the One he implored.
I said last Sunday that we in England have always given special worth to the Old Testament, accepting it as an explanation of the law under which God has placed us. The good men I referred to would not wish us to abandon this reverence; they, like me, think we are in danger of losing it and need to hold it fast against all comers. Let me beg them not to become allies of this faith’s enemies — not to raise their own experiences, precious as they are, into a standard for judging God’s revelations, when they might instead use those revelations to illuminate their experiences.
They accuse themselves of stubbornness, wickedness, and sin. Why? Because a voice spoke to them which they would not heed, a light shone which they closed their eyes to. Now that they have yielded to the voice and let the light in, they still feel the same evil tendencies, and feel entitled to warn others of their stubbornness, wickedness, and sin. Is the cause not the same in those they address as in themselves — are those others not also refusing a voice, shutting their eyes to a light? Is that not what we say in preaching the Gospel? Why not be consistent, and say that our stubbornness and theirs alike consist in departing from an order that belongs to us both? Why not use the very language of the Old Testament, and say that we and they are members of a righteous Nation, a holy Society, and that we have refused to own it and act as if we belonged to it?
If we believe this, what a message we have for the most different classes among us! Some live utterly reckless lives; some keep every propriety and ordinance yet feel a secret heartlessness and unbelief; some have aspired to higher thoughts than most, only to be taught by some bitter lesson that they are exposed to the same temptations as those they called carnal or worldly. These have moved in different circles, suspecting and despising one another, yet all need the same help — a common salvation or none at all. They must discover that God’s covenant embraces them all, that each may say: “God has called me, therefore I am holy; my stubbornness and sin have come from not acting as what God has declared me to be. Therefore I may ask Him not to look on that sin, but to remember His covenant and set me right. In so praying, I ask Him to do His will, not mine — to free me not from the just punishment of my evil, but from the evil itself, which I know to be my real curse: from the sensual habit enslaving me, the secret pride I wrap myself in, the trust in my own heart that has made me a fool.”
One who takes this ground identifies himself with all the people of his land. He has, in effect, said: “If there is no covenant broad enough for the whole nation, there is none broad enough for me.” And so, I believe, he comes to a truth that helps him reconcile what he had thought was mere outward, secular life with the inward life he supposed incompatible with it. We sometimes speak as though Jewish history were unique in tracing all common affairs, all ordinary offices, all civil statutes, back to God as their ground and author. I believe we must come to see that this is the rule for all other histories as well, since we grow less and less able to explain what a nation is, or how it can exist, if we refuse to see Him as its present King and Lawgiver. Once convinced of this, every fact in a nation’s history becomes sacred, every member of it a man called to a task and a stewardship, every office from highest to lowest something God Himself has appointed. Citizenship can no longer be thought a privilege belonging to men through external possessions, but must belong, as the old statesmen taught, to man as a spiritual creature. The more we broaden the limits of earthly citizenship, the more we must confess that all who hold it possess that higher glory — and so we are bound to declare on what terms they hold it, to assert their relations to God, to tell them that society is not built on mutual fear and hatred, but grounded in His Nature, who is wholly Righteous, in whom is no darkness.
Such a faith cannot be shaken by the anomalies the world shows us. We may see in them signs of a coming judgment, but not the overthrow of any principle the King of Kings has declared as the principle of His government. We must regard our nation as holy in spite of its wickedness, stubbornness, and sin. Therefore, for it as much as for ourselves — how can we separate it from ourselves? — we may still pray: “Remember not this wickedness, stubbornness, and sin. Remember Thine own covenant. Remember Thy people, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy mighty hand and outstretched arm.”
This, then, is the ground of what I mean by national repentance — not a fantastic, unreal thing. Ours and yours must be of this kind if it has any divine root, for we are to claim no righteousness of our own; we are to confess we have none and can have none, and to thank God that by raising Christ from the dead He has declared His righteousness the only righteousness for us all. We are not to seek a selfish felicity, but to lament that we have sought it, and thank God that Christ’s Sacrifice has redeemed us from so miserable a pursuit. What is best for England is best for each Englishman, because what is best for England is best for every nation. If we believe our own nation has a holy calling, we shall believe every nation has one. The more we confess the stubbornness, wickedness, and sin of our own people, the more we shall long for God to remove the same from every people under heaven. While we mourn our gross idolatries, the foul orgies of our Mammon-worship, we shall trust that all idols everywhere will be utterly abolished. And so the prayer of Moses for his nation will pass into the prayer of Christ for the whole Universe; the cry of our text, “Yet they are Thy people and Thine inheritance,” will help us better understand the cry of the Son: “That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us.”