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Patriarchs and Prophets
nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous
as all this law, which I set before you this day?” Today the challenge
to Israel might be repeated. The laws which God gave His ancient
people were wiser, better, and more humane than those of the most
civilized nations of the earth. The laws of the nations bear marks of
the infirmities and passions of the unrenewed heart; but God’s law
bears the stamp of the divine.
“The Lord hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron
furnace,” declared Moses, “to be unto Him a people of inheritance.”
The land which they were soon to enter, and which was to be theirs
on condition of obedience to the law of God, was thus described to
them—and how must these words have moved the hearts of Israel, as
they remembered that he who so glowingly pictured the blessings of
the goodly land had been, through their sin, shut out from sharing the
inheritance of his people:
“The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land,” “not as the land
of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and
wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: but the land, whither
ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of
the rain of heaven;” “a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths
that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and
vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey;
a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not
lack anything in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills
thou mayest dig brass;” “a land which the Lord thy God careth for:
the eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of
the year even unto the end of the year.”
Deuteronomy 8:7-9
;
11:10-12
.
“And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into
the land which He sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to
Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not,
and houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells
digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou
plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; then beware lest
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thou forget the Lord.” “Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the
covenant of the Lord your God.... For the Lord thy God is a consuming
fire, even a jealous God.” If they should do evil in the sight of the
Lord, then, said Moses, “Ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land
whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it.”