December 29

Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee. - Deuteronomy 8:2.

HERE are two things to be observed: First, the call to remembrance, “Thou shalt remember.” Memory, like every other faculty, has been injured by the fall, and the injury appears not only in its weakness, but to those things in regard to which it is, in general, most unhappily conversant. It would be almost endless to adduce all the calls to remembrance afforded in the Scripture.

One thing, however, is certain; that in all these instances, the remembrance is to be experimental and practical. The sacred writers never regard remembrance as an end, but an instrument; that is, they enjoin us to remember for some purpose; to call forth such feelings, and to produce such actions as will correspond with the things we are required to remember. When Moses calls upon the Jews to look back upon their history, we must suppose he intended they should be affected with encouragement or humiliation, or gratitude, and praise, according as the case demanded. In this Spirit, and with this purpose in view, let us be influenced in all our retrospections.

Observe, secondly, the subject to be reviewed. There are four things to be noticed, and they are all to be exemplified in the experience of Christians now, as of the Jews. Yea, much more abundantly. We have the place to be reviewed, “the wilderness.” Such a place literally they were in after leaving Egypt; and we shall find many allusions to its dreariness, its solitariness, its privations, audits perils. And are not Christians in a similar condition?

What is the world, comparatively at least, but a wilderness? Christians are summoned to arise and depart hence, because it is polluted, because its friendship is enmity with God, because it is unsuitable to their new nature, because they have found that good part which shall never be taken away from them, because they look to that better country, even a heavenly, because they have not yet come to that rest and inheritance which the Lord their God shall give unto them, because their portion is beyond the world.

They were to remember their Conductor: “The way which the Lord thy God led thee.” Their safety, their joy, and happiness arose from being under his immediate care. He led them all the way by a fiery, cloudy pillar; it was a pillar of cloud by day, serving to interpose between them and the rays of a vertical sun; and it was a pillar of fire by night, to absorb the unwholesome damps, to cheer the darkness and the gloom; and by this God showed them where they were to look, and where they were to go; and it never left them until it brought them to “a city of habitation.”

And so God is the conductor of his people now. He guides them with his eye, he leads them by his word’ by his Spirit, and his providence. He is “a very present help to them in every time of trouble,” and he will never leave them nor forsake them till they have entered the promised land; where, looking back to the desert, and to all his dealings with them in the vale of tears, they will sing songs of everlasting praise to him that “led them up through the wilderness, for his mercy endureth for ever.”