Our God our glory.
The "glory" of Israel was found, as this verse indicates, in the God whom her sons worshipped; not in her cultivated fields, not in her varied scenery, not in her peculiar civilization, not even in her temple and its rites, but in her God. No other contemporary nation worshipped one, pure, righteous, pitiful God, who sought the well being, material and spiritual, of all his children. Well may we, to whom God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, claim that our God is the glory of our land.
The hope of the exile.
Israel in exile had no hope at all, but in the mercy and the faithfulness of her redeeming God (Le 26:41, 42). When a human soul is far away from God, and can sing no song of joy in the "strange land" of sinful alienation; when it is brought very low with a sense of Divine disapproval, and of a future which it dare not face; when it shrinks from the society of those with whom it once had sweet and sacred fellowship, and shuns the eye of human piety;—there is one thing to remember, one refuge in which to hide—the boundless mercy and the inviolable Word of God. That will not fail a human soul at its very worst. Up that pathway there is an escape from the "lowest hell" to the highest heaven.
HOMILIES BY S. CONWAY