The manifold mercies of the covenant people.
In striking contrast to Israel's treatment of God stands out his treatment of them. Mercy rises above mercy, tier on tier, in a mighty pyramid of blessing. Of these there was—
I. NATIONAL ADOPTION. This is not mentioned, but it is implied, as underlying all the other favours. God's first step was to make them his people. He loved and chose them (Deuteronomy 10:15; Deuteronomy 7:7, Deuteronomy 7:8). He separated them from the peoples, and took them into covenant with himself (Exodus 33:16; Genesis 17:7, Genesis 17:19). That covenant he sealed (Genesis 17:13), and all who observed the seal he styled his own people (Isaiah 43:1), lavishing on them in addition many a title of affection. This national adoption is the fact that subtends the whole line of Israel's national favours.
II. NATIONAL DELIVERANCE. "Brought you up," etc. (Amos 2:10). This was a stupendous providence; stupendous in its measures and stupendous in its results, and therefore of immense moral significance and weight. The mighty forces of nature are utilized. A haughty heathen nation is brought to its bended knees before the God of the down-trodden Israel. A rabble becomes an army. Crouching slaves become the fearless free. And, out of the chaos of despair and death emerges the young world of fresh national life. This astounding work was Jehovah's rod to conjure with in the after centuries. He makes it the fulcrum on which to rest the lever of resistless motive. His Law, in its moral (Exodus 20:2), judicial (Deuteronomy 24:18-22; Deuteronomy 15:15), and ceremonial aspects (Deuteronomy 16:12), is bespoken a ready and glad obedience in the word, "I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt," etc.
III. NATIONAL PRESERVATION. "And led you forty years." The sustained but quiet miracles of the desert pilgrimage were a worthy sequence to the prodigies of the Exodus. Divine energies were not exhausted in the thunder bursts under which Egypt was made to reel. They were but the stormy prelude to the sunshine and soft showers and gentle wooing winds of a long spiritual husbandry. In the manna falling silently, and the mystic guiding pillar, and the Shechinah glory lighting up the most holy place, Jehovah by a perpetual miracle kept himself before the nation's eye in all providential and saving relations. The resistless Deliverer was the jealous Protector, the bounteous Provider, and the solicitous and tender Friend.
IV. NATIONAL TRIUMPH. "I destroyed the Amorite," etc. The Hebrews had fierce and powerful enemies in all the neighbouring nations. These were generally their superiors in physical strength and courage and the warlike arts. Apart from miraculous help, it is doubtful whether Israel would not have been overmatched by almost any one of them (Exodus 17:11; 1 Samuel 17:42). Yet the giant races were subdued before them and wasted off the earth. When the grasshopper (Numbers 13:33) seizes on the lion's domain there are forces at work that invert the natural order of things. To make the minnows of unwarlike, timid, plodding Israel victorious over the tritons of Anak, the colossal warriors of Hebron (Joshua 11:21), was a moral miracle, sufficient in itself to carry a nation's faith and a nation's gratitude till the end of time.
V. NATIONAL ENFEOFFMENT. "To possess the land of the Amorite." An earthly inheritance was included in the earliest promise to Israel (Genesis 17:8). The tradition of this ideal provided home was never lost. In the stubble fields and by the brick kilns, where, "like dumb, driven cattle," they toiled throughout the years of their Egyptian bondage, the vision of it came as a ray of comfort lighting the darkest hours. When they marched from Egypt they consciously went to possess their own land, and the long detention in the desert was taken as a tedious but appropriate schooling to prepare them for the coming of age. Palestine, when at last they settled in it, was the very garden of the world, and a home so perfect of its kind as to be made an emblem of the eternal home above. God's standing monument, written over with the story of his goodness, was to every Israelite the teeming, smiling land in which he lived.
VI. NATIONAL EVANGELIZATION. "And I raised up of your sons," etc. The prophet was a characteristic national institution among the Jews. He was a man to whom God made revelations of his will (Numbers 12:6), and through whom he communicated that will to the people (Hebrews 1:1). Of this communication more or less was generally, although not invariably, committed to writing, and embodied in the Scriptures. The prophet did not regularly instruct the people; that was rather the business of the priest. But he did so often, and was besides God's mouthpiece for the communication of new truth, speaking it always according to the analogy of faith (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). The permanent establishment thus of a Divine oracle in their midst, giving constant access to the fountainhead of truth, was a notable privilege to Israel. The institution of Nazarites was little less so in another direction. They were consecrated ones, separated from common men and common uses, and devoted in a special manner to God (Numbers 6:1-21). Such consecration was the ideal human life (John 17:19). Therefore what the prophet did for truth in the abstract the Nazarite did for it in the concrete. The one revealed God's will, the other embodied it, or at least its great central principle. Their respective functions were complementary of each other, and between the two the Israelitish nation was "throughly furnished unto good works."