Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Deuteronomy 33:27
The eternal God [is thy] refuge, and underneath [are] the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy [them].
27. dwelling place ] As in Psa 90:1. A.V. refuge; and some moderns thy refuge by emending the text. The LXX renders the line .
And underneath are the everlasting arms ] Berth. and Marti oddly declare this beautiful line unintelligible, on the ground that the arms of God inhabiting heaven ( Deu 33:26) cannot at the same time be conceived as beneath His people! By changing one consonant and pointing others differently they substitute and the power (arms) of the wicked was broken. But the figure of the arms underneath (cp. Hos 11:3, Psa 89:21 (22)) comes in naturally after the other of God as a dwelling or refuge; ‘God at once the foundation and the roof of their abode’ (Calvin).
And he drave out; in Hex. only here and in JE (frequently); not in D nor deut. passages.
And said, Destroy ] A line of but 2 stresses.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Thy refuge – Rather, dwellingplace. Compare Psa 90:1; Psa 91:9.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Deu 33:27
The eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.
Mans refuge and support
I. Man needs a refuge and a support. We make mistakes, and men misunderstand and misinterpret them, and a word or a look fans the flame and makes a foe, and our heart craves for someone to fly to who knows our sincerity and will look kindly on our error. We feel the din and bustle, the agitation, and anxiety, and restlessness of active life; our spirits often are fretted by it, our hands hang down and are weary, and we want One by our sides, ever present, ever powerful, and ever loving, to cheer, uphold, and encourage us. We realise daily our own weakness. Resolutions are made and broken. Where shall I find a refuge from self, a refuge from sin, a refuge from an accusing conscience, a refuge from coming wrath, in the hour of death, in the day of judgment, and through the ages of eternity?
II. Just such a refuge as man needs is provided for him by God.
III. What such a need, and such an offer, demand of us.
1. Your first step is to fly to Jesus as your refuge. Do you ask how? Have you not read or heard of the homeless poor in London, and the refuges prepared for them? Numbers who have no home to cover their heads and no morsel of food to sustain their fainting bodies, hasten all shivering amidst the storm, night after night, and wait hours at the door of some rooms prepared by Christian charity to receive them for a nights lodging and a nights food. They have no recommendation but their poverty. Go thus to Jesus, realising your spiritual poverty, and pleading your spiritual need.
2. Your next step is to rest in Him, as an everlasting support. (Canon Morse.)
The everlasting arms
In one of the old classic fables of our schooldays, we used to read of the giant Sisyphus, condemned to go on forever and ever, rolling a mighty stone up a mountain, whose summit was forever becoming more distant and out of reach. Can such a fable be in any wise emblematic of the task of human life? Can it be that life is, after all, one long and meaningless rolling of an eternal stone up an eternal hill? Let the venerable lawgiver make answer to our questionings; let him teach us faith; let him show us the true meaning and dignity of our life on earth.
I. The eternal God is thy refuge. It is an impressive figure; one, moreover, we well can understand, in the mouth of Moses. The idea is borrowed, doubtless, from that wild and awful mountain scenery of which the aged lawgiver had seen so much in his experience of the Sinai peninsula. There, amid those lonely and tremendous heights, with here and there some majestic rock standing isolated from the rest, like a solitary watchtower and frontier fortress of the desert; amid such scenes as this, as all travellers can tell, the mind of man is over-mastered with a sense of human insignificance. What more natural than that Moses should draw from these Titanic battlements and buttresses a picture, however inadequate, of the omnipotence of the Creator; a parable of the Rock of Ages; an emblem of the Divine Power Himself; a similitude of that Tremendous and Ineffable Being, who is indeed the only abiding Refuge and Stronghold of the soul of man; the Rock, the Fortress, the Castle, the Tower of Strength, the House of Defence, to which it may always resort?
II. And underneath are the everlasting arms. The idea suggested here goes much further than the bare notion of protection from storms and troubles without; it suggests also that God offers to the soul of man the comfort of His love, the welcome to a Fathers heart; it reminds us, irresistibly, of the unwearying pity of the Good Shepherd, rescuing the sheep that was lost, bearing it in the strong arms of His everlasting love, receiving the little ones into His enfolding embrace, gathering the lambs with His arm, carrying them in His bosom. (H. B. Ottley, M. A.)
The only refuge
The Eternal God is thy refuge–from what? The word itself implies the existence of peril and distress; and God, if we seek Him, will be our refuge from every form of peril and distress–the only sure refuge from every one of the many ills of which our life would otherwise be the helpless prey.
I. From the illusions, the disappointments, the inexorable weariness of life. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my pilgrimage. Each man soon finds for himself that these are not common places, but sad realities. God has two ways of leading men to Him through the narrow gate of disappointment–one by refusing our desires, to show us that they are not according to righteousness; the other, by granting them, and sending leanness withal into our souls. I hardly know which of the two experiences causes the most bitter disappointment. And yet to be led by these facts into gloom or pessimism is entirely to misunderstand their nature, and would be the most fatal of all errors. For why does God deal thus with us? It is simply His way of convincing us that this earth is not our home, that here we have no abiding city, that if we are in any way to fulfil the true law of our life we must set our affections on things above, and not on things on the earth.
II. From the insoluble mysteries of life. We cry aloud for surer knowledge, and while to the froward and presumptuous there comes back no answer except the echo of their own voice, even for humbler and faithful questioners there is only the whisper, What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter. There is silence and there is darkness. Our vaunted science cannot break that silence and cannot dissipate that gloom. Yes; but faith can speak to us even though there be neither voice nor language, and can shed upon our path a light which is not of earth. We see not, nevertheless we believe. The mystery ceases to be so oppressive when humility accepts it and hope enlightens it, for then we soon realise that, after all, we know all that it imports us to know. Though the walls of an impenetrable darkness are around us, the lamp of conscience is in our hand, and it shines on the clear though narrow path of duty.
III. From sin, from our evil selves, from the guilt of the past, from the weakness of the present, from the dread of the future. For each true penitent the handwriting of ordinances that was against us is torn asunder and nailed to Christs Cross, and there will be granted to us, not only pardon for the past, but also strength and grace to help in time of need. And when, at last, each of us is laid on the bed of death, and the moment has come when we must enter into the presence of God and see our souls, with every mask of hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, torn away–what can help us then? The Eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. (Dean Farrar.)
Present privilege and future favour
I. The present blessing.
1. God is His peoples shelter.
(1) Even when they are under the yoke. Even some of those who are never converted, have sense enough to feel at times that the service of Satan is a hard one, yielding but little pleasure, and involving awful risks. Some men cannot long go on making bricks without straw, without being more or less conscious that they are in the house of bondage.
(2) When captivity is led captive, God becomes the refuge of His people from their sins.
(3) He is also their refuge in times of want.
(4) When their enemies rage.
(5) When their falls into sin had cursed the people of God, and provoked the Most High, so that He sent fiery serpents among them, even then the Eternal God was their refuge. When we are conscious that sin has brought us into any mischief or sorrow, we are apt to fed–I must not go to God with this, because it is clearly the natural and inevitable result of my sin, it is a rod of my own making. Yes, but we may go even with that, for if the Lord should send the fiery serpents, still, you must fly into the arms of that very God who has sent the serpents to bite you; for it is He, and He alone, who can lift up the brazen serpent before your tearful eye, and give yon life through looking thereon.
2. God is our mansion, our dwelling, our abiding place.
(1) At home one feels safe. So, when we get to our God, not bolts of brass nor gates of iron could guard Gods people so well as that wall of fire which Jehovah is to all His chosen.
(2) At home we take our rest. When I get to my God, no servile work have I to do, no hewing of wood and drawing of water, like a Gibeonite, in Gods house; but here! am, His servant, happy in His service, and finding sweet rest in what I do for Him.
(3) At home we let our hearts loose. We feel at ease. So is it when we are with our God. I dare tell Him what I dare not tell anyone else; there is no secret of my heart which I would not pour into His ear; there is no wish that might be deemed foolish or ambitious by others, which I would not communicate to Him; for surely if the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, the secrets of them that fear Him ought to be, and must be, with their Lord.
(4) It is at home, if anywhere, that a man is thoroughly happy and delighted. He takes his souls best solace there; his eyes sparkle most at his own fireside; whatever the man may be abroad, with all his cares and his troubles, he looks to getting home, as going to the place of his delight. So I trust it is with us and our God.
(5) It is for home that a man works and labours.
3. God is our support, and our support just when we begin to sink.
(1) At certain seasons the Christian sinks very low in humiliation. But the great atonement is still under all.
(2) The Christian sometimes sinks very deep in sore trial from without. Loss of property. Bereavement. You cannot sink so low in distress and affliction, but what the covenant grace of an ever-faithful God will be still lower.
(3) Possibly you are sinking very deep down, under trouble from within. You have felt such vexations of spirit as you never thought you could have known; you have waged such a conflict as you never dreamed of; the fountains of the great deep have been broken up; and, as a deluge, sin threatens to cover your spirit, and drown all the life in your heart. You cannot even there be brought so low as Christ was, for what did He say–My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?
(4) This also I may give you by way of comfort, in any weary labours in which you may be engaged.
(5) At last, when death comes, the promise shall still hold good.
II. The future.
1. Here is a Divine work. Before yon get to your difficulties, your God will have removed them.
2. A Divine word. Whatever sins we have, there is only one thing to be done with them, and that is, to destroy them. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Underneath
The words are placed at the end of Moses song, and they are its crown and climax. He had wound himself up to the highest pitch of poetic excitement and spiritual fervour, and this passage is the result. He had spoken grandly before concerning the separate tribes, and the words which fell from his lips are unspeakably rich; but now he is about to close, and therefore he pours forth his loftiest strains and utters full and deep meanings, the ripest and choicest fruit of a lifetime of communion with God. As our Lord ascended to heaven blessing His disciples, so did His servant Moses, before climbing to Pisgah, pour out a torrent of benedictions full and deep, inspired by the Divine Spirit.
I. Where? Underneath is a region into which we cannot see. We associate the subterranean with all that is dark and hidden, and because of this it is often regarded as terrible. Life will soon end: what is death? What is the immediate result of death? What shall we feel when we are traversing those tracks unknown, and finding our way to the judgment seat of God? Not knowing, except that little which has been revealed to us, we are all too apt to conjecture terrors and invent horrors, and so to begin trembling concerning that which we do not understand. What a comfort it is to be told by the voice of inspiration that Underneath are the everlasting arms! Underneath–the word arouses thought and inquiry. Everything ought to be sound, solid, and substantial there. Underneath must be firm, for if that fails we fail indeed. We have been building, and our eyes have been gladdened with the rising walls, and with the towering pinnacles; but what if something should be rotten underneath? Great will be the fall thereof, if we have built as high as heaven, if the sand lie underneath, yielding and shifting in the day of flood. Let us look more closely into this most important matter. Underneath are the everlasting arms.
1. That is, first, as the foundation of everything. If you go down, down, to discover the basement upon which all things rest you come ere long to the everlasting arms. The things which are seen are stayed up by the invisible God. He is the foundation of creation, the fountain and source of being, the root and basement of existence. Underneath everything are the everlasting arms. Most true is this with regard to His Church. He chose her and redeemed her to Himself: the very idea of a church is from the Lord alone.
2. Underneath are the everlasting arms, in the sense of being the bottom and end and object of everything. Underneath the best events are the arms of love to make them good, and underneath the worst that can happen are the selfsame everlasting arms to moderate and overrule them. As the design, and object of all, underneath are the everlasting arms.
3. I take the text, Underneath are the everlasting arms, to mean next that the arms of God are there as the preservation of His people. Holiness, strength of faith, and ultimate perfection are the things which we must daily aim at, but it is a blessed consolation that when through infirmity or carelessness we do not fully maintain our consecrated walk we are not therefore cast away forever, for it is written, Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with His hand. Underneath are the everlasting arms.
4. The everlasting arms are the rest of His people. If these everlasting arms are always outstretched to preserve me lest I totter in weakness and fall into destruction, then on those arms let me lean my whole weight for time and for eternity. That is the practical lesson of this choice word.
5. The text gives a promise of exaltation. The merciful God is great at a deadlift.
II. What is it which is beneath us? The everlasting arms.
1. The arms of everlasting purpose. We have to deal with one whose gifts and calling are without repentance.
2. The arms of everlasting love. Love has hands and arms with which it draws us, and these are at this moment underlying all the dealings of God with us.
3. The arms of power. Strength is needed to uphold the people of God lest they fall to their confusion, and that strength is always ready, nay, it is always in exercise. He is able to keep thee from falling and to present thee faultless, and He will do it.
4. The arms of immutability.
5. The arms of everlasting blessing.
III. When? The only answer is now and for evermore.
1. Now; at this moment, the everlasting arms are underneath us. The life of a Christian is described as walking by faith, and to my mind walking by faith is the most extraordinary miracle ever beheld beneath the sun. Walking on the waves, as Peter did, is a type of the life of every Christian. I have sometimes likened it to ascending an invisible staircase far up into the clouds. You cannot see a step before you, but you wind up towards the light. When you look downward all is dark, and before you lies nothing visible but cloud, while beneath you yawns a fathomless abyss. Yet we have climbed, some of us, now for years up this perpetually ascending stair, never seeing an inch before us. We have often paused almost in horror, and asked in wonder, What next, and what next? Yet what we thought was cloud has proved to be solid rock; darkness has been light before us, and slippery places have been safe.
2. So it shall be forever and forever, for the arms are everlasting in their position as well as their power. Now thou hast come to die; thou hast gathered up thy feet in the bed; the death sweat stands upon thy brow: thou art sinking so far as this life is concerned among the sons of men, but underneath thee shall then be the everlasting arms. Beautifully has Bunyan described confidence in death, when he pictures the pilgrims passing the river. Christian cried out to young Hopeful, I sink in deep waters, the billows go over my head, all his waves go over me. Then said Hopeful, Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good. Thus shall it be with you. You shall feel the bottom of deaths chill river, but you shall say it is good; for underneath are the everlasting arms. Then comes the last plunge, and we shall be as when a man stands on the edge of a precipice and leaps over into the clouds below him. You need not fear to take your last farewell and drop into your Fathers arms, for underneath you shall be the everlasting arms; and oh, how sweetly shall you be caught up together with the Lord in the air, pressed to the bosom of the great Father, and borne upward into the heaven of heavens.
IV. What then?
1. Let us look underneath. It is well to look underneath an outward providence when it frowns darkly upon you, for it conceals the eternal purpose of love.
2. Let us lean heavily. God loves His children to treat Him with entire confidence. Your load is no burden to Him.
3. Let us rise confidently. Be not afraid of high doctrines, or high enjoyments, or high attainments in holiness. Go as high as you like, for underneath you are the everlasting arms. It would be dangerous to speculate, but it is safe to believe.
4. Let us dare unhesitatingly, and be very courageous for our God. Are you called upon to lose everything for Christ? Go on and leap like Curtius into the gulf for your Lord Jesus, for underneath you are the everlasting arms. Does your Master call you to an enterprise which seems impossible? Nevertheless, if God has called you to it, attempt it, for He rendereth to every man according to his work. Remember what the negro said: If Massa Jesus say to me, Sam, you jump through that brick wall, I jump. It is Sams business to jump. It is Massas work to make me go through the wall. So it is with you. It is yours to leap forward when the captain gives the watchword, and in confidence to attempt what mere nature cannot achieve, for the supernatural is still with us. Underneath us are the everlasting arms. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The everlasting arms
This short passage is found in the midst of a mass of gold, sentences containing the richest treasures of truth. All this spiritual wealth is the heritage of the people of God. Notice, in verses 26-29, how near God is said to be to His people. Above, before, around, and in the text beneath us.
I. The quarter that is thus honourably secured. Underneath.
1. The point of mysterious assault. You may be tempted by Satan, but it shall only be in a measure; God will not let him put forth all his diabolical strength.
2. The place of our daily pilgrimage. Some of you go forth to your daily labours, and you find the place of your service to be a real wilderness, full of trial and everything that is unpleasant to you. Yet look again, with eyes touched with heavens eye-salve, and instead of seeing the bitter poverty, and the grinding toil, and the daily trial, you will begin to see that God is in it all, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
3. The place of perilous descent. You cannot go so low but that Gods arms of love are lower still.
4. A matter of intense concern. Examine your foundations.
5. The secret of singular discoveries that will yet be made. Perhaps some of us are in sore perplexity; we cannot understand the Lords providential dealings with us. He does not always tell us the reason for His actions; we might not understand if He did, but we may rest assured that He is working out purposes of infinite love. He ceases not to care for us even when things appear to be at their very worst. I bear my willing witness to the faithfulness of God; I am not so old as some, but I am old enough to have gone through fire, and through water, and I am here to testify that I have not been burned by the one, nor drowned by the other. Cannot many of you say the same? In your sorest trials, and in your hottest furnaces, has He not been specially present with you, and bestowed great blessings upon you?
II. The manner in which this quarter is secured.
1. God Himself is close to us, guaranteeing the eternal safety of all who trust in Him. Even the false prophet, Mahomet, had a strong faith in God,–in Allah,–and when he fled for the first time, and hid in a cave with only one friend, his companion said to him, Our pursuers are after us, and there are only two of us. Stop, exclaimed Mahomet, there are three, for Allah is here! It was the utterance of a brave and grand faith; would that his whole career had been in harmony with it! Wherever there are two of Gods people, there is Another with them, for God is there. Mr. Wesley said, as he died, The best of all is, God is with us; and that is the best of all, is it not?
2. The Lords immutable purpose is being fulfilled. Where Gods arms are, He is at work, and He is at work accomplishing His purposes of grace.
3. His inexhaustible patience is waiting its time. Underneath are the everlasting arms, bearing up thy load, sustaining it with long endurance, while He keeps on working for thee–invisible, yet active on thy behalf.
III. There are times when this text is very precious to believers.
1. When we are very sick and very feeble. It is delightful to feel that our feebleness impinges on Omnipotence; that, just when there is nothing left to us, then God comes in with His fulness, and bears us up.
2. When burdened with sore trouble, or oppressed with heavy labours. The most wonderful joys that ever were felt by mortal hearts, have been felt by men who, on the morrow, were to be burned at the stake; but whose very souls have danced within them because of the unspeakable delight which the presence of God has given to them. I think it was Socrates who said that Philosophers could be merry without music. I take the statement from his mouth, and alter it, and say, Christians can be happy without happy circumstances; they can sometimes, like nightingales, sing best in dark nights. Their joy is not mere outward mirth. Sorrows fall upon them; yet, from the deep that lieth underneath, wells up yet more exceeding joy.
3. When trembling and shaking. Your wing feathers will grow by your very attempt to fly; the possibilities of grace are boundless; leave yourself to them. Be not always weak and trembling; God help you to become as a David, and you who are as David to become as an angel of the Lord!
4. The hour will come when everything will begin to melt away beneath your feet. Earthly comforts will fail you, friends will be unable to help you; they can wipe the clammy sweat from your brow, and moisten your lips with a drop of water, but they cannot go with you on the great voyage upon which you are about to be launched. When heart and flesh fail, then may the Lord speak to you the sweet words before us, Underneath are the everlasting arms! It will be a sinking to the flesh, but a rising to the spirit. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Is the everlasting arms
There are two sides to a religious life. One is the active side. We are urged to faithfulness in all duty, to activity in all service, to victoriousness in all struggle, to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. But there is another side. We are to trust, to have quietness and confidence, to repose on God. The picture suggested is that of a little child, lying in the strong arms of a father who is able to withstand all storms and dangers. God comes to us first in our infancy, in our mothers, who bear us in their arms. Yet they are only dim revealings of God for a time. They leave us after teaching us a little of Gods tenderness, but God Himself remains when they are gone, and His arms never unclasp. The thought of the embracing arms is very suggestive. The figure is to be interpreted by what it would mean in human friendship.
1. One meaning is protection. A father puts his arm about his child when it is in danger. God protects His children. Thou hast with Thine arm redeemed Thy people. Be Thou their arm every morning. His arm brought salvation.
2. Another meaning is affection. The fathers arm drawn about a child is a token of love. The child is held in the fathers bosom, near his heart. The shepherd carries the lambs in his bosom. John lay on Jesus breast. The mother holds the child in her bosom because she loves it. This picture of God embracing His children in His arms tells of His love for them. His love is tender, close, intimate. He holds them in the place of affection.
3. Another thought suggested by an arm is strength. A mothers arm may be frail physically, but love makes it strong. When it is folded about a feeble child, all the power of the universe cannot tear the child away. We know what it is in human friendship to have one upon whose arm we can lean with confidence. There are some people whose mere presence seems to give us a sense of security. We believe in them. In their quiet peace there is a strength which imparts itself to all who lean upon them. Every true human friend is more or less a strength to us. Yet the surest, strongest human strength is but a fragment of the Divine strength. This is Omnipotence. In the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength.
4. Another suggestion is endurance. The arms of God are everlasting. Human arms grow weary even in loves embrace; they cannot long press the child to the bosom. Soon they lie folded in death. So pathetic is human life with its broken affections, its little moments of love, its embraces that are tom away in one hour. But these are everlasting arms–these arms of God. They shall never unclasp.
5. There is another important suggestion in the word underneath. Not only do the arms of God embrace the child, but they are underneath–ever underneath. That means that we can never sink, for these arms will ever be beneath us, wherever we may be east. We cannot sink below them or out of their clasp. And when death comes, and every earthly thing is gone from beneath us, and we sink away into what seems darkness and the shadow of death–out of all human love, out of warmth and gladness and sweet life, into the gloom and strange mystery of death, still it will be only into the everlasting arms. (J. R. Miller, D. D.)
The everlasting arms-a thought for the new year
Underneath are the everlasting arms,–that was the repeated burden of the great men of Israel. They lived in the midst of national calamities and distresses. They were defeated, puzzled, baffled. The way looked dark. Then they fall back on the one great reestablishing thought: after all, it is Gods world. It is not going to ruin. Changes which seemed tremendous are not fatal or final. Israel dwells in safety, for God holds us in His arms. We need some such broad, deep confidence as we enter a new year. We get involved in small issues and engrossed in personal problems, and people sometimes seem so malicious, and things seem to be going so wrong that it is as if we heard the noise of some approaching Niagara. Then we fall back on the truth that after all it is not our world. We can blight it or help it, but we do not decide its issues. In the midst of such a time of social distress, Mr. Lowell, in one of his lectures, wrote: I take great comfort in God. I think He is considerably amused sometimes, but on the whole loves us and would not let us go at the matchbox if He did not know that the frame of the universe was fireproof. That is the modern statement of the underlying faith and self-control and patience which come of confessing that in this world it is not we alone who do it all. Why so hot, little man? says Mr. Emerson. I take great comfort in God, says Mr. Lowell; and the Old Testament, with a much tenderer note, repeats, Underneath are the everlasting arms. (Prof. F. G. Peabody.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 27. The eternal God] elohey kedem, the former God; HE who was of old. Not like the gods which were lately come up. HE who ever was and ever will be; and HE who was, is, and will be unchangeably holy, wise, just, and merciful. See Clarke on Ge 21:33.
Everlasting arms] As the arm is the emblem of power, and of power in a state of exertion, the words here state that an unlimited and unconquerable power shall be eternally exerted in the defence of God’s Church, and in the behalf of all those who trust in Him.
Thrust out the enemy] He will expel all the ancient inhabitants, and put thee in possession of their land.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
Thy refuge, or, thy dwelling-place. Compare Psa 91:1.
Underneath, i.e. under thy arms to hold thee up, as my hands were once held up by Aaron and Hur. He will support and defend thee. Or the meaning is, Though he dwelleth on high, yet he comes down to the earth beneath to assist and deliver thee.
Shall say, Destroy them, i.e. shall give thee not only command and commission, but also power, to destroy them; for Gods saying is doing, his word comes with power.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
The eternal God [is thy] refuge,…. God is eternal, from everlasting to everlasting; the Ancient of days, before all things, and all time; which is, and was, and is to come: the same is true of Christ, who is the everlasting Father, or Father of eternity, the true God, and eternal life; as appears from his nature, having the whole fulness, all the perfections of deity in him; from his office, as Mediator, in which he was set up from everlasting; from his concern in eternal election, in the everlasting covenant, and in the creation of all things out of nothing: and he is the refuge of his people, the antitype of the cities of refuge, to whom sinners, under a sense of sin, flee for refuge; and where they are safe from avenging justice, the wrath of God, the condemnation of the law, everlasting ruin and destruction, or the second death; or their “mansion”, or “dwelling place” k; which he has been in all generations, as Moses also says, Ps 90:1. Such is Christ to his people, who dwelt secretly in him from everlasting, being chosen in him, and given to him; and openly in conversion, where they dwell as in a strong hold, safely, quietly, comfortably, and pleasantly:
and underneath [are] the everlasting arms; that is, of God, which are the support of his people, and their protection, safety, and security; such as the arms of his everlasting love, which encircle them, and compass them about as a shield; his everlasting covenant, which is immovable, and in which they ever remain; eternal redemption and salvation, wrought out by Christ, which secures them from destruction; and everlasting power, by which they are kept and preserved as in a garrison; and everlasting consolation, which flows from all this: and so the arms of Christ, or his almighty power, are under the world, to uphold it in being; and under his church, to support it, on whose shoulders the government of it is; and under particular believers, whom he carries in his arms, embraces in his bosom, bears them up under all their afflictions and temptations, trials and exercises; nor will he ever suffer them to drop out of his arms, or to be plucked from thence:
and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; the Canaanites out of the land of Canaan, to make room for Israel, which he was just about to do, and quickly did. In like manner Christ thrusts out Satan and the spiritual enemies of his people, whom to dispossess is a work of mighty power; and not only so, but gives orders to destroy them, and does destroy them, and makes his people more than conquerors over them:
and shall say, destroy [them]; the Canaanites: to do which the people of Israel had an order from the Lord, De 7:1.
k “habitaculum”, V. L. Pagninus, Montanus, Piscator, Cocceius.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
27. The eternal God is thy refuge. This is just as if he had said that the Israelites were protected from above by the help of God, and also based, as it were, upon Him. The beginning of the prayer corresponds with that other in Psa 90:1, “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations.” The sum is, that although the Israelites might be exposed to many injuries, still there was secure repose for them under the shadow of God’s wings; and assuredly unless the hand of God had been like a roof to protect them, they would have perished a thousand times over. But, inasmuch as it would not be sufficient for our heads to be in safety, the other point is also added, viz., that God’s arms should be stretched forth to sustain them from beneath. He calls them “everlasting,” because the security of the pious, who rely upon God, is never shaken: it is, therefore, just as though he represented God to be at the same time the foundation, and the roof, of their abode. Others translate it less correctly, “Thou shalt live under the arms of the Everlasting;” for an elegant distinction is drawn, (326) which, however, tends to the same point, when God it called קדם, kedem, and His arms עלם, gnolam, the first of which words has reference to the past, whilst in the other there is allusion to the future; as if he had said of God, that He was from the beginning, and that His power would endure unto the end.
He adduces experimental evidence of the above statements, inasmuch as God had (327) miraculously destroyed the enemies of His people; at the same time he specifies the manner in which this was done, viz., that He had said, Destroy, or blot out, or dissipate. And by this word he signifies that, although God had made use of the agency of the Israelites, still He only was the conqueror; since the Israelites prevailed not except at His bidding, and by His will.
(326) This sentence is omitted in the Latin edition of 1563 though given in substance in the French of 1564.
(327) It will be seen that C. translates the verbs here in the past tense; A. V. in the future: “he shall thrust out, etc.”
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(27) The eternal God is thy refuge.The word thy is not represented in the original. Mnah, the word for refuge, differs very slightly from the refuge of Psa. 90:1, Lord, thou hast been our refuge in generation and generation, which are also the words of Moses. The same word is used of the habitation of Jehovah in heaven (Deu. 26:15). Perhaps we ought to connect this clause with what pre cedes, and render the passage thus:
There is none like the God of Jeshurun,
Riding on the heavens for thy help,
And in His Majesty on the sky
The dwelling of the eternal Jehovah (above thee)
And underneath, the everlasting arms!
And He will expel before thee (every) enemy,
And will say (to thee), Destroy them.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
27. The eternal God is thy refuge Better thus, Thy dwellingplace is the God of ancient days. Comp. Psa 90:1: “Lord, thou hast been our dwellingplace in all generations.” This psalm is entitled, A prayer of Moses, the man of God.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Deu 33:27
The eternal God is a dwelling-place,
And underneath are the everlasting arms.
And he thrust out the enemy from before you,
And said, Destroy.
But He does not just ride above them as their Deliverer, as the eternal God He is also a dwelling place for them, and His everlasting arms are upholding them. Thus, as He has for them in the past, He will thrust forth the enemy from them and then say to them, ‘Destroy’, because their enemies are in flight. God will defeat their enemies but Israel have to play their part, and thus recognise the judgment of God on sin. Notice the stress on eternal and everlasting, compare verse 15. Their God has no limits.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
The man of GOD, having poured out his praises on Israel’s GOD, now bestows his commendation on Israel. They have the eternal GOD for their refuge. JEHOVAH is engaged in all his covenant relations for their defense. He will protect, and govern, and bless, and rejoice over them; nay, he will not only protect, and govern, and bless them, but he will destroy their enemies. And when he hath thrust out all before them, they shall dwell securely in their GOD; they shalt abound with a fulness of all blessings; corn and wine shall be their sustenance, and their heavens shall drop down dew. If we read these things as temporal mercies, we must read them with certain limitations. It is sad to consider how Israel, in after ages, forfeited these things by their disobedience and ingratitude. But if we read them spiritually, and with an eye to the gospel church of the LORD JESUS, (and which no doubt, is the chief sense of the words), to what a degree of greatness and sublimity do the blessings then rise to our view? Reader! look at the gospel church of the LORD JESUS; and see the Israel of GOD in him! Here indeed, the eternal GOD is the refuge of his people; for in the Covenant of redemption, in the blood and righteousness of JESUS, all the perfections of the GODHEAD are made over in an everlasting covenant, which cannot be broken, for the eternal security of his people. And GOD is not only the support and security of his people; but he is their refuge, their hiding place, their everlasting, and eternal home. Hence one of old, calls the LORD his hiding place, and bids his soul to return to his rest. See Psa_46:1; Psa_32:7; Psa_90:1; Psa_116:7 . And how is the church of the LORD JESUS provided for? Every individual believer of it, hath the charter of all these blessings secured to him, in the blood of the covenant. GOD the FATHER is his, in all his covenant relations. JESUS, in his person, offices, and character; and the HOLY GHOST, with all his gracious influences. These mercies are the fountain of Jacob here spoken of, because they are fountain mercies indeed, which send off streams innumerable, to make glad the city of GOD. These are the heavens which drop down their dew upon the church, and every individual believer of it, to refresh, to comfort, to enlarge, and make fruitful. Well might the man of GOD, in a review of these things, and well may everyone interested in them, echo to the same, and cry out, as he did, Happy art thou, O Israel, who is like unto thee, O people, saved by the LORD!
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Deu 33:27 The eternal God [is thy] refuge, and underneath [are] the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy [them].
Ver. 27. The eternal God. ] Heb., The God of antiquity, that “Ancient of days,” that “Rock of ages,” “who is before all things, and by whom all things consist,” Col 1:17 who is “the first and the last, and besides whom there is no God.” Isa 44:6
And underneath are the everlasting arms.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
refuge = abode. Psa 90:1; Psa 91:9. Or, “Above is the everlasting God And beneath are His everlasting arms. “
arms. Put by Figure of speech Metonymy (of Subject), App-6, for the strength which is in them. Also Figure of speech Anthropopatheia. App-6.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
God Who is our Home
The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deu 33:27.
These words, while almost the last, are also among the most memorable, in the psalm so fitly described as the blessing, wherewith Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death. They express one of the sublimest truths of faitha truth Moses himself had realized in the court of Pharaoh, on the peak of Sinai, in the hurry of flight, and in the calm and glory of the Divine Face. He had finished his work, the law was given, the wilderness traversed, the goodly land in sight, and now he had but to be led by the hand of God to the top of Nebo, and thence into great eternity. The voice he knew and loved so well had said to him, Get thee up into this mountain of Abarim unto Mount Nebo, and die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people. That was a very sweet and soothing command to the weary soul of the old man. His had been a long day; and now, travel-sick, toil-worn, in its mellow autumn twilight, he was to set
As sets the morning star, which goes not down
Behind the darkened west, nor hides obscured
Among the tempests of the sky, but melts away
Into the light of heaven.
But before he goes to the point of evanishment into the everlasting light, he pauses to bless the people; and as he stands on the border-land between time and eternity, feeling his soul in the hands of God, he utters this truth of highest, holiest import, The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
The two lines of the text are not identical. The second line is not a mere repetition of the first. It is the usual manner of Hebrew poetry to run in couplets, but the second line of the couplet usually carries the thought a stage further than the first, or gives it a closer application. The thought of the first line is that God is the dwelling-place of His people, their homewith all that the word home carries or can carry to our hearts and minds. Then the second line arrests a possible doubt. Is there no danger that we may slip away from the Divine shelter? We need not fear; underneath are the everlasting arms.
I
The Eternal God is thy Dwelling-place
The children of Israel had need to be reminded of the eternal refuge and support when they were about to lose the presence and guidance of the man who had been their leader and companion in their toilsome and troubled march through the wilderness for forty years. Moses was leaving them, but leaving them with God. They were homeless, and their national future was uncertain and hidden; but to-morrow, as to-day, from generation to generation, they would be in the presence and care of the Eternal, in the arms of the everlasting power and peace.
i. The Eternal God
I feel that if I can believe in God I believe in all that I need, wrote an eminent Presbyterian divine in the record of his private reflections. To believe truly and fully in God may be all that we really need to inspire and sustain our hearts, but this most necessary thing is the most difficult thing in the world. It is the hardest and rarest attainment of life. Oh blessed soul! that has reached and realized through its own experience this ancient and sublime trust: The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
The eternal God is the God of old, literally aforetime. The word denotes what is ancient rather than what is eternal. It is often used of the Mosaic age, or other distant periods of Israels past (Psa 44:1; Psa 74:2; Psa 74:12; Isa 51:9; Mic 7:20), and even of a former period of a single lifetime (Job 29:2). It is used also of mountains (Deu 33:15), of the heavens (Psa 68:33). Besides the present text it is used of God in Hab 1:12; Psa 55:19 (where the R.V. is he that abideth of old).
1. What does a man mean when he says, I believe in God? God is a most elastic term, capable of narrowing to suit the meanest capacity, of expanding to fill the largest. It seems to have a sense intelligible to the simplest mind, while to the profoundest it becomes the symbol of thoughts too high to be spoken, too immense to be comprehended. But though it may signify very different things to different minds, what it signifies does not thereby become unreal. It stands as the symbol of the best and highest Being man can conceive, his idea of the Being rising with his thought of the good and the high.
2. The notions of the men who first called the Being they worshipped God do not bind the latest; the word may remain while its contents are transfigured, as it were changed from one degree of glory to another. But while later ages may outgrow the ideas earlier ages expressed by the term God, they do not outgrow the idea which the term represents. The symbol widens to their thought as the firmament has widened to the telescope, telling, as it widens, secrets before undreamed of, showing such infinite reaches of space, such multitudes and varieties of star clusters, of worlds beyond worlds, as to awe the imagination in its loftiest mood.
3. When we speak of God we speak of Him as a personal Being, a free and conscious Will. If God be impersonal, He can have no heart tender with love, no will moved by swift-footed mercy, regulated by the large righteousness that loves order and deals with the individual through his relations to the whole, no gracious ends for the universe, or energies active in it that may cheer the despondent and help him in his sad struggle with ill.
I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for this, may he fight for anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost my friend I should still be there. I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country I should still exist. But if what that devil dreams were true, I should not beI should burst like a bubble and be gone; I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for my own existence?1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross.]
What are the elements essential to a person? They are twoconsciousness and will; or the knowledge by a being that he is, that he knows, that he acts and has reasons for his action; and the power of free or spontaneous, or, simply, rational choice. Where these are, there is a person; where they are not, there is only a thing. Personality is simply the power of ordered and reasonable conduct, whether it be in ruling a world or in regulating a life.2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]
Personality expresses itself, not by eternal processes, but by individual words and deeds. If there be personality in God at all, it means that He who is behind me, and beneath me, and above me, who besets me everywhere, who is in all naturethe source of forces, the measure of law, the orderer of eventscan also, can, as Person with person, stand face to face with me on the platform of His own world to speak and to be answered. But can He do it worthily? Can He do it so as to complete, without fatally perplexing, the manifestation of Himself? I point for answer to Jesus Christ.3 [Note: Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 134.]
4. Let it be noted that the text expresses no transcendental or speculative doctrine of Moses, but simply a fact of his experience. The eternal God had been his refuge. He had known better than most men the extremes of wealth and poverty, power and weakness, fulness and want. He had known solitude amid the gaieties and glories of the then most splendid court on earth. He had enjoyed Divine society on the sultry and solitary slopes of Horeb. He knew the best that Pharaoh could do for him, the worst that he could do against him, and had found both to be infinitely little. He had known, in all its anxious and bitter phases, what it was to be the loved and hated, trusted and suspected, praised and blamed, leader of a mutinous and murmuring and unstable people. The realities and semblances, the dreams and the disappointments, the actualities and the illusions of life he had alike experienced; and the grand truth which had amid all given stability, strength, and comfort was, The eternal God my refuge, and underneath the everlasting arms.
5. A great poet, whose words are equally dear to men of letters and to men of science, tells us the eternal womanliness draws us ever on; that is, the love, the beauty, the sweet and potent gentleness personified in ideal woman is a ceaseless inspiration to man, wakes him to admiration, wins him to love. But there is one term that embraces everlasting womanliness and infinitely more, the term Eternal Father, or in its simple and beautiful paraphrase, God is love. When we think of the eternal God, then we think of the living Source of good, active at all moments in all lives. He is righteousness, but also love; He is truth, but grace as well. His character determines His ends, His ends justify His ways. His acts become Him, are not accommodated to our deserts, but to His own character and designs. He does not deal with us after our sins, but according to His mercies and in harmony with His own ends. No man is to God an isolated individual, but a unit within a mighty whole, loved as a person, but handled as one whose being was deemed necessary to complete the universe, and judged through the ends of Him who means the universe to be complete. And the man who believes in God, believes in One who loved him from eternity, whose love called him into being, designed and prepared a place for him in the system His wisdom ordained and His will maintains. He knows that, amid all the shadows and sorrows and shame of life, underneath him and around are the everlasting arms.
The two sublimest affirmations concerning the Deity in the inspired Word are theseGod is Light, God is Love. It is the latter of these two which, apparently, had so taken hold of the mind and the heart of Browning that he never wearies of reiterating the statement of the fact in numerous connexions and in various forms. In Paracelsus he declares unhesitatingly:
God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that.
And presently, praying for one who has erred, and for himself, he says:
Save him, dear God; it will be like Thee: bathe him
In light and life! Thou art not made like us;
We should be wroth in such a case; but Thou
Forgivestso, forgive these passionate thoughts
Which come unsought and will not pass away!
I know Thee, who hast kept my path, and made
Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow
So that it reached me like a solemn joy;
It were too strange that I should doubt thy love.1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 23.]
ii. A Dwelling-place
Our need of the eternal God is but too manifest. Weak and mortal, man feels himself a most helpless being. Birth and death are stronger than he; of the one he is the product, of the other the victim. He comes out of a past eternity, in which he had no conscious being; he must go into an eternal future where he is to behe knows not what. This little conscious present is all he has, all that sense can discover or intellect disclose. Mind can see, can feel, the lonely sadness of this little lifecan look out into the infinities of space and time, realize their boundlessness and its own minute personality, till it feels like a small self-conscious star twinkling solitary in an immense expanse.
In moments when the thought of these infinities, conceived only as such, has been strong in me, I have felt like one standing, and reeling while he stood, on a narrow pillar reared high in space, looking up to a starless sky, out on a boundless immensity, down into a bottomless abyss, till in the despair of utter loneliness the soul has cried, Oh for the face of the eternal God above, and the everlasting arms below.2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]
The dearest things in this fair world must change;
Thy senses hurry on to sure decay;
Thy strength will fail, the pain seem no more strange,
While love more feebly cheers the misty way.
What then remains above the task of living?
Is there no crown where that rude cross hath pressed?
Yes, God remains, His own high glory giving
To light thy lonely path, to make it blest.
Yea, God remains, though suns are daily dying,
A gracious God, who marks the sparrows fall;
He listens while thine aching heart is sighing;
He hears and answers when His children call;
His love shall fill the void when death assails,
The one, eternal God, who never fails.3 [Note: William Ordway Partridge.]
1. What man needs is a permanent consciousness of the eternal God as a daily presence, the very atmosphere in which the soul lives, moves, and has its being. To this, two movements are necessary, one from God to man, one from man to God.
Theres heaven above, and night by night
I look right through its gorgeous roof;
No suns and moons though eer so bright
Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
I keep the broods of stars aloof:
For I intend to get to God,
For tis to God I speed so fast,
For in Gods breast, my own abode,
Those shoals of dazzling glory passed,
I lay my spirit down at last.1 [Note: Browning, Johannes Agricola in Meditation.]
(1) Gods movement is one in fact and essence, though manifold in form and manifestationLove. There is truth Divine and universal in that saying of the PsalmistThy gentleness hath made me great. All mans greatness comes from Gods gentleness. Were He wroth, our spirits would fail before Him; but He remains merciful, and we endure. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. His heart, boundless as space, infinite as eternity, beats with mercy; and the eternal God around us means simply, Man is enveloped in eternal love.
Two little girls were playing with their dolls, and singing
Safe in the arms of Jesus,
Safe on His gentle breast,
There, by His love oershaded,
Sweetly my soul shall rest.
Mother was busy writing, only stopping to listen to the little ones talk:
Sister, how do you know you are safe? asked Nellie, the younger of the two.
Because I am holding Jesus, with both my hands, tight, replied her sister.
Thats not safe, said the other. Suppose Satan came along and cut your two hands off!
Little sister looked troubled, dropped dolly, and thought. Suddenly her face shone with joy. Oh, I forgot! Jesus is holding me, and Satan cant cut off His hands; so I am safe.1 [Note: W. Armstrong.]
The child, that to its mother clings,
Lies not all safely on her breast,
Till she her arm around it flings,
Sweetly caressing and caressed:
Evn so, my God, Thy mighty arms,
Not my poor Faith, shield me from harms.
I bless Thy Name for every grace,
Wherewith Thou dost enrich Thine own;
Yea, I would seek each day to trace
Myself more like my Master grown:
Yet, O my God, Thy mighty arms,
Not my faint Love, shield me from harms.2 [Note: A. B. Grosart, Songs of the Day and Night, 12.]
(2) But, on the other hand, let us not forget that the movement from man to God is as needful as the movement from God to man. The one, like the other, is a movement of love; yet with a difference. Divine pity moves down to all men; but only from filial hearts does human trust move up to God. The Fatherhood is universal; but only where the sonship is consciously realized can the spirit cry, Abba, Father! His loving-kindness falls on us like incense by night.
The Divine Father is not the same to all devout men; He is to some more of a daily Presence, more of a permanent Friend; and this larger sense of God rises from a larger need and conscious use of Him in the soul. Vacancies made in the heart are often only rooms in it swept and beautified for God; and His presence at once, glorifies the chamber thus prepared, sheds a mellow light back upon the past, and splendid hopes forward upon the future. Were it possible to reduce a pious soul to a consciousness of only two beingsfirst and pre-eminently of God, next and feebly of selfthen it were possible to endow that soul with the supremest happiness possible to a creature; and the more nearly any man approaches to that consciousness the more blessed will he be. Of a truth, he is happy who can say, As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.3 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]
2. God is a dwelling-place (1) to the nation, and (2) to the individual.
(1) The words were spoken, as all the greatest utterances of the Old Testament were spoken, to a people. The hope of the Israelite was a national hope. His fathers had known God and done their work and passed to their rest. He in his turn was allowed to know God and do his share of work and be buried with his fathers, leaving children and childrens children to carry the work still further forward till at last it should reach its glorious consummation. The nation lived on and expanded and developed, blessed when it feared the Lord, punished when it forgot Him. Thousands and tens of thousands of its sons and daughters passed, but the nation still lived on, and learned to look for its perfect glory in the future, when the king Messiah should reign in righteousness over the whole earth, sitting on Davids throne in Jerusalem. This was the ideal of the great poets and prophets of the Jewish people. It was a national and not an individual hope.
In times of critical strain and trial to civilization and the State, amid great political and social troubles and changes, let us not fail to remember and realize that the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. It is not our decrees and institutions that are upholding the world, but the everlasting lawsanother name for the everlasting arms. Our refuge in times of distress is not parliaments and governments and compromising politicians, but the eternal God. Our rulers and governors may help or hinder progress, but they do not decide the supreme and final issue of things. There is another Providence in affairs than the human providence. This world is, after all, Gods world. Let us not, therefore, lose courage and hope because in the complications of disintegration and change we do not see what is to follow. In all ages, men, bewildered by the vision of great changes, have pronounced the doom of the world because they were not able to see or understand the process of its salvation. Let us not be fearful even if the worst happens. The worst that can happen is often the best for the world. Jerusalem destroyed is better than Jerusalem saved, and the fall of the Roman Empire better for the moral health of the peoples of the earth than its continuance.
The children of Israel had no other, and therefore if God were not their dwelling-place, they were houseless. Pilgrims of the weary foot, they found no city to dwell in; at eventide they pitched their tents, but they struck them again in the morning; the trumpet sounded and they were up and away; if they were in a comfortable valley for one day, yet that relentless trumpet bade them resume their wearisome march through the wilderness in the morning; and perhaps they thought they lingered longest where an encampment was least desirable. Nevertheless they always had a dwelling-place in their God. If I might use such a description without seeming to be fanciful, I would say that the great cloudy canopy which covered them all day long from the heat of the sun was their roof-tree, and that the blazing pillar which protected them by night was their family fireside.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]
(2) But if the national reference of these words is their primary reference, yet we are justified in giving them a further and more personal reference in the light of the Christian revelation.
Sooner or later every son of man is taught the lesson of his own insufficiency, of his need of a strength he does not find in himself, and of a shelter and support which his fellows cannot give, and no earthly interest or object can yield. The larger and more varied his experience of the world and life, and the more deeply he feels and thinks, the more does he realize the assurance of the Divine protection and care to be the most pressing and imperious of all his practical needs. Of all substitutes for Godwealth, comfort, amusement, music, beauty, learning, friendship, love, philanthropyhe must say, at least in all his most searching and critical experiences, Miserable comforters are ye all! To state the fundamental facts of human life is, indeed, to affirm religion. In the generalized experience of mankind lies the real basis of religion. And all religion must somehow have its beginning and its end in God. Religion is God; God is religion.
The ancient words interpret and give immortal expression to a universal and indestructible need of humanity. They were true before they were written, and they would be true if they had not been written in the sacred book of religion. Centuries have passed away and generations have come and gone, but they still lay upon us their solemn spell, and we continue to use them, as we do all the great words of the Bible, because they find us, divine our hearts for us, and utter what in us is but faintly felt and dimly thought with the clear and certain sound of complete conviction, and with the energy of a faith that quickens and strengthens our wavering trusts and hopes.1 [Note: J. Hunter.]
The infinities of space and time are like boundless deserts, silent, void, till filled with a personal God and Father; but once He lives in and through them, they become warm, vital, throbbing, like hearts pulsing with tides of infinite emotion rushing towards us and breaking into the music of multitudinous laughter and tears. The sky above is no longer space gleaming with stars; but filling it, round the stars, round and through the world, in and about each individual man, is God, daily touching us, daily loving us, giving us life and being in Himself. The Eternities behind and before us are no longer dark, empty, or, at best, a grim procession of births and deaths; they are a living, loving God, from whom man came, to whom he returns. And that Eternal God makes all things secure, restful, blessed. No moment, either here or hereafter, can ever be without God; therefore in none can the good man be otherwise than happy. What is beyond death is not beyond God. He is there as here; and so, whether we live or die, the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath us are the everlasting arms.2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]
O Name, all other names above,
What art Thou not to me,
Now I have learned to trust Thy love
And cast my care on Thee!
What is our being but a cry,
A restless longing still,
Which Thou alone canst satisfy,
Alone Thy fulness fill!
Thrice blessd be the holy souls
That lead the way to Thee,
That burn upon the martyr-rolls
And lists of prophecy.
And sweet it is to tread the ground
Oer which their faith hath trod;
But sweeter far, when Thou art found,
The souls own sense of God!
The thought of Thee all sorrow calms;
Our anxious burdens fall;
His crosses turn to triumph-palms,
Who finds in God his all.1 [Note: Frederick Lucian Hosmer.]
II
Underneath are the Everlasting Arms
God surrounds His children on all sides: they dwell in Him. The passage before us shows that the Lord is above them, for we read, There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky. Assuredly He is around them, for the eternal God is thy refuge; and He is before them, for He shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them. Here, according to the text, the Lord is also under His saints, for underneath are the everlasting arms. Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations, and by Thee we are everywhere surrounded as the earth by the atmosphere.
Within thy circling power I stand;
On every side I find thy hand;
Awake, asleep, at home, abroad,
I am surrounded still with God.
1. The meaning is that God is our support, and our support just when we begin to sink. We want support when we are sinking, and the arms being underneath implies that this support is given just when we are going down. At certain seasons the Christian sinks very low in humiliation. He has a deep sense of his own sin; he is humbled before God, till he scarce knows how to lift up his face and pray, because he appears, in his own sight, so abject, so mean, so base, so worthless. Well, let him remember that when he is at his worst underneath are the everlasting arms. Sin may sink him ever so low, but the great atonement is still under all. Here is a text which proves it: He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him. You may have gone very low, but you can never have gone so low as the uttermost. Here is another: All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men. Have you plunged into nearly every kind of sin; have you gone into all manner of blasphemy? Even if you have, it may be forgiven, so that this promise goes underneath you. The love of God, the power of the blood, and the prevalence of the intercession, are deeper down than sin with all its hell-born vileness can ever sink the sinner, while breath is in his nostrils.
I dare approach that Heaven
Which has not bade a living thing despair,
Which needs no code to keep its grace from stain,
But bids the vilest worm that turns on it
Desist and be forgiven.1 [Note: Browning, A Blot in the Scutchcon.]
Underneath are the everlasting arms. That means Personality. That means an all-enfolding, all-embracing love. That means power, the power of the right arm of the Most High. That means redemption, an arm that is not shortened that it cannot save; not shortened by any material limitations or physical obstacles. It is not shortened that it cannot save. It can reach down through all defects of being, through all taints of blood, through all grossness of the flesh, through all warpings of the will, and corruptions of the mind and heart; it can get within, to the mysterious soul and core of all character, the springs of all conductunderneath are the everlasting arms.2 [Note: C. S. Horne.]
2. The word underneath has never been used in the Bible before, and it is never used again. It is of its own order; a word big with meaning and suggestiveness. It is the index to a whole system of thought, philosophical and theological. No solitary word, perhaps, could imply more than this. It opens to us the attitude of wonder and reverent faith in which the deepest minds have pondered what we call to-day the phenomenal; the things that are seen, that strike upon the senses of touch and taste, sight and sound. Such deep minds, brooding over phenomena, have never been satisfied with merely registering those properties and qualities of the material world which they can test and know. They have divided and subdivided matter till they have reduced it to its tiniest possible elements, and then have been conscious that their world and thought end in a note of interrogation after all. It is all summed up, let us say, in this word underneath.
It has been said that the great contribution of science to the sum of modern belief has been that underneath phenomena is that which is everlasting. During the wonderful century the men of science cleaved the rocks, penetrated the skies, scanned the hidden depths, looked into the secrets of nature, brought to light strange knowledge, and set much wisdom in order; and the strangest and most wonderful discovery of all is that the temporal rests on the eternal, that every commonest thing we see, and every commonest thing we handle, has beneath it the everlasting which becomes clear to patient thinking.
I heard my father say he understood it was
A building, people built as soon as earth was made
Almost, because they might forget (they were afraid)
Earth did not make itself, but came of Somebody.
They laboured that their work might last, and show thereby
He stays, while we and earth, and all things come and go.
Come whence? Go whither? That, when come and gone, we know
Perhaps, but not while earth and all things need our best
Attention: we must wait and die to know the rest.
Ask, if thats true, what use in setting up the pile?
To make one fear and hope: remind us, all the while
We come and go, outside theres Somebody that stays.1 [Note: Browning, Fifine at the Fair.]
3. When do we most need to know that underneath are the everlasting arms?
(1) When we have reached a state of special joy and exaltation in our religious life.Sometimes God takes His servants and puts them on the pinnacle of the temple. Satan does it sometimes: God does it tooputs His servants up on the very pinnacle, where they are so full of joy that they scarce know how to contain themselves, whether in the body or out of the body they cannot tell. Well, now, suppose they should fall! for it is so easy for a man, when full of ecstasy and ravishment, to make a false step and slip. They are safe enough, as safe as though they were in the Valley of Humiliation, for underneath are the arms of God.
Suffering has been long acknowledged as an indispensable factor in the building up of souls; the place of love and happiness is less secure. It is at least possible that there are stunted souls who cannot converse fully with the Divine Father till they have had ampler draughts from the breasts of natural joy.1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, xi.]
Its O my heart, my heart,
To be out in the sun and sing!
To sing and shout in the fields about,
In the balm and the blossoming.
Sing loud, O bird in the tree;
O bird, sing loud in the sky,
And honey-bees blacken the clover seas:
There are none of you glad as I.
The leaves laugh low in the wind,
Laugh low with the wind at play;
And the odorous call of the flowers all
Entices my soul away!
For O but the world is fair, is fair:
And O but the world is sweet!
I will out in the gold of the blossoming mould,
And sit at the Masters feet.
And the love my heart would speak,
I would fold in the lilys rim,
That the lips of the blossom, more pure and meek,
May offer it up to Him.
Then sing in the hedgerow green, O thrush,
O skylark, sing in the blue;
Sing loud, sing clear, that the King may hear,
And my soul shall sing with you!2 [Note: Ina Donna Coolbrith.]
(2) When we are specially depressed and in fear.There are times when the burdens of lifes unintelligible secret rest upon us with a weight almost too heavy to be borne. There are so many things which it seems to us infinitely important that we should know, but about which we yet know almost nothing. Mystery circumscribes our little lives as with a wall of adamant; we can hardly advance one single step in thought without dashing ourselves against it; we know not what we are came, we know not whither we came, we know not whither we are going, and none can tell us. We cry aloud for surer knowledge, and while to the forward and presumptuous there comes back no answer except the echo of their own voice, even for humble and faithful questioners there is only the whisper, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter. There is silence and there is darkness. Our vaunted science cannot break that silence and cannot dissipate that gloom.
The eternal God is our refuge from the unsearchable mystery of life. We cannot escape from mystery. It grows with our growing knowledge. What a world this is in which we live, and how awful in some of its aspects is our life in it! Does it not require something more than our little systems and schemes to keep the mind and soul in strength and peace in the midst of this troubled world and troubled life? Where else can we find the sense of shelter and security than where Moses found it long ago? The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Let us yield nothing to our fears. That the Unknown and the Unknowable may be trusted is the message of religion. Our discipleship to Jesus Christ inspires this lofty confidence in the beneficence of the universe, in a universe essentially good and making for goodnessa confidence which is the anticipation of much that modern knowledge is now slowly declaring. In the companionship and fellowship of the Son of God we know that where His trust was in Gethsemane and on Calvary ours can ever rest. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
Often as a child I have trembled to cross at night the courtyard of a lonely country mill. Every little object that moonlight or starlight revealed in other than natural proportions was a source of fearseemed to hide shapes terrible to childish flesh and blood. But if my little hand was laid in the large hand of my father, I could cross the courtyard as gleefully and carelessly at night as at noonday. So, with our spirits held in the hands of the eternal God, who is above, around, and before, the dark places of Life, Death, and the great for Ever become light; and, trusting where we cannot see, our steps are firm, when otherwise they would falter and fail.1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]
I suppose some brethren have neither much elevation nor much depression. I could almost wish to share their peaceful life, for I am much tossed up and down, and although my joy is greater than that of most men, my depression of spirit is such as few can have any idea of. This week has been in some respects the crowning week of my life, but it closed with a horror of great darkness, of which I will say no more than thisI bless God that at my worst, underneath me I found the everlasting arms.2 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]
Till last night I never knew what depression was. I had no illness; one or two things had happened to grieve me, but still they were comparatively slight; but I never felt so thoroughly downcast about myself and all the world, or so bitter and serious a struggle within me. It tore me through and through, yet it was a great mercy and a special answer to prayer; for having previously felt my own indifference and want of real sense of danger, I had entreated to be bruised and brought low to feel the burthen, that I might appreciate what deliverance might be, and it was granted; consequently this morning I felt such as I had never felt before at the whole service and communion. I never till then had an adequate notion of the power and beauty of our Liturgy, and, on the other hand, of its inferiority to the Word of God. I gained some faint idea of what the Bible was; I felt the glorious depth of the declaration, Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept, a passage which I had merely understood before.3 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, Life and Letters, i. 36]
Dark and sad the hours have been
In the valley and shade of Death,
Where no light mine eyes have seen
But the far, cold stars of faith.
And my heart with haunting fears
Almost sank into despair;
Yet the harvest of my years
Mostly has been gathered there.
(3) When sorrow has come in upon us like a flood.By a strange and stern law of compensation, which equalizes the distribution of pain, where the material loss is the less felt the hearts loss is often the greater. No hunger, no cold, no nakedness enters this house by reason of the new record in the registry of death. Externally, maternally, all is as before. But there is the more room and scope for the agony of bereavement; there is the less possibility of assuagement by the good offices of others. Gifts can do nothing here to help; and words, we know, are often less kind than silence. The stranger cannot intermeddle; no anxious effort we can make can mitigate the bitterness.
A king once planted in his garden a beautiful rose-tree, and bade his gardener so tend and train it as to make its flowers the richest and loveliest possible. The tree grew and flourished, and year by year blushed into blossoms of manifold beauty. But it sent out so many shoots, formed so many buds, that its very fertility threatened to injure the quality of its flowers. So the gardener removed the shoots, pruned away the buds, till the tree seemed to bleed all over in loss and pain; but the wounds healed, the sap and strength ran up to those buds that were spared, and when the season of ripeness was come, the roses were lovelier and sweeter than evermost meet of all in the garden to be carried into the palace of the great king, to fill its galleries and chambers with delicious and grateful fragrance.
God gives us love. Something to love
He lends us; but, when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls off, and love is left alone.
But it is left alone that it may be the one perfect bond between the human and the Divine, the fragrant sacrifice that rejoices God, the glorious beauty that makes man a source and seat of joy for ever.
If all my years were summer, could I know
What my Lord means by His made white as snow?
If all my days were sunny, could I say,
In His fair land He wipes all tears away?
If I were never weary could I keep
Close to my heart, He gives His lovd sleep?
Were no graves mine, might I not come to deem
The life eternal but a baseless dream?
My winter, yea, my tears, my weariness,
Even my graves may be His way to bless;
I call them ills, yet that can surely be
Nothing but good that shows my Lord to me.
(4) In the fear of death.When, at last, each of us is laid on the bed of death, and the moment has come when we must enter into the presence of God and see our souls, with every mask of hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, torn away, see our souls as they are and as God sees them; when we are sinking naked and possessionless into the grave; when we feel the mist in our eyes, the fog in our throats, and the voices of our friends no longer reach us, or if they do we have no strength even to sigh back an answer or to return the pressure of the handwhat can help us then? Alone we must enter that dark valleyno troops of friends can accompany us there; alone must our souls seem to sink downwards as through unfathomable seas of gloom. Which of us can tell how soon that awful hour may be awaiting us? And when it comes, how will every one of the things which we have desired on earth seem to shrink into utter insignificance in comparison with the one thing needful, which, perhaps, we may have altogether neglected. When the solid earth itself seems to be crumbling under our feet, when we lie helpless in the grasp of that inexorable force, there is one thing which gives to the Christian not only hope, but peace which passeth all understanding; it is when we feel that for us death can have no sting, and the grave no victory, because the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
Mr. B., an eager business man in middle life, declared that, till he found a way of escape, to go to bed was to go to hell. Just as he was about to lose consciousness there had been almost always presented to his mind the idea and sensation of himself falling through boundless space. The perspiration stood on his face as he avowed that the phrase bottomless pit was to him overwhelming in its suggestiveness. This torture he had begun to experience while he was yet a schoolboy. At the school prayers on Sunday night the boys had always sung Kens evening hymn. The lines
Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed
had seemed terrible in their irony to one who dreaded nothing so much as his bed. Relief had not come to him until he was well on in manhood. Strolling one evening in a country churchyard, his eyes were arrested by the words on a gravestone Underneath are the Everlasting Arms, and in a flash of inspiration he saw his safety. That very night, as the solid platform of the earth was falling away from him, he rested on the promisefor so he described his mental attitudeand he affirmed that since that time he had always at his command a sense of physical comfort and safety upon which he could sleep as on a pillow.1 [Note: The Spectator, July 2, 1910.]
The embers of the day are red
Beyond the murky hill.
The kitchen smokes: the bed
In the darkling house is spread:
The great sky darkens overhead,
And the great woods are shrill.
So far have I been led,
Lord, by Thy will:
So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.
The breeze from the embalmd land
Blows sudden toward the shore,
And claps my cottage door.
I hear the signal, LordI understand.
The night at Thy command
Comes. I will eat and sleep and will not question more.2 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Songs of Travel.]
Literature
Armstrong (W.), Five-Minute Sermons to Children, 46.
Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 154.
Fairbairn (A. M.), The City of God, 190.
Fairbairn (R. B.), College Sermons, 302.
Horan (F. S.), A Call to Seamen, 131.
Hunter (J.), De Profundis Clamavi, 310.
Hutton (J. A.), The Fear of Things, 1.
Parks (L.), The Winning of the Soul, 201.
Robinson (J. A.), Unity in Christ, 123, 137.
Robinson (J. A.), Holy Ground, 7, 15.
Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 345.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xi. (1865), No. 624; xiv. (1868), No. 803; xxiv. (1878), No. 1413.
Wardell (R. J.), Studies in Homiletics, 94.
Christian Age, xxx. 66 (Farrar).
Christian World Pulpit, xxix. 209 (Farrar); Leviticus 4 (Horne); lxviii. 401 (Hunter).
Churchmans Pulpit: The Old and New Year, ii. 412 (Hunter); Sermons to the Young, xvi. 288 (Ross); Harvest Thanksgiving, 31 (Fairbairn).
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
eternal: 1Sa 15:29, Psa 90:1, Psa 90:2, Psa 102:24, Isa 9:6, Isa 25:4, Isa 57:15, Jer 10:10, Mic 5:2, 1Ti 1:17, Heb 9:14
refuge: Psa 18:2, Psa 27:5, Psa 36:7, Psa 46:1, Psa 46:7, Psa 46:11, Psa 48:3, Psa 91:1, Psa 91:2, Psa 91:9, Psa 91:15, Pro 18:10, Isa 32:2, Luk 13:34, Phi 3:9
underneath: Gen 49:24, Pro 10:25, Son 2:6, Isa 26:4, 1Pe 1:5, Jud 1:24
thrust: Deu 9:3-5, Joh 10:28, Joh 10:29, Rom 8:2, Rom 16:20, Rev 20:2, Rev 20:3, Rev 20:10
Reciprocal: Gen 7:16 – the Gen 21:33 – everlasting Deu 33:12 – The beloved Job 1:10 – an hedge Job 5:11 – exalted Job 29:5 – the Almighty Psa 4:8 – for Psa 9:9 – The Lord Psa 55:19 – even Psa 89:18 – the Lord is Psa 102:12 – thou Psa 125:2 – the Lord Psa 139:5 – beset me Psa 140:7 – the strength Son 8:3 – General Isa 40:28 – the everlasting Isa 41:10 – I will strengthen Isa 51:16 – I have covered Lam 5:19 – remainest Hab 1:12 – thou not Hab 3:8 – ride Rom 1:20 – even his Rom 14:4 – he shall Rom 16:26 – everlasting
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Deu 33:27. The eternal God He who was before all worlds, and will be when time shall be no more; is thy refuge Or, thy habitation, or mansion-house, (so the word signifies,) in whom thou art safe, and easy, and at rest, as a man in his own house. Every true Israelite is at home in God: the soul returns to him, and reposes in him. And they that make him their habitation shall have all the comforts and benefits of a habitation in him. And underneath are the everlasting arms The almighty power and infinite goodness of God, which protects and comforts all that trust in him, in their greatest straits and distresses. He shall thrust out the enemy from before thee He shall expel the Canaanites, and make room for you in their country. And shall say, Destroy them That is, shall give you power, as well as authority, to root them out. For to say is to command, and what he commands he gives power to execute. And has he not commanded believers to destroy, in themselves, all sin; all evil tempers and corrupt inclinations, as well as all sinful words and actions; and will he not give them power so to do, if they apply to him for it?