Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Deuteronomy 1:32
Yet in this thing ye did not believe the LORD your God,
32. Yet in this thing ] Rather, in spite of this word, Deu 1:29-31.
ye did not believe ] Heb. ye were not believing (participle), i.e. ye continued, or persisted, not to believe.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Deu 1:32
In this thing ye did not believe the Lord your God.
Partial truth
These are the great battles of the world. Not the clang of swords and the roar of kingdoms, but the conflict of man with God,–man calling God a liar; these are the disastrous and fatal wars. We think ourselves refined because we shrink from the taste of hot blood, and then go and secretly disobey the God that made us. We are often called upon to contemplate what may be called partial faith. We have faith in spots; we are mainly bruises of unbelief, wounds of unconfessed but deadly atheism; yet here and there, leopard-like or zebra-like, we are studded with pieces of detached piety. How true this is let every man bear witness on his own account. We do believe some things, but generally they are things of no importance. We believe things that cost us nothing. Who believes the thing that has a Cross. Wet with red blood in the middle of it? We are all partially religious, whimsically religious, religious after a very arbitrary and mechanical fashion. It is marvellous how the conscience is trained in little dots and short lines, and how the total manhood is left in a practically atheistic condition. We see what is meant by partial faith when we contemplate a vision which comes before us every day of our life, and that is the vision of partial character. Where is there a man that is all reprobate? The son of perdition occurs but now and then in the rolling transient centuries. Who is there who has not some good points about him? How we magnify those points into character. The chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Would you trust a chain thirty links long if you were sure that one of the links was very weak? You are no stronger than your weakest point; study that weak point; repair, amend, or remove it, or replace it by some point worthy of the rest of the character. That would be common sense, that would be downright logic worthy of the market place. Why not accept it and realise it? We all believe in providence. Which providence? how much providence? in what seasons do we believe in providence? We are great believers in blossoming time, but what faith have we when the snow upon our path is six feet deep and the wind a hail and frost? The Lord has many fine day followers. When a man has had ten thousand pounds unexpectedly left to him, he is prone to sing, God moves in a mysterious way. He is mayhap, notwithstanding his psalm singing, a hypocrite; he does not understand the meaning of faith, which is self-transformation into the very bosom of God. We often hear of some persons who are remarkably sound on certain doctrines. I dread to hear of any man who is particularly sound, on any one doctrine, because I have the suspicion that he is magnifying his soundness upon that doctrine that he may ingratiate himself into my confidence so far as to inoculate me with some peculiar heresy of his own. As we have said before, what would be thought of any man who was partial to certain letters of the alphabet, and remarkably sound upon the consonants, or who held two of the vowels with most pious and clinging faith, who would lay down his intellectual life for the vowel a and for the vowel o, but who would take leave to cherish his own suspicions with regard to the soundness of the other vowels? What of the man who is strong upon the letter b, but a little heretical upon the letter z? This is Gods charge against us by the mouth of His prophets and apostles–Yet in this thing ye did not believe. We must not only be careful about what we do believe, but about what we do not believe. Do we really believe in providence?–in the shepherdly God, in the fatherly God, in the motherly God, in the God of the silent step, who comes with the noiselessness of a sunbeam into the chamber of our solitude and desolation? Do we really believe in the God who fills all space, yet takes up no poor mans room, and who is constantly applying to broken or wounded hearts the balm that grows only in old sweet Gilead? Do we believe that the very hairs of our head are all numbered? I am not so old in faith as mighty Habakkuk, I could see many trees blighted without losing my faith; but there is ,one tree, if aught should happen to any single branch or twig of that tree, my souls faith would wither. What, then, can be my faith, if it is true, and it is true, that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link? We believe in prayer. How much? At what time do we believe in prayer? Are there not periods of agony in life in which we dismiss all around, and look with dumb sorrow upon the unheeding heavens? It is in vain that we say we believe in prayer, and that we lament for those who do not pray, if our prayer does not stand us in good stead in the hour and article of lifes extremest agony. Remember the possibility of our having a partial faith, a partial faith in providence, a partial faith in prayer, and remember that the chain is no stronger than its weakest point; and if in this thing or that we do not believe the Lord our God, we may strike the rest of our faith dead as with a sword stroke. Lord, save me, or I perish! What we want, then, is an all-round faith; in other words, what we want is an all-the-year-round faith. But our faith comes in fits and starts. Perhaps this may be accounted for by the fact that we have confounded the word creed with the word faith. Creed is weather, faith is climate; creed is a variable alphabet, faith is an eternal poetry. We live on faith, we walk by faith; without faith we have no life. As to our creed, take it, leave it, read it, despise it, adopt it, do what you like with it, but faith abides for ever, sometimes requiring new words and new modes, but never changing its inward and Divine substance and meaning. Let every man apply this text to himself. Let no man charge another about this merely occasional or spasmodic faith. Now and again we hear men say, My faith could not rise to that height. Sometimes I may ask for a little patience, now and again I may say, Give me time. Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee. That is the true faith. So long as that love lingers in the heart hell shall not have thee, nor the gates of hell prevail against the rock on which you build. This is very serious. This reflection makes life very solemn. Some of us have thought too much that we could take up our faith and set it down, that we may believe a little of this and a little of that; some of us have not thought much of the roundness of the orb of faith. Let us not give way to censoriousness upon others. You do not know how hard it is for some men to believe. It may be comparatively easy for you and me to believe. But we who are strong should bear the infirmities of the weak; we should be patient with the slow, we should desire that other men may know the joy and the blessedness and the triumph and the glory of the full life. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
In this matter which God commanded and encouraged you to do, to wit, in going in confidently to possess the land. Or, in this word, whereby God promised to fight for you, and assured you of good success.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
Yet in this thing ye did not believe the Lord your God. That they might go up and possess the land at once, and that he would fight for them, and subdue their enemies under them; or notwithstanding the favours bestowed upon them, and because of them, they did not believe in the Lord their God, and which was a great aggravation of their unbelief, and was the cause of their not entering into the good land, Heb 3:19.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
Verses 32-36:
Israel was unwilling to accept the evidence of God’s guidance by the fire and cloud, as assurance of His Presence and blessing in the conquest of the Land. This unbelief cost the lives of all the men of Israel twenty years old and upward, except two, Num 14:28-35. The present text lists only the name of Caleb.
The cause of Israel’s failure may be summed up in one word: unbelief, Heb 3:17-19; Heb 4:6-11. This is the cause for failure among God’s children today.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
32. Yet in this thing ye did not believe the Lord. He signifies that they had been most prejudiced observers of the works of God, since His power, so often experienced and. so thoroughly understood, had not aroused them to confidence in Him. For in the word דבר, dabar, which we have translated thing, he embraces all the proofs whereby God had testified, that in Him alone there was all that was necessary to insure their complete salvation. And this was, so to speak, real or practical doctrine, when God called upon them to trust Him by stretching forth His hand. Still, He accuses them of unbelief with reference to the promise; for, whilst faith is not only prompt and ready in obedience, but invigorates and quickens the whole mall, so the cause of their inertness was that they gave no heed to God who had promised to bestow upon them the land of Canaan, and did not rest upon His covenant. In relation to this also, he says, that God marked out the places and stations where they should pitch their camp, for, unless it had been His design to guide them onwards, this change of places would have been superfluous. It was, therefore, gross supineness not to refer these signs for halting and proceeding to their proper object, since it was equivalent to despising God when He held out His hand to them.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
Deu 1:32-33
‘ Yet in this thing you did not believe Yahweh your God, who went before you in the way, to seek you out a place to pitch your tents in, in fire by night, to show you by what way you should go, and in the cloud by day.’
But they (in their fathers) had not believed Yahweh their covenant God. God had constantly gone before them in the cloud by day and the fire by night, showing them the way in which they should go and selecting the best camps sites at night, and guiding them to the essential water that was so needed, and feeding them with manna. But they still would not accept that He was capable of defeating these fearsome enemies, by now as large as giants in their imagination. They had refused to believe.
Deu 1:34-36
‘ And Yahweh heard the voice of your words, and was angry, and swore, saying, “Surely not one of these men of this evil generation shall see the good land, which I swore to give to your fathers, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh, he shall see it, and to him will I give the land that he has trodden on, and to his children, because he has wholly followed Yahweh.” ’
The result was, that after waiting and giving them opportunity to make up their minds fully, which they did in terms of a refusal to go forward, Yahweh was ‘angry’. That is, in His moral righteousness He held their attitude in aversion and determined to punish them.
Thus He swore that not one of the mature men would see or enter the land, with the exception of Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, who had urged them to go forward, (literally ‘he was completely full after Yahweh’). He alone of all who had received the command to go forward would see it, (apart also from the leadership itself who had given the command), and what was more, he would receive at God’s hand the very land that he had trodden on, because he, and he alone, had fully followed Yahweh in the infighting among the eleven scouts. Joshua is not mentioned because, having taken his place at Moses’ side, and having had discussions with him as his deputy, he would not be in the argument. It is clear from the narrative in Num 13:30 that Caleb had stood firm and alone in the case of the ‘people versus Moses and Joshua’, for Joshua was not seen as ‘of the people’ but as ‘on the other side’. He was known to be Moses’ right hand man. Thus he had wisely kept quiet, and was not standing among them, although later adding his witness. This description tells us that Moses clearly remembers the sight of Caleb standing there on one side with the others baying on the other, a sign of authenticity. he is remembering what he saw.
But it may be asked, ‘What about Joshua?’ The answer is simple. Neither Moses nor Joshua were under examination. Moses was God’s chosen one, and Joshua was his right hand man, ‘standing before him’. They were the ones who had conveyed Yahweh’s commands. At this stage it was fully acknowledged that both of them would enter the land. So the fate of Joshua had not been in question.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
“Handfuls of Purpose”
For All Gleaners
“Yet in this thing ye did not believe the Lord your God.” Deu 1:32
Note the possibility of partial faith. There may be very considerable credence in divine promises, yet there may be one weak point. In this as in other respects the law holds good: he that offends in one point offends in all. Faith is no stronger than its weakest point. We must not expect to realise divine blessings if we bring a crippled faith to the exercise. It is sometimes supposed that faith is one act, and that as such it is either strong or weak. All consciousness and all spiritual history distinctly disprove this theory. We may have a general faith in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and yet encounter with strong doubt some particular injunction or promise which appeals to our self-sacrifice. We may believe in other men praying and have doubts about our own prayers. We may have general faith in Christian doctrine and yet be lacking in the particular faith which applies that doctrine to actual life. We should examine the whole line of faith day by day to see which points are weak and to amend them accordingly. What if we believe God and do not practise godliness? Where is faith then?
Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker
Deu 1:32 Yet in this thing ye did not believe the LORD your God,
Ver. 32. Ye did not believe. ] Sic surdo plerunque fabulam: there was none within to make answer. “Who hath believed our report?” &c. We cannot get men to credit us.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
the LORD. Hebrew “in the LORD”(= Jehovah).
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
2Ch 20:20, Psa 78:22, Psa 106:24, Isa 7:9, Heb 3:12, Heb 3:18, Heb 3:19, Jud 1:5
Reciprocal: Num 14:11 – believe me Deu 9:23 – ye believed 2Ki 17:14 – did not believe