GOD AND HIS SAINTS

'He loved the people; all His saints are in Thy hand: and they sat down
at Thy feet; every one shall receive of Thy words.'--DEUT. xxxiii. 3.


The great ode of which these words are a part is called 'the blessing
wherewith Moses blessed the children of Israel before his death.' It is
mainly an invocation of blessing from Heaven on the various tribes, but
it begins, as the national existence of Israel began, with the
revelation of God on Sinai, and it lays that as the foundation of
everything. It does not matter, for my purposes, in the smallest
degree, who was the author of this great song. Whoever he was, he has,
by dint of divine inspiration and of his own sympathy with the inmost
spirit of the Old Covenant, anticipated the deepest things of Christian
truth; and these are here in the words of our text.

I. The first thing that I would point out is the Divine Love which is
the foundation of all.

'He loved the people.' That is the beginning of everything. The word
that this singer uses is one that only appears in this place, and if we
regard its etymology, there lies in it a very tender and beautiful
expression of the warmth of the divine love, for it is probably
connected with words in an allied language which mean the _bosom_
and a _tender embrace_, and so the picture that we have is of that
great divine Lover folding 'the people' to His heart, as a mother might