Bible Commentaries
Deuteronomy 32

Verse 39

KILL AND CURE

‘I wound and I heal.’

Deuteronomy 32:39

The text declares with a magnificent fulness the personality and the power of God.

I. God as healing is made visible to us in Jesus.—The miracles of Jesus were mainly connected with the bodies of men. There were two great reasons for this. (1) One reason is to show the close connection of sickness with sin. One indication of this we have in a great fact of our Saviour’s life. He was incarnate that He might have sympathy with us. Yet He was never sick. He had no particular sickness because He had no sin. (2) Christ’s miracles of healing were not the luxury of a Divine good-nature. They were not random alms that cost Him nothing. A perceptible exhaustion of vital energy accompanied the exertion of His power. Here then is a second cause for our Lord’s miracles of healing: to teach us self-denial and thought for the sick. He took to Himself God’s motto, ‘I heal,’ for one of the highest of theological and for one of the tenderest of practical reasons.

II. We now consider God as wounding.—As to the wounds of suffering humanity—sickness—two considerations practically diminish the perplexity which they bring to us when we consider them as existing under a rule of love. (1) One of these considerations is the intention of sickness as a part of the spiritual discipline of the Christian life. (2) Another moral object of sickness is to draw out the fulness of Christian sympathy, scientific and personal.

III. As we enlarge our view, the Divine pity predominates.—There are, indeed, voices of anguish on every breeze; there are shadows in the foreground of the picture of the history of humanity. But these voices of anguish are only surface discords, underlying which is a wondrous harmony. All those shadows do but set off the picture that closes with the long golden distances of sunlit hills, whose atmosphere is perfect wisdom, whose magic colouring drops from the tender pencil of perfect love.

Archbishop Alexander.

Illustration

(1) ‘This is probably the noblest ode in the compass of the Bible, and the quarry from which many of the Psalmists derived materials for their grandest outbursts. We can say the greatest things of God in whispers, like the distilling of the dew, and they will refresh souls as the small rain on the tender grass. As we review life, we shall be compelled to own that God’s way has been perfect, but we shall be full of regret at the way in which we requited Him. Our portion is in God, and God’s in us. How graphic is the picture of His dealings with us, from the time when He found us in the waste howling wilderness of this world! We owe everything to His encompassing care (R.V.) and to His keeping grace. And though sometimes He has stirred up our nest, and driven us into the unwelcome air, yet we have learnt there powers of flight which have been a sacred possession for all after-days. How rich is the provision that God makes for His saints, and yet they forget Him and become unmindful of Him! Then in the very order of His love, He is compelled to act as though He were their enemy, until they return from their backslidings.’

(2) ‘Learn the terrors that follow hard on rebellion. When men wax fat and kick like a well-fed heifer, when they lightly esteem the Rock of their salvation and provoke God to jealousy, they incur terrible penalties (15, 16). They set themselves against the nature of things and the course of the universe. They become outlaws and rebels. Then the penalties pronounced in verses 21–35 befall to bring them to a better mind (36). Then He makes expiation for their sins, and receives them back to Himself (43).’