The old man stood high on the hillside, the Israelites below him hushed and expectant as they waited for him to continue. These were his people, the flock he had shepherded for over 40 years. Moses’ voice rang cjear through the desert air: “The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6).
“It was not because you were more in number than any other people,” he reminded them. Numbers have never mattered to God. Quality is more important than quantity, to Him. “It is because the LORD loves you,” he went on, “and is keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand” (verses 7,8). How He had loved them, in spite of their rebellious spirit, their hankering after the Egypt from which He had called them out! Those decades of eating manna, enduring discipline and wandering in the wilderness had finally forged the Children of Israel into a unique nation, a people with a history and a destiny.
The Chosen Nation
Was Moses being too starry-eyed, too close to the Israelites to see things in perspective, when he spoke of them as the “chosen people”? The answer is …
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