Remember the days of old, Consider the years of generation to generation; Ask thy father, and he will shew thee; Thine elders, and they will tell thee.
Moses is at the end of his life. God has him write a song for Israel to learn by heart, and it moves straight from God's faithfulness to the people's failure. Then verse 7 stops to command a look backwards. Why does a warning song turn to memory, and what would Israel find if they asked?
Israel had a calling before the nations. This song turns it on its head.
Instead of Israel being a witness for the Lord before all the nations, the song of Moses was to be a witness for the Lord against the children of Israel. They were called to be His witnesses. They were responsible to declare His name and show His praise in that land into which, in His faithfulness and sovereign mercy, He brought them. But they failed, utterly and shamefully. So, in view of this sad and humiliating failure, a song had to be written. First, it sets out the glory of God in the most magnificent terms. Second, it records Israel's deplorable failure at every stage of their history, with unbending faithfulness.
The song's first rebuke lands just before verse 7. What comes next is not more rebuke.
Here we have the first note of reproof in this song. But the moment we hear it, a most precious outpouring of testimony follows. It testifies to the goodness, loving kindness, faithfulness and tender mercy of the Lord, the God of Israel, and the Most High of all the earth.
The verse gives three routes to the same information: the record of the past, your father, the elders. None of them will contradict the others.
And will men repay the Lord like this? He is the Father who purchased them out of captivity because of the love He had for them. Foolish and unwise as they were, did they not know Him to be that? Had He not made them and established them? Then let them look back on the past, the record of one generation after another. Or let them ask their fathers, and the elders grey with age. Whoever they asked, there could be only one answer.
This call to remember opens a whole section of the song. What it uncovers is God's goodness.
The third section, verses 7-14, reveals the goodness and the love of the Lord for them… And how they are reminded again of what the Lord did for them! Verses 9-14 are wonderful words. And they apply to us spiritually, as they describe the Lord's goodness to Israel.
"Ask your father" assumes a father who can answer. When that teaching stops, the children lose more than facts.
The fathers and mothers carried a very definite responsibility. They had to pass on to the children the great events in the history of Israel, and the Lord's blessings to them. So if a generation arose that did not know the Lord or His works, it means there had been a lapse in the teaching of the fathers and mothers… They did not know the Lord, and they did not know His works. So it was very easy for them to give up. They had nothing to hold on to.
The backward look matters most in a bad day. Then the question is what you measure God by.
In an evil day we should always judge the power and goodness of God by the way He acted for His people at the beginning. Beware of judging God by the low condition His people may have fallen into because of their failure.
Commentators differ on how far to press this. One warns that a habit of looking back can itself be a bad sign:
It is nearly always a sign of present weakness if we have to look back to the past for marks of God's favour. It tends to go together with pride in that past, as well as discouragement in the present.
- Witness. Israel was called to witness for God; instead the song witnesses against them. It opens with His glory and records their failure at every stage.
- Reproof. The command to remember lands right after the song's first rebuke. What follows the rebuke is a flood of testimony to God's goodness.
- Answer. Records, fathers, elders: three sources, one verdict. Ask whoever you like and the testimony to His goodness comes back the same.
- Handover. "Ask your father" only works if fathers and mothers have taught. Where that teaching lapses, a generation grows up with nothing to hold on to.
- Use. In a bad day, measure God by how He acted at the beginning, not by the state His people have fallen into. But do not live on the past alone.
When the Most High assigned to the nations their inheritance, When he separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the peoples According to the number of the children of Israel.
Moses is teaching Israel a song, and he sends them back to the moment the nations of the world were first laid out on the map. His claim is startling: God drew the borders of every people with Israel in view, long before Israel existed. One note first. The ESV reads "the sons of God" here, while the writers below use an older reading, "the number of the children of Israel."
"The Most High" is not the usual name for God. One writer ties it to the kingdom still to come:
This verse has a deep meaning. It carries us backward. God made the boundaries of the nations with direct reference to the children of Israel. The name of God used here, "the Most High," is His millennial title, the one He will have when His blessed Son our Lord receives His Kingdom. When that time of blessing comes, and a converted Israel is no longer the tail but the head of the nations, this division that God made will then be fully known.
The name goes back to the meeting between Melchizedek and Abraham, and it comes with a description:
This is the name given to Jehovah in the meeting between Melchizedek and Abraham, where the words "Possessor of heaven and earth" are added to it. This is, in fact, the character God will take up when He gathers together in one all things in Christ, both the things in heaven and the things on earth.
These writers place this dividing at Babel, when God confused human language and scattered mankind:
This means that at the Babel scattering God brought each people to settle exactly where His ways would need them when Israel came on the scene. So God Himself settled the first map of the world, with the land and people of Israel as His centre.
The verse uses two different actions — separating and dividing — and one commentator keeps them apart:
Dispersion preceded: a different term is employed in the Hebrew, as there ought to be in the translation. The isles are said here to be "separated," as the earth there is "divided." The orderly partition followed the confused dispersion.
The force of the verse lies in its timing. Israel was not there to be counted:
Mankind was split into nations more than a hundred years before Abraham was born. Israel had no national existence for nearly five hundred years after that. Yet this passage tells us that Israel was already so present to the thoughts and purposes of God, and held such a central and important place in them, that when the Most High separated the sons of Adam and divided to the nations their inheritance, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. That is, He arranged where their empires would sit and how far they would reach.
The number, then, was one Israel had not yet reached:
Even then, when the Gentiles were receiving their inheritance, He set their bounds according to the needs of such a number as the children of Israel would become.
One writer uses this verse to set God's government of the earth apart from what He does in grace:
Once personal salvation is settled, Scripture takes up two subjects. One is the sovereign grace that makes us, redeemed from sin, like Christ in the glory. This is the blessed portion of the church of God. The other is the government of the world. The Jews are the centre of the government of this world... Israel would not have Christ, and so was set aside for the time.
Today's map does not look like that. These writers treat the present order as an interruption, not a cancellation:
At present the nations have the upper hand; these are the "times of the Gentiles." But in the end Judah reappears on the scene as the object of God's purposes.
The verse also has a plain use for reading world events now:
Men may seize by force, at any time, the lands they want, but they can only get them if God permits it. The all-wise Creator sees some way in which the anger of man will serve His purpose. So there is a hand above all, controlling the movements of nations, even though men hardly notice it. This was true in the earliest days, and it is true still.
- Who divides — the name used here is "the Most High," the title linked with Melchizedek and with God as owner of heaven and earth.
- When He divided — at Babel, when God confused human language and settled each people where His plan for Israel would need them.
- By what measure — by a people who would not be a nation for centuries. The division was planned, not accidental.
- To what end — Israel stands at the centre of God's government of the earth. That is a different line from the grace that gives the church its place with Christ.
- What it means now — nations still move only as God permits. Today's map ignores Israel, but that is temporary: Judah reappears at the end.