Deuteronomy 32:9–10

At the same time (verse 8) we have an all-important declaration. In His government of the world, God had made Israel the centre. He had arranged the nations of the earth, in their various locations, with respect to the boundaries of Israel. Israel was the first object of those ways. For His earthly people are Jehovah's portion, His inheritance upon earth.

It is important to notice what God did when He divided the people in Genesis 10. He gave them all their place in relation to a people who did not yet exist. He set His grace on Israel before Israel or their great ancestor existed. When God allotted the nations their position, He allotted it all around His own plot of land. That land is now trampled under foot by the Gentiles. He kept it for His people. So His ways with the nations had Israel in view. Now His church is His chief interest, and there is not a movement going on under heaven that God will not turn to the good of His church.

The song carries them back to a time beyond these experiences. It goes back before the nation existed at all, when the sons of Adam were finding the homes God assigned them. Even then the Gentiles were receiving their inheritance, and He set their boundaries to fit the needs of a people as many as the children of Israel would become. For in truth they were Jehovah's portion — His people, and Jacob (though only "Jacob") the lot of His inheritance.

Centuries may pass, as in the case of Amalek, before the judgment is carried out. How many centuries have passed since Edom cried against Jerusalem, "Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!" (Psalm 137:7). God has not forgotten that. His vengeance will certainly overtake her... God's people are precious to Him, though He may have to discipline them under His government.

Then how sweet is the next verse: "The Lord's portion is His people." I do not know how far we enter into it. In the New Testament we are told we have treasure in heaven. We are told, "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." But Christ has a treasure here upon earth. With that treasure in view, He sold all that He had. He laid aside all His Messiah titles and rights, so that He might secure it... The children of Israel are the people in question in our chapter. But in this present time God is gathering a people out of this world for heaven. He is forming His church.

But God has His heritage as well as we... That God should inherit a people is a familiar idea in Scripture. He always had a people, and in grace He called His chosen His inheritance (Deuteronomy 32:9). This expression makes clear to faith the true position of God's chosen people, in the middle of a world He has rejected.

One of the grandest and fullest sections of the whole Bible now lies open before us and asks for our prayerful attention. It covers God's dealings with Israel from first to last. It gives a most solemn record of their terrible sin, and of God's wrath and judgement. But, blessed be God, it begins and ends with Him; and this is full of the deepest and richest blessing for the soul. If it were not so, if we had only the sad story of man's ways, we would be completely overwhelmed.

One phase of God's dealings with His people was over. They were saved (Ex. 14:30). But what about their future? Would He leave them to their own resources now that He had delivered them from judgment and from the power of the enemy? … Moses tells us that "He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness." What was to become of poor Jacob there? Note the name he is given here: weak and failing Jacob, not the princely name Israel. … Later the Saviour "found" the man He had healed of blindness and revealed Himself to him, meeting his spiritual need as well as his bodily need. In the same way Jehovah "found" the people whom He had delivered, and proved Himself enough for their every need until they reached the promised rest.

Where had He found them? In a desert land, yes, a howling wilderness; but where the Lord's care had only the more opportunity for display. Encircled, watched over, guarded as the pupil of the eye, they had proved this.

Gesenius says this word means 'little man', and then 'the little man of the eye'. That is, the pupil of the eye. In it, as in a mirror, a person sees his own small reflected image. He says this pleasing image is found in several languages. This is the part of the eye that especially needs guarding: God preserved His own as the apple of His eye. Deut. 32:10; Ps. 17:8.

He will be jealous over His people, for those who touch them are touching "the apple of His eye," the pupil, the most sensitive area. He feels deeply everything that affects His beloved people Israel, and certainly no less what affects His body, the Church.

"He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness." Where did God find you and me? In the quarry of nature. We were in the gutter, but, thank God, He came to the gutter for us. We were unclean and sinful. Some of us may have been respectable, and others not respectable at all. But we were all covered with sin — the thing that nailed the Son of God to the cross. But He sought us and saved us. How great is the grace of our God!