‘ Then I said to you, “Do not be in such dread, nor be afraid of them. Yahweh your God who goes before you, he will fight for you, in the same way as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you (thou) have seen how Yahweh your God bore you (thee), as a man bears his son, in all the way in which you (ye) went, until you came to this place.'
Moses assures them that he had immediately stepped in to give them confidence. Let them lose their fears, he had said. Let them remember that Yahweh would go before them. Let them recognise that it was the same Yahweh Who had delivered them from the Egyptians ‘before their very eyes', Who would go with them. The same Yahweh Who had protected them in the wilderness, and had borne them as a man carries his young son in the face of difficult circumstances, feeding them with manna and quails and providing them with water, and giving them a father figure in Moses, and He had done it in all the ways in which they went. If they thought back they would recognise that He was dependable in every way. He had performed the miraculous for them against the Egyptians in such a way that they had been able to watch it, and He had continually strengthened and comforted and fed them in their journey through the wilderness. This was indeed the same Yahweh as they had described as a ‘Man of War' in Exodus 15:3. As long as they fought on His behalf, He would fight for them.
Note in Deuteronomy 1:31 the use of the singular ‘thou' and ‘thee' which is primarily because of the illustration. Israel is likened to a son borne by his father. The singular is therefore appropriate. But the application is then immediately to ‘ye'.