Without attaching any mystic meaning to this figure of the eagle, we may readily discover the great principles of God's action that it was intended to illustrate.
I. The Divine discipline of life is designed to awaken man to the development of his own powers. The instinct of the eagle in breaking up her nest is to arouse the native energies of her young. The power of flight is in them, but unknown, because it has never been called into play; it is a slumbering faculty, and must be awakened into action. Man's soul is formed into God's image by the right action of his spiritual powers, and these powers are only awakened by the activity of God. (1) The great purpose of all spiritual discipline is to render men Divine. By the very constitution of the soul, the Godlike image must be formed by awakening the energies that lie slumbering within. The soul contains in itself the germinal forces of the life it may possess in the future ages. (2) The image of the text suggests two methods of Divine action: the stimulating and the exemplary. The eagle breaks up her nest, and is not the voice of life's experiences God's summons to man to rise and live to Him? God sends a shock of change through our circumstances, and rouses us from repose.
II. Discipline attains its end only when regarded as under the control of a father. It is obvious that the instinct of the eagle is that of parental affection. (1) Believe in the Father, and you submissively accept the mysterious in life. (2) Believe in the Father, and you shall strive to realise the purpose of this discipline. We have no impulse to any spiritual aspiration, to any true self-sacrifice, to the exertion of any spiritual energy, which is not awakened by the touch of the Eternal Spirit. Let us then awake out of sleep. God is breaking up our material resting-places in order that we may aspire towards the imperishable and the immortal.
E. L. Hull, Sermons,3rd series, p. 131.
I. This passage suggests the thought of Divine incitements. The world is all alive with nest-building. Men seek comfort, satisfaction, and rest in outward things. In a scene where all is flowing they try to make fixity. God shatters what man builds, drives away what man gathers, takes what man in vain tries to hold.
II. Divine example. "As an eagle fluttereth over her young," as showing them the way to fly, so God sets before us the example of the good, the strivings of the great, the lives of the saints, and chiefly the perfect pattern, the perfect life of His incarnate Son. With the disturbances and dislodgments of life will be found very often invitations, and possibilities, and enlargements.
III. Divine protection. "The eagle spreadeth abroad her wings." The spreading of the wings is the promise of protection to the young birds, both while in the nest and while attempting to fly. So here we have the Divine protection amply promised and assured to us by the word of God.
IV. Divine compulsion. "As an eagle... taketh them," if they will, in helpfulness; if they will not, in compulsion; in one way or another they must be got out of the nest. God takes oftentimes one and another in quiet, common life, and by a kind of sacred violence forces them into new scenes and almost into better states.
A. Raleigh, Front Dawn to the Perfect Day,p. 219.
References: Deuteronomy 32:11; Deuteronomy 32:12. W. Haslam, The Threefold Gift of God,Part I., p. 41; T. Cuyler, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 529; W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life,p.. 78. Deuteronomy 32:13. H. Melvill, The Lothbury Lectures,p. 19. Deuteronomy 32:20. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxx., No. 1784.