We belong to two worlds. Neither the one nor the other completes our life. It is the action and reaction of their influences, the intermingling of their currents, which ministers to our vital progress. Man is strongly beset by the temptation to divide himself, and give himself part to one, part to the other, world; to let the daily round, the common task, have the share which they claim of his time and energy, in dull submission to the inevitable, and then to live what he calls his life in another it may be a higher, but, alas! it tends terribly to become a lower world. It is the daily round which makes life, and God will have us live.Therefore He keeps us there. The daily, hourly repetition of heavenly acts and efforts is training us for the life of heaven.
I. To Moses was entrusted the noblest, but at the same time the weariest, life-task ever committed to the hand of man. The burden of his people he bore through life; never for one instant was he permitted to lay it down. And to him were visions vouchsafed of Diviner brightness than meaner men could look upon. For him, as for many a faithful pilgrim, the brightest and most blessed vision was the last, from the last mountain summit which lies on the hither side of the river of death.
II. The visions cluster most thickly around death, because those who know what it is to live must die to realise their dreams. Like Moses, they may see the land, but they must die to inherit it, die with the vision before their spirits, which fades for the moment as they die, but when they pass it is heaven.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Soul's Exodus and Pilgrimage,p. 334.
References: Deuteronomy 34:1. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xii., p. 274.Deuteronomy 34:1-5. E. Bersier, Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 1.Deuteronomy 34:1-7. H. Batchelor, The Incarnation of God,p. 193.Deuteronomy 34:1-8. H. Allon, The Vision of God,p. 225 (see also Sunday Magazine,1875, p. 486). Deuteronomy 34:1-12. W. M. Taylor, Moses the Lawgiver,p. 434.Deuteronomy 34:4. Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 293; J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College,vol. i., p. 160; Bishop Woodford, Sermons on Subjects from the Old Testament,p. 27; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. x., p. 339; Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 447; Deuteronomy 34:5. A. Scott, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 3.