We cannot consider this solemn, mysterious close of the great prophet's life without feeling that there are lessons of instruction the most manifold which are presented by it.
Notice:
I. A life may appear in some leading point of it to have been a failure, to have been defeated of that crowning success which in our short-sighted vision it had almost a right to claim, and may for all this have been a life most acceptable to God, and consummated with a death very precious in His sight. The lives of few men are rounded and complete; there is something wanting, something fragmentary, in almost all, and this quite as much in the lives of God's saints as in the lives of other men. God writes His sentence of vanity upon allthings here.
II. We see here an example of the strictness with which God will call even His own to account, and while His judgments are in all the world, will cause them to begin at His own house. Moses' sin seems to us to have been a comparatively small one, a momentary outbreak of impatience or unbelief, and yet it entailed this penalty upon him, this baffling of the dearest hopes of his life.
III. We are wont to regard the death of Moses as something unlike the deaths of other men, and so in a sense it was. Yet look at it in another point of view, and what was it but the solitude of every deathbed? " Je mourrai seul," said the great Pascal, and the words are true of every man. We may live with others, but we must die by ourselves.
IV. Observe and admire the way in which God so often overrules the lives of the saints of the elder covenant that by them He may, in type and shadow, set forth to us the eternal verities of the Gospel. Think not of Moses that he can ever be more than a schoolmaster to Christ; that he can bring thee a foot further than to the borders of the land of thine inheritance. Another must lead thee in if ever that good land shall be thine. Jesus, our Joshua, our Saviour He must do this.
R. C. Trench, Sermons Preached in Ireland,p. 238 (see also Sermons New and Old,p. 152).
References: Deuteronomy 4:21; Deuteronomy 4:22. J. A. Sellar, Church Doctrine and Practice,p. 287. Deuteronomy 4:22. Parker, vol. v., p. 5.Deuteronomy 4:29. Old Testament Outlines,p. 43; Parker, Christian Chronicle,May 7th, 1885.Deuteronomy 4:29-31. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxii., No. 1283.Deuteronomy 4:36. Parker, Fountain,March 8th, 1877.