This prayer brings out in its greatest strength a contrast which goes through the Book of Deuteronomy, and through the whole Bible. The Israelites are the people of God, His inheritance redeemed by His mighty hand. They are stubborn, stiff-necked, wicked. We become so familiar with passages which contain both these descriptions of them, that we attach little meaning to either.
In seeking for a resolution of this difficulty we notice:
I. That the Scriptures do not set forth the history of a man seeking for God, but of God seeking for men. To separate Moses the righteous man from Moses the deliverer of the Israelites is impossible. He could not have been righteous if he had not fulfilled that task; he could not have been righteous if he had not testified in all his acts and words that God, not he, was the Deliverer. If we once see upon what ground the holiness of Moses stood, we must admit that the nation of which he was a member was holy in precisely the same sense and for precisely the same reason as he was; nay, that it had a title prior to his, a title from which his own was derived. It was a holy nation because God had called it out, had chosen it to be His; He had put His name upon it.
II. See then how reasonable was the prayer of the text. Because Moses regarded the Israelites as a holy and chosen people, redeemed by God's own hand, because he believed that this description belonged to the whole covenant people at all time, therefore he felt with intense anguish their stubbornness, their wickedness, and their sin. It was the forgetfulness of their holy state which he confessed with such shame and sorrow before God; it was because they had gone out of the right way, each man preferring a selfish way of his own, that they needed his intercession and God's renewing and restoring mercy.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 53.
References: Deuteronomy 9:29. Bishop Lightfoot, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 63.Deuteronomy 9 Parker, vol. iv., p. 195.Deuteronomy 10:14-16. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vi., No. 303.Deuteronomy 10:16. Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times"vol. v., p. 9 (see also Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year: Christmas and Epiphany,p. 193); Clergyman's Magazine,vol. viii., p. 12; Parker, vol. v., p. 8. Deuteronomy 10; Deuteronomy 11 Parker, vol. iv., p. 204.Deuteronomy 11:10-12. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 58.