Canaan and Egypt.
I. ITS CONTRAST WITH EGYPT. (Deuteronomy 11:10, Deuteronomy 11:11.) Not, like Egypt, a land rainless and artificially watered. It had no Nile. It drank in water from the rains of heaven. It was thus in a peculiar way a land dependent upon God. Egypt's fertility depended on God also, but less directly. Its contrivances for irrigation gave it, or might seem to give it, a semi-independence. Palestine was a land, on the contrary, whose peculiar conditions made it dependent for fruitfulness on the direct gift to it of rains from heaven. It was a land requiring a providential adjustment of conditions—a daily care—to make it yield the utmost it was capable of (Deuteronomy 11:12). The truth here figured is that God wills the believer to put his life day by day under his immediate care. The worldly man may desire, and in a measure may be allowed to attain, a position of relative independence of God: he may get (within limits) the ordering of his own plans and ways, and by ingenious contrivances and manipulations of laws of nature, he may think to put himself beyond the power of God's interference with him. But the godly man will neither desire this nor be content with it. He wishes God's eyes to be upon his lot day by day, "from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year." There is, within the ordinary providence of God, a special providence to be recognized over God's people, over Christ's Church, and over nations that adhere to God's ways.
II. THE RESULTS OF THIS CONTRAST TO THE INHABITANTS. (Deuteronomy 11:13-18.) The directness of the dependence of Canaan on God's care made it, to a greater degree than Egypt could have been, suitable for the operation of a system so intimately bound up with temporal rewards and punishments. Should the people prove obedient, God engages to bless them with rains, and make the land fruitful (Deuteronomy 11:13-16). [But should they disobey, the peculiar conditions of the land put it in his power to scourge them, as he so often did, with drought and famine (1 Kings 17:1; Joel 1:1-20.; Haggai 1:10, Haggai 1:11). So he threatens (Deuteronomy 11:16, Deuteronomy 11:17). It is a blessed but a perilous position which God's people are called to occupy. It secures to them unwonted favors, but it exposes them also, if disobedient, to chastisements and punishments of a peculiarly direct and severe kind. The higher the position of nearness to God, the greater the responsibility which that position entails upon who enjoy it.—J.O.