Deuteronomy 31:6
“Be strong and courageous. Don’t be afraid or scared of them; for Yahweh your God himself is who goes with you. He will not fail you nor forsake you.””
Where this sits
Moses is a hundred and twenty years old and says so in the same chapter. He is speaking to the whole nation on the day he hands over and is told he will not cross the Jordan.
Reflection
The pronoun is where the weight sits. Yahweh your God himself is who goes with you.
Moses is retiring. He has led these people for forty years, argued with God on their behalf, and been the single point of contact between the nation and heaven for their whole living memory. Now he is telling them he will not be crossing with them. Every reason they have had to feel secure is walking off the stage.
So the emphatic himself is answering the obvious question. If Moses goes, who goes? And the answer is not Joshua, though Joshua is being appointed three verses later. The answer is that the one they had assumed was reachable through Moses goes with them directly.
That is the pattern behind most of what we call fear of change. We rarely fear the new thing on its own terms. We fear losing the arrangement through which the good things reached us — the person, the role, the health, the structure. This verse does not deny the loss. Moses really is not crossing. It relocates the source.
He will not fail you nor forsake you. The first verb has the sense of letting go, relaxing a grip; the second, of abandoning outright. A hand that neither loosens nor lets go. It is the line the writer of Hebrews reaches back for, centuries later, when he wants to cure people of the love of money.
- Theme:
- Fear
- Book:
- Deuteronomy