What would you give someone to express your love for him or her? Candy and flowers? A big steak dinner? Sometimes, you see folks driving new cars with big bows on them around Christmastime. Nothing’s too good for your true love, right?

Today’s passage reminds us that God spares no expense where it comes to blessing His people. Here, Moses recalls not only the events of the Exodus from Egypt, but also hundreds of years before, in the days when God promised Abraham that his descendants would possess the land where he was merely a wanderer. Even in those days, Moses says in verse 8, God had destined the Promised Land for the children of Israel.

And although they were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, God eventually brought His people out of bondage into the wilderness, into the desert. And all during their 40 years there, God continued to protect them, as verse 10 says. He even guided them with a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day, as verse 12 recalls.

And in verses 13 and 14, Moses points out how God was going to keep His promise to Abraham. He was getting ready to bring the descendants of Israel into a land of fertile fields and rich pastures and vineyards, a land that God described to him in Exodus 3:8, when God first spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, as flowing with milk and honey.

And why did God do all this for the descendants of Israel? It wasn’t because they were especially faithful to Him – in fact, much of the rest of this chapter recalls how they had continually doubted Him, and predicts how they would turn away from Him once they entered the Promised Land. No, the people of Moses’ day weren’t any more faithful to God than we are.

Nevertheless, today’s passage reminds us of an astounding truth – that God chooses to bless His people simply because He loves us. Verse 10 insists that God cares for us, and verse 11 uses the imagery of God protecting us and providing for us as an eagle hovers over the young in its nest.

But God is not content to love us from afar. No, verse 9 makes the amazing claim that God’s people are His own inheritance. Even though He created everything that exists, He has chosen His people in a special way to belong to Him.

So, if you know what it’s like to be cherished by someone you love, remember this: the Almighty God of the universe loves all His people that much and more. He has set His love upon all those who trust in the Lord Jesus, making us His special treasure (Exodus 19:5). What more could we possibly want?

Deuteronomy 32:7-14 (ESV)

7 Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.
8 When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
9 But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
10 “He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.
11 Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions,
12 the LORD alone guided him, no foreign god was with him.
13 He made him ride on the high places of the land, and he ate the produce of the field, and he suckled him with honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock.
14 Curds from the herd, and milk from the flock, with fat of lambs, rams of Bashan and goats, with the very finest of the wheat– and you drank foaming wine made from the blood of the grape.