“For the Lord’s portion is His people; Jacob is the lot (or line) of His inheritance. He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; He led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.” (Deuteronomy 32:9-10). Jacob is a representative character for God’s elect people as this passage clearly shows. The passage is a reference to the scene at Bethel when Christ was revealed to him in the form of a ladder. The “wilderness” is the wilderness of Judea. At one time I was by nature like the “waste howling wilderness,” like the desert that yields no healthy plants or vegetation. Like all men by nature we were like a salt land, which is not inhabited; no good thing was in us, or could spring out of us. WHAT A DIFFERENCE there is between what the believer was by nature and what the grace of God has made him! Jacob being representative, and his experience a type of the experience of God’s people, leads me to ask you a series of questions. Has God found you in such a way? Is this how this world appears to you? Do you find everything under the sun only “vanity and vexation of spirit?” Is this world a “waste howling wilderness” to you? Better still has God rolled back the curtain of your wicked heart and caused you to see the “waste howling wilderness” in your soul. If so, have you cried out with the old Patriarch, “I am less than all worthy of the least of all your mercies, and of the truth, which you have shown unto your servant.” This my friend is the spirit and confession of the people that Jehovah has chosen for His portion. Having done so and the Lord revealing Himself unto you, you are transformed into a garden, your wilderness is made like Eden, and your desert is changed into the garden of the Lord. “I will turn unto you,” said the Lord to our hearts when they were bleak and bare; “…I will turn unto you, and ye shall be tilled and sown” (Ezekiel 36:9). This is exactly what He said to the barrenness of our nature. Now as gardens we have been enclosed by grace, we have been tilled and sown, we have experienced all the operations of the divine garden keeper—leading us about, instructing us, keeping us as the apple of His eye (the husbandry of our souls). Our Lord Jesus said to his disciples, “My Father is the husbandman,” and He has made us to be fruitful unto His praise, full of sweetness where once there was no fruit and nothing that could give Him delight! Now we are His delight, true Christians are as Jacob, His portion, His elect, His garden. “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into His garden, and eat His pleasant fruits” (Song of Solomon 4:16). There is a good beginning made wherever the grace of God has undertaken the cultivation of our nature, and there is a good end.
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