Deuteronomy 33:27, “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
Two awesome things to quickly note here.
First, “The eternal God is your dwelling place.” That deserves a lot of thought. The true land, the true haunt, the true home for the people of God is not primarily a where but a who–namely, the “eternal God” Himself. God Himself–as He will ultimately give Himself to us in the Son–is our home.
We can taste something of this even now…isn’t it often true that the “home-ness” of our homes comes from the people in them? People–especially the father and mother–are a bit like scented candles…over time the aroma of their personalities works into the walls and floor and furniture so that the physical place begins to be “home.” And yet, it is really the people who have made it so.
Similarly–only more so–the Triune God Himself is the essence of HOME, and only His intratrinitarian love, everywhere diffused throughout creation, makes any place able to be called home….if a God who is infinitely glad and infinitely at peace in the fellowship of Father, Son and Spirit were not at the heart of the universe, nowhere could be home….and if we know this God as He is savingly revealed in the Christ, then everywhere will one day be home as we have never known it before. Where He is, we are at home.
And that leads to the second thing to mention. “Underneath are the everlasting arms.” I don’t think post-cross saints can read of the “arm” of the Lord without at least hearing an echo of the cross. The same God who Moses spoke of in Deuteronomy 33 would stretch out His temporally incarnate “everlasting arms” on the cross so that His people might be sustained in the wilderness of the fall and brought to the promised land of His own eternal rest In God. The eternal God is our dwelling place only because the Son’s everlasting arms were extended on the cross to bear our sins and absorb our punishment and draw us inexorably to Himself.
