1:29-31 - Then I said to you, "Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, and in the desert. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place."

Any husband—if his wife who has accused him of the kind of things that Israel had accused of Yahweh—would have been considered blameless walking out on her. Yet, here, His servant continues to plea with this utterly recalcitrant Israel. "Do not be terrifed; do not be afraid of them," Moses encourages them.

Now, their expression of fear of the Anakites had been emphatic: "Even the Anakites — we saw them there." Fear is never underrated in the Old Testament, a fact attested by the frequent occurrence of the phrase-pair, "Do not be terrified. Do not be afraid."1 The Old Testament knows of only one antidote for fear and it has two parts: 1) remember who is Yahweh, especially who He is to us, and 2) what He had done in the past on our behalf. So Moses applies this antidote on GenA by reminding them:

1. Who is Yahweh?

"Yahweh your God will fight for you" (v30). This is not statement of belligerence but an encouragement to confidence. In this context it is the equivalent of "Yahweh is with you."

2. What Yahweh has done for Israel?

This Moses did by bracing his assurance with two historical facts that Israel cannot deny:

A. Israel has already tasted this behalfness of Yahweh as a fact: Yahweh had fought for her in Egypt and in the desert "before your very eyes!" (v30).

B. Israel has already experienced how Yahweh cared for her: Yahweh had carried her "as a father carries his son, all the way" (v31). And, of course, "all the way" here is not from one end of the shopping mall to the other, with ice-cream along the way, but—as we have already noted in our comment on v19-20—"through that vast and dreadful deseart."

Finally, Moses goes back to the first part of the antidote by grounding his assurance in the character of Yahweh (i.e., who is Yahweh?) by his use of the verb-participle, "walk/walking" (halak/holek). This unit had opened with a record of how, in obedience to Yahweh's command to leave Horeb, "Israel went (halak) towards the hill country of the Amorites." Now, in encouraging Israel to move forward, Yahweh is depicted as "the one who is going before you" (haholek lipnekem) in v30, and as the one "who carried you . . . all the way you went (halaktem)" in v31. In this way Israel's walk is bracketed into the character of Yahweh as one who is present with, and for, her in all her walking. Everywhere Israel went Yahweh went. No president, monarch or prime-minister has ever been protected with greater vigilence by their Secret Service agents than Israel was by Yahweh! And that, not just by the way, is also our privilege as children of God too; He carries us on His shoulders too, "as a father carries his son." But is such assurance enough?

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