(2.) Or it may be understood of God's kindness to them; of that he afterwards speaks largely. When Israel was a child, then I loved him, Hos. xi. 1. He then espoused that people to himself with all the affection with which a young man marries a virgin (Isaiah lxii. 5), for the time was a time of love, Ezek. xvi. 8. [1.] God appropriated them to himself. Though they were a sinful people, yet, by virtue of the covenant made with them and the church set up among them, they were holiness to the Lord, dedicated to his honour and taken under his special tuition; they were the first fruits of his increase, the first constituted church he had in the world; they were the first-fruits, but the full harvest was to be gathered from among the Gentiles. The first-fruits of the increase were God's part of it, were offered to him, and he was honoured with them; so were the people of the Jews; what little tribute, rent, and homage, God had from the world, he had it chiefly from them; and it was their honour to be thus set apart for God. This honour have all the saints; they are the first-fruits of his creatures, Jam. i. 18. [2.] Having espoused them, he espoused their cause, and became an enemy to their enemies, Exod. xxiii. 22. Being the first-fruits of his increase, all that devoured him (so it should be read) did offend; they trespassed, they contracted guilt, and evil befel them, as those were reckoned offenders that devoured the first-fruits, or any thing else that was holy to the Lord, that embezzled them, or converted them to their own use, Lev. v. 15. Whoever offered any injury to the people of God did so at their peril; their God was ready to avenge their quarrel, and said to the proudest of kings, Touch not my anointed, Ps. cv. 14, 15; Exod. xvii. 14. He had in a special manner a controversy with those that attempted to debauch them and draw them off from being holiness to the Lord; witness his quarrel with the Midianites about the matter of Peor, Num. xxv. 17, 18. [3.] He brought them out of Egypt with a high hand and great terror (Deut. iv. 34), and yet with a kind hand and great tenderness led them through a vast howling wilderness (v. 6), a land of deserts and pits, or of graves, terram sepulchralem—a sepulchral land, where there was ground, not to feed them, but to bury them, where there was no good to be expected, for it was a land of drought, but all manner of evil to be feared, for it was the shadow of death. In that darksome valley they walked forty years; but God was with them; his rod, in Moses's hand, and his staff, comforted them, and even there God prepared a table for them (Ps. xxiii. 4, 5), gave them bread out of the clouds and drink out of the rocks. It was a land abandoned by all mankind, as yielding neither road nor rest. It was no thoroughfare, for no man passed through it—no settlement, for no man dwelt there. For God will teach his people to tread untrodden paths, to dwell alone, and to be singular. The difficulties of the journey are thus insisted on, to magnify the power and goodness of God in bringing them, through all, safely to their journey's end at last. All God's spiritual Israel must own their obligations to him for a safe conduct through the wilderness of this world, no less dangerous to the soul than that was to the body. [4.] At length he settled them in Canaan (v. 7): I brought you into a plentiful country, which would be the more acceptable after they had been for so many years in a land of drought. They did eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof, and were allowed so to do. I brought you into a land of Carmel (so the word is); Carmel was a place of extraordinary fruitfulness, and Canaan was as one great fruitful field, Deut. viii. 7. [5.] God gave them the means of knowledge and grace, and communion with him; this is implied, v. 8. They had priests that handled the law, read it, and expounded it to them; that was part of their business, Deut. xxxiii. 8. They had pastors, to guide them and take care of their affairs, magistrates and judges; they had prophets to consult God for them and to make known his mind to them.