John Calvin Commentary Deuteronomy 10:21

"He is thy praise, and he is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen." — Deuteronomy 10:21 (ASV)

He is thy praise. That he may the more easily persuade his countrymen that nothing is better, or more desirable for them than to devote themselves to God’s service, Moses reminds them that they have nothing to boast of apart from Him. It is as if he had said that they were happy in this one respect: God had taken them under His charge. But if this glory were to be taken away, they would be miserable and ruined.

For God is called “the praise” of His people, as being their honor and their ornament. Consequently, if they desire to enjoy true and solid blessedness, they must take care to keep themselves under His guardianship. For if they should be deprived of this, nothing would remain to them but ignominy and shame.

To the same effect, he adds that He is their God. This is because nothing can be more perverse and absurd than not to receive the Creator of the world Himself, when He freely offers Himself as our God.

In proof of this, he further states that God has exerted His power in many miracles for His people’s safety. And, so that they might be made more inexcusable, he cites their own eyes as witnesses of so many mighty acts which had been performed in their favor.

Then he goes a step higher (reminding them,²⁵²) that their race had been wonderfully increased in a short time. From this it was plain that they had been thus incredibly multiplied by supernatural and divine influence.

For surely the remarkable blessing of God was clearly manifested in the procreation of seven hundred thousand men in less than two hundred and fifty years.²⁵³ Those who then lived had not seen these things with their own eyes. But Moses retraces God’s grace to its source, so that they may more fully acknowledge that whatever good they had experienced depended on that adoption, which had made them God’s people.

²⁵² Added from the French.

²⁵³ D’un si petit hombre des gens. — Fr..