John Calvin Commentary Deuteronomy 31:3

"Jehovah thy God, he will go over before thee; he will destroy these nations from before thee, and thou shalt dispossess them: [and] Joshua, he shall go over before thee, as Jehovah hath spoken." — Deuteronomy 31:3 (ASV)

The Lord your God, He will go over. With no ordinary consolation He encourages their minds to renewed alacrity, because they would experience, even when he was dead, the unceasing favor of God. From this we gather a lesson of especial usefulness, that whenever God raises up for us men endowed with excellent gifts, He is accustomed so to use their labors for a time that He still retains others in His hand, and constantly substitutes others, unless our sins stand in the way. From this it follows that the power of God is not to be tied to the illustrious qualities of men, as if their death meant His destruction.

It is true, indeed, that eminent men are rarely succeeded by their equals,²³² because our wickedness stifles the light of spiritual gifts and, as far as it can, extinguishes them. Still, let this be deemed certain: when God promotes our welfare by ministers of special eminence, He gives us a taste of His goodness, so that we may expect its continuance, because he forsakes not the work of his own hands (Psalms 138:8). Moses says, therefore, that although he might be taken away by death, God will still undertake the office of their leader, or rather, that He will continue to be their leader, as the Israelites had before experienced Him to be.

But he also sustains their weakness with another consolation, pointing out Joshua as his successor; otherwise, the people might have been ready to object that if God was willing to go before them, why did He not manifest it by the selection of a representative, by whose hand He might continue what He had begun through Moses? In this respect, therefore, he also shows that God’s favor was by no means obscure, since Joshua was already chosen to sustain the care and burden of governing the people: for it is not by his own authority that he obtrudes Joshua and sets him over them, but he declares him to be called by God. Still, it is not a previously unknown matter that he puts before them, but he only instructs them to remember what God had long ago revealed, as we have seen elsewhere.

²³² “Pareils et de mesme calibre;” equal and of the sanc calibre. — Fr..