God is very pitiful and of tender mercy; and though He had to punish the people for their sin by sending a plague among them, yet He did forgive them, and He told Moses to lead the people forward again, and to make two fresh slabs of stone, and told him to write His law upon them over again. How often we find in our daily lives, children, that when we mean to be very good, after all, we do not keep to what we had intended to do. The only way is for us to ask God to write His Holy Law in our hearts every day, and to beg Him to keep us from doing what would displease Him. If we trust in our own strength we shall be sure to fail; but if we look to Him and truly seek to please Him, He will help us to become more and more like the Lord Jesus. And when we know that we have failed in anything, let us not wait a single moment, but lift our hearts to our Father in heaven, and ask Him, for Jesus' sake, to wash away our sin and make us pure and white again in the precious Blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God. XLVII. A Great Victory Soon after the smiting of the Rock, out of which God made water to flow for the people's thirst, another difficulty came. As the great company of the Children of Israel travelled on, some enemies, called, Amalekites, came out against them, and tried to conquer them. So Moses called Joshua and told him to choose men who could fight, to go against the Amalekites; and that he would go to-morrow to the top of the hill with the Rod of God in his hand. So Joshua did as Moses had said to him, and fought with Amalek; and Moses and Aaron and Hur went up to the top of the hill. So Moses stretched out his hand with the Rod of God in it, and then the Children of Israel prevailed and conquered, but when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But poor Moses got very weary, and his hands seemed very heavy, so that he could not hold them up any longer! But Aaron and Hur thought of a very good plan. They took a large stone for Moses to sit on, and they stood by him and held up his hands, one on each side, and his hands were steady till the sun went down. And Joshua had a great victory over Amalek, because God fought for them. And God told Moses to write it down in a book, and tell Joshua about it, that He would utterly destroy the Amalekites. We read afterwards in Deuteronomy xxv. 17, that God had been specially angry with the Amalekites because they had attacked the Israelites when they were faint and weary, and had smitten the hindmost and weak ones in the camp instead of fighting bravely with the strong. It seems to me that we may take this first battle of the Israelites as a sort of picture of Satan's temptations and buffetings. He attacks us where we are weakest. He perhaps tells us that God has forgotten us for a little while, that we are like those weaker Israelites in the camp, who were particularly exposed to the enemy! Then what must we do, when we feel Satan is too strong for us?