Deuteronomy 9:26
I prayed therefore unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand. I prayed therefore unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand.
Deuteronomy 9:26 stands in Moses' rehearsal of Israel's transgression and of his own appeal to God on the people's behalf. On the fuller account, it belongs to his second forty days and forty nights of fasting and intercession, after Israel on the report of the spies refused to enter Canaan and the Lord had declared He would destroy them. On the other account, it is his plea for pardon for the remainder of the people after the worship of the golden calf, when the leading idolaters had been slain.
The meaning is that Moses begged God not to destroy His people and inheritance, whom He had redeemed through His greatness and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand and mighty power. The force of the plea was that after doing so much for Israel and bearing so long with them, God should not now destroy them. The surrounding chapter also tells how Moses broke the first two tables of stone in righteous indignation at Israel's sin.
The answer was the command for Moses to hew a second set of stone tables and bring them up into the mount, that God might again write His law, thus supplying a second copy of the Ten Commandments including the Sabbath. The prayer prevailed, and so stands as proof of the worth of intercessory prayer, encouraging Christian patriots to pray for their country, pious souls to pray for revival in time of declension, and every saint to pray for sinners in danger of perdition. The deliverance from Egypt named in the prayer is evidence of God's redeeming love and power and a type of the greater redemption of God's people from sin, showing that the creative power displayed in creation is the same power that redeems and sanctifies and saves. The verse shows that life and good and death and evil are suspended upon obedience or disobedience to the one moral law, the Ten Commandments, in loving the Lord and walking in His ways and keeping His commandments and statutes and judgments, and this applies to those commandments and to no other law.