Deuteronomy 7-9

New Life Version

God’s Chosen People

7 “The Lord your God will bring you into the land you are taking for your own. He will drive away many nations in front of you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations bigger and stronger than you. ² When the Lord your God gives them to you and you win the battles against them, you must destroy all of them. Make no agreement with them and show no favor to them. ³ Do not take any of them in marriage. Do not give your daughters to their sons. And do not take their daughters for your sons. ⁴ For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will burn against you. And He will be quick to destroy you. ⁵ But do this to them: Break down their altars. Crush their objects of worship. Cut down their female goddess Asherim. And burn their false gods with fire.

⁶ “For you are a holy nation to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the nations on the earth, to be His own. ⁷ The Lord did not give you His love and choose you because you were more people than any of the nations. For the number of your people was less than all nations. ⁸ But it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the promise He made to your fathers. So the Lord brought you out by a strong hand. He set you free from the land where you were servants, and from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. ⁹ Know then that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God. He keeps His promise and shows His loving-kindness to those who love Him and keep His Laws, even to a thousand family groups in the future. ¹⁰ But He destroys those who hate Him. He will not show kindness to the one who hates Him, but will punish him to his face. ¹¹ So keep and obey all the Laws I am telling you today.

Good Comes to Those Who Obey

¹² “If you listen to these Laws and keep and obey them, the Lord your God will keep His agreement and loving-kindness as He promised to your fathers. ¹³ He will love you and bring good to you and make you a nation of many. He will bring good to your children and the fruit of your land, your grain, your new wine and your oil. And He will give you many cattle and young ones in your flock, in the land He promised to your fathers to give you. ¹⁴ More good will come to you than to any other nation. There will be no male or female among you or your cattle that is not able to have young ones. ¹⁵ The Lord will take all sickness from you. He will not let any bad diseases come upon you that you have known in Egypt. But He will give them to all who hate you. ¹⁶ You will destroy all the nations the Lord your God will give to you. You will not pity them or worship their gods, for that would be a trap to you.

¹⁷ “You may say in your heart, ‘These nations are stronger than I. How can I drive them out?’ ¹⁸ But you will not be afraid of them. You will remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. ¹⁹ You will remember the hard trials you saw, the powerful works, and the strong hand and powerful arm the Lord your God used to bring you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the nations who make you afraid. ²⁰ And the Lord your God will send the hornet against them. Those who are left will hide themselves from you and be destroyed. ²¹ You will not be afraid of them. For the Lord your God is among you, a great and powerful God. ²² The Lord your God will drive away these nations in front of you one by one. You will not be able to destroy them in a short time, or the wild animals may become too many for you. ²³ But the Lord your God will give them to you. He will bring much trouble upon them until they are destroyed. ²⁴ He will give their kings into your hand. And you will destroy their name from under heaven. No man will be able to stand in front of you until you have destroyed them. ²⁵ You must burn with fire their objects of worship. Do not want the silver or gold that is on them, or take it for yourselves. It would be a trap to you, for it is a hated thing to the Lord your God. ²⁶ Do not bring a hated thing into your house. You would become hated also. But turn from it with fear and hate, for bad will come from it.

The Promised Land to Be Taken

8 “Be careful to do all that I am telling you today. Then you will live and have many children, and go in to own the land the Lord promised to give to your fathers. ² You will remember all the way the Lord your God led you in the desert these forty years, so you would not have pride, and how He tested you to know what was in your heart to see if you would obey His Laws or not. ³ He let you be hungry which helped you to not have pride. Then He fed you with bread from heaven which you and your fathers had not known. He did this to make you understand that man does not live by bread alone. But man lives by everything that comes out of the mouth of the Lord. ⁴ Your clothes did not wear out, and your feet did not get sore during these forty years. ⁵ So know in your heart that the Lord your God was punishing you just as a man punishes his son. ⁶ Keep the Laws of the Lord your God. Walk in His ways, and fear Him. ⁷ For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of rivers and wells of water, flowing into valleys from hills. ⁸ It is a land of grains, vines, fig trees, fruit, olive oil and honey. ⁹ It is a land where you will have enough food to eat and not have to do without, a land where stones are iron. And you can make brass from what you dig out of its hills. ¹⁰ When you have eaten and are filled, you will honor and thank the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.

¹¹ “Be careful not to forget the Lord your God by not keeping all His Laws which I am telling you today. ¹² When you have eaten and are filled, and have built good houses to live in, ¹³ and when your cattle and flocks become many, and you get much silver and gold, and have many things for your own, ¹⁴ be careful not to become proud. Do not forget the Lord your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house where you were servants. ¹⁵ He led you through the big desert that brought fear with its poisonous snakes and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water. He brought you water out of hard rock. ¹⁶ In the desert He fed you bread from heaven, which your fathers did not know about. He did this so you would not have pride and that He might test you. It was for your good in the end. ¹⁷ Be careful not to say in your heart, ‘My power and strong hand have made me rich.’ ¹⁸ But remember the Lord your God. For it is He Who is giving you power to become rich. By this He may keep His agreement which He promised to your fathers, as it is this day. ¹⁹ If you ever forget the Lord your God and go to other gods to worship and work for them, I tell you today that you will be destroyed for sure. ²⁰ You will be destroyed like the nations the Lord destroys before you, because you would not listen to the voice of the Lord your God.

Israel to Remember How They Did Not Obey

9 “Hear, O Israel! You are crossing over the Jordan today to take the land that belongs to nations greater and stronger than you, with big cities with walls as high as heaven. ² The people there are strong and tall, the sons of Anakim. You know of them and have heard it said, ‘Who can stand in front of the sons of Anak?’ ³ But know today that it is the Lord your God Who is crossing over before you as a fire that destroys everything. He will destroy them and bring them down before you. So you may drive them out and be quick to destroy them, just as the Lord has told you. ⁴ But after the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say in your heart, ‘The Lord has brought me in to take this land because I am right and good.’ It is because of the sin of these nations that the Lord is driving them out in front of you. ⁵ It is not because of your being right with God that you are going to take their land. But it is because of the sin of these nations that the Lord your God is driving them out in front of you. By this the Lord is proving that He keeps the promise He made to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. ⁶ Understand that it is not because you are right with God that the Lord your God is giving you this good land for your own, for you are a strong-willed people.

⁷ “Remember and do not forget how you made the Lord your God angry in the desert. You have gone against the Lord from the day you left the land of Egypt until you came to this place. ⁸ Even at Mount Sinai you made the Lord angry. The Lord was so angry with you that He would have destroyed you. ⁹ I went up the mountain to receive the pieces of stone, the Laws of the agreement which the Lord had made with you. I stayed on the mountain forty days and nights. I did not eat bread or drink water. ¹⁰ Then the Lord gave me the two pieces of stone written by the finger of God. On them were all the words the Lord had spoken with you on the mountain from the fire on the day of the meeting. ¹¹ At the end of forty days and nights the Lord gave me the two pieces of stone, the Laws of the agreement. ¹² Then the Lord said to me, ‘Get up. Hurry and go down from here. For your people whom you brought out of Egypt have become very sinful. They have been quick to turn away from what I told them. They have made a false god for themselves.’ ¹³ And the Lord said to me, ‘I have seen these people. See, they are strong-willed. ¹⁴ Let Me alone, so I may destroy them and destroy their name from under heaven. I will make you into a nation that will be greater and stronger than they.’ ¹⁵ So I turned and came down from the mountain while the mountain was burning with fire. The two pieces of stone of the agreement were in my two hands. ¹⁶ And I saw that it was true that you had sinned against the Lord your God. You had made for yourselves a calf out of gold. You had been quick to turn away from what the Lord had told you. ¹⁷ So I took the two pieces of stone and threw them from my hands, and broke them in front of your eyes. ¹⁸ Then again I fell down before the Lord for forty days and nights. I did not eat bread or drink water, because of all the sin you had done. You did what was sinful in the eyes of the Lord and made Him angry. ¹⁹ I was afraid of the anger of the Lord which was burning against you to destroy you. But the Lord listened to me again. ²⁰ The Lord was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him. So I prayed for Aaron at the same time also. ²¹ Then I took your sinful thing, the calf you had made, and burned it with fire and crushed it. I ground it into pieces until it was as fine as dust. And I threw its dust into the river that flowed down from the mountain.

²² “You made the Lord angry again at Taberah, Massah and Kibroth-hattaavah. ²³ The Lord sent you from Kadesh-barnea, saying, ‘Go and take for your own the land I have given you.’ But you went against what the Lord your God told you to do. You did not believe Him or listen to His voice. ²⁴ You have gone against the Lord from the day I first knew you.

²⁵ “So I fell down before the Lord and lay forty days and nights, because the Lord had said He would destroy you. ²⁶ I prayed to the Lord, saying, ‘O Lord God, do not destroy Your people, Your chosen nation, whom You have set free by Your power and brought out of Egypt with a strong hand. ²⁷ Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Do not look at the strong will or sin or wrong-doing of these people. ²⁸ Or the land You brought us from may say, “The Lord was not able to bring them into the land He promised them. Because He hated them, He brought them out to kill them in the desert.” ²⁹ Yet they are Your people, Your chosen nation, whom You have brought out by Your great power and Your long arm.’