Old/New Testament
7 “When the Lord brings you into the Promised Land, as he soon will, he will destroy the following seven nations, all greater and mightier than you are: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites.
2 “When the Lord your God delivers them over to you to be destroyed, do a complete job of it—don’t make any treaties or show them mercy; utterly wipe them out. 3 Do not intermarry with them, nor let your sons and daughters marry their sons and daughters. 4 That would surely result in your young people’s beginning to worship their gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be hot against you, and he would surely destroy you.
5 “You must break down the heathen altars and shatter the obelisks and cut up the shameful images and burn the idols.
6 “For you are a holy people, dedicated to the Lord your God. He has chosen you from all the people on the face of the whole earth to be his own chosen ones. 7 He didn’t choose you and pour out his love upon you because you were a larger nation than any other, for you were the smallest of all! 8 It was just because he loves you, and because he kept his promise to your ancestors. That is why he brought you out of slavery in Egypt with such amazing power and mighty miracles.
9 “Understand, therefore, that the Lord your God is the faithful God who for a thousand generations keeps his promises and constantly loves those who love him and who obey his commands. 10 But those who hate him shall be punished publicly and destroyed. He will deal with them personally. 11 Therefore, obey all these commandments I am giving you today. 12 Because of your obedience, the Lord your God will keep his part of the contract which, in his tender love, he made with your fathers. 13 And he will love you and bless you and make you into a great nation. He will make you fertile and give fertility to your ground and to your animals, so that you will have large crops of grain, grapes, and olives, and great flocks of cattle, sheep, and goats when you arrive in the land he promised your fathers to give you. 14 You will be blessed above all the nations of the earth; not one of you, whether male or female, shall be barren, not even your cattle. 15 And the Lord will take away all your sickness and will not let you suffer any of the diseases of Egypt you remember so well; he will give them all to your enemies!
16 “You must destroy all the nations the Lord your God delivers into your hands. Have no pity, and do not worship their gods; if you do, it will be a sad day for you. 17 Perhaps you will think to yourself, ‘How can we ever conquer these nations that are so much more powerful than we are?’ 18 But don’t be afraid of them! Just remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all the land of Egypt. 19 Do you remember the terrors the Lord sent upon them—your parents saw it with their own eyes—and the mighty miracles and wonders, and the power and strength of Almighty God that he used to bring you out of Egypt? Well, the Lord your God will use this same might against the people you fear. 20 Moreover, the Lord your God will send hornets to drive out those who hide from you!
21 “No, do not be afraid of those nations, for the Lord your God is among you, and he is a great and awesome God. 22 He will cast them out a little at a time; he will not do it all at once, for if he did, the wild animals would multiply too quickly and become dangerous. 23 He will do it gradually, and you will move in against those nations and destroy them. 24 He will deliver their kings into your hands, and you will erase their names from the face of the earth. No one will be able to stand against you.
25 “Burn their idols and do not touch the silver or gold they are made of. Do not take it or it will be a snare to you, for it is horrible to the Lord your God. 26 Do not bring an idol into your home and worship it, for then your doom is sealed. Utterly detest it, for it is a cursed thing.
8 “You must obey all the commandments I give you today. If you do, you will not only live, you will multiply and will go in and take over the land promised to your fathers by the Lord. 2 Do you remember how the Lord led you through the wilderness for all those forty years, humbling you and testing you to find out how you would respond, and whether or not you would really obey him? 3 Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to both you and your ancestors. He did it to help you realize that food isn’t everything, and that real life comes by obeying every command of God. 4 For all these forty years your clothes haven’t grown old, and your feet haven’t been blistered or swollen. 5 So you should realize that, as a man punishes his son, the Lord punishes you to help you.
6 “Obey 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 of brooks, pools, gushing springs, valleys, and hills; 8 it is a land of wheat and barley, of grapevines, fig trees, pomegranates, olives, and honey; 9 it is a land where food is plentiful, and nothing is lacking; it is a land where iron is as common as stone, and copper is abundant in the hills. 10 When you have eaten your fill, bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
11 “But that is the time to be careful! Beware that in your plenty[a] you don’t forget the Lord your God and begin to disobey him. 12-13 For when you have become full and prosperous and have built fine homes to live in, and when your flocks and herds have become very large, and your silver and gold have multiplied, 14 that is the time to watch out that you don’t become proud and forget the Lord your God who brought you out of your slavery in the land of Egypt. 15 Beware that you don’t forget the God who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with the dangerous snakes and scorpions, where it was so hot and dry. He gave you water from the rock! 16 He fed you with manna in the wilderness (it was a kind of bread unknown before) so that you would become humble and so that your trust in him would grow, and he could do you good. 17 He did it so that you would never feel that it was your own power and might that made you wealthy. 18 Always remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you power to become rich, and he does it to fulfill his promise to your ancestors.
19 “But if you forget about the Lord your God and worship other gods instead, and follow evil ways, you shall certainly perish, 20 just as the Lord has caused other nations in the past to perish. That will be your fate, too, if you don’t obey the Lord your God.
9 1-2 “O Israel, listen! Today you are to cross the Jordan River and begin to dispossess the nations on the other side. Those nations are much greater and more powerful than you are! They live in high walled cities. Among them are the famed Anak giants, against whom none can stand! 3 But the Lord your God will go before you as a devouring fire to destroy them, so that you will quickly conquer them and drive them out.
4 “Then, when the Lord has done this for you, don’t say to yourselves, ‘The Lord has helped us because we are so good!’ No, it is because of the wickedness of the other nations that he is doing it. 5 It is not at all because you are such fine, upright people that the Lord will drive them out from before you! I say it again, it is only because of the wickedness of the other nations, and because of his promises to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he will do it. 6 I say it yet again: Jehovah your God is not giving you this good land because you are good, for you are not—you are a wicked, stubborn people.
7 “Don’t you remember (oh, never forget it!) how continually angry you made the Lord your God out in the wilderness, from the day you left Egypt until now? For all this time you have constantly rebelled against him.
8 “Don’t you remember how angry you made him at Mount Horeb? He was ready to destroy you. 9 I was on the mountain at the time, receiving the contract which Jehovah had made with you—the stone tablets with the laws inscribed upon them. I was there for forty days and forty nights, and all that time I ate nothing. I didn’t even take a drink of water. 10-11 At the end of those forty days and nights the Lord gave me the contract, the tablets on which he had written the commandments he had spoken from the fire-covered mountain while the people had watched below. 12 He told me to go down quickly because the people I had led out of Egypt had defiled themselves, quickly turning away from the laws of God, and had made an idol from molten metal.
13-14 “‘Let me alone that I may destroy this evil, stubborn people!’ the Lord told me, ‘and I will blot out their name from under heaven, and I will make a mighty nation of you, mightier and greater than they are.’
15 “I came down from the burning mountain, holding in my hands the two tablets inscribed with the laws of God. 16 There below me I could see the calf you had made in your terrible sin against the Lord your God. How quickly you turned away from him! 17 I lifted the tablets high above my head and dashed them to the ground! I smashed them before your eyes! 18 Then, for another forty days and nights I lay before the Lord, neither eating bread nor drinking water, for you had done what the Lord hated most, thus provoking him to great anger. 19 How I feared for you—for the Lord was ready to destroy you. But that time, too, he listened to me. 20 Aaron was in great danger because the Lord was so angry with him; but I prayed, and the Lord spared him. 21 I took your sin—the calf you had made—and burned it and ground it into fine dust, and threw it into the stream that cascaded out of the mountain.
22 “Again at Taberah and once again at Massah you angered the Lord, and yet again at Kibroth-hattaavah. 23 At Kadesh-barnea, when the Lord told you to enter the land he had given you, you rebelled and wouldn’t believe that he would help you; you refused to obey him. 24 Yes, you have been rebellious against the Lord from the first day I knew you. 25 That is why I fell down before him for forty days and nights when the Lord was ready to destroy you.
26 “I prayed to him, ‘O Lord God, don’t destroy your own people. They are your inheritance saved from Egypt by your mighty power and glorious strength. 27 Don’t notice the rebellion and stubbornness of these people, but remember instead your promises to your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Oh, please overlook the awful wickedness and sin of these people. 28 For if you destroy them, the Egyptians will say, “It is because the Lord wasn’t able to bring them to the land he promised them,” or “He destroyed them because he hated them: he brought them into the wilderness to slay them.” 29 They are your people and your inheritance that you brought from Egypt by your great power and your mighty arm.’
19 That evening as usual they left the city.
20 Next morning, as the disciples passed the fig tree he had cursed, they saw that it was withered from the roots! 21 Then Peter remembered what Jesus had said to the tree on the previous day and exclaimed, “Look, Teacher! The fig tree you cursed has withered!”
22-23 In reply Jesus said to the disciples, “If you only have faith in God—this is the absolute truth—you can say to this Mount of Olives, ‘Rise up and fall into the Mediterranean,’ and your command will be obeyed. All that’s required is that you really believe and have no doubt! 24
26-28 [a]By this time they had arrived in Jerusalem again, and as he was walking through the Temple area, the chief priests and other Jewish leaders came up to him demanding, “What’s going on here? Who gave you the authority to drive out the merchants?”
29 Jesus replied, “I’ll tell you if you answer one question! 30 What about John the Baptist? Was he sent by God, or not? Answer me!”
31 They talked it over among themselves. “If we reply that God sent him, then he will say, ‘All right, why didn’t you accept him?’ 32 But if we say God didn’t send him, then the people will start a riot.” (For the people all believed strongly that John was a prophet.)
33 So they said, “We can’t answer. We don’t know.”
To which Jesus replied, “Then I won’t answer your question either!”
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.