6These are the commands, rules, and laws that the Lord your God told me to teach you to obey in the land you are crossing the Jordan River to take. ²You, your children, and your grandchildren must respect the Lord your God as long as you live. Obey all his rules and commands I give you so that you will live a long time. ³Listen, Israel, and carefully obey these laws. Then all will go well for you, and you will become a great nation in a fertile land, just as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.

⁴Listen, people of Israel! The Lord our God is the only Lord. ⁵Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. ⁶Always remember these commands I give you today. ⁷Teach them to your children, and talk about them when you sit at home and walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸Write them down and tie them to your hands as a sign. Tie them on your forehead to remind you, ⁹and write them on your doors and gates.

¹⁰The Lord your God will bring you into the land he promised to your ancestors, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he will give it to you. The land has large, growing cities you did not build, ¹¹houses full of good things you did not buy, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees you did not plant. You will eat as much as you want. ¹²But be careful! Do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt where you were slaves.

¹³Respect the Lord your God. You must worship him and make your promises only in his name. ¹⁴Do not worship other gods as the people around you do, ¹⁵because the Lord your God is a jealous God. He is present with you, and if you worship other gods, he will become angry with you and destroy you from the earth. ¹⁶Do not test the Lord your God as you did at Massah. ¹⁷Be sure to obey the commands of the Lord your God and the rules and laws he has given you. ¹⁸Do what the Lord says is good and right so that things will go well for you. Then you may go in and take the good land the Lord promised to your ancestors. ¹⁹He will force all your enemies out as you go in, as the Lord has said.

²⁰In the future when your children ask you, “What is the meaning of the laws, commands, and rules the Lord our God gave us?” ²¹tell them, “We were slaves to the king of Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt by his great power. ²²The Lord showed us great and terrible signs and miracles, which he did to Egypt, the king, and his whole family. ²³The Lord brought us out of Egypt to lead us here and to give us the land he promised our ancestors. ²⁴The Lord ordered us to obey all these commands and to respect the Lord our God so that we will always do well and stay alive, as we are today. ²⁵The right thing for us to do is this: Obey all these rules in the presence of the Lord our God, as he has commanded.”

You Are God’s People

7The Lord your God will bring you into the land that you are entering and that you will have as your own. As you go in, he will force out these nations: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—seven nations that are stronger than you. ²The Lord your God will hand these nations over to you, and when you defeat them, you must destroy them completely. Do not make a peace treaty with them or show them any mercy. ³Do not marry any of them, or let your daughters marry their sons, or let your sons marry their daughters. ⁴If you do, those people will turn your children away from me, to begin serving other gods. Then the Lord will be very angry with you, and he will quickly destroy you. ⁵This is what you must do to those people: Tear down their altars, smash their holy stone pillars, cut down their Asherah idols, and burn their idols in the fire. ⁶You are holy people who belong to the Lord your God. He has chosen you from all the people on earth to be his very own.

⁷The Lord did not care for you and choose you because there were many of you—you are the smallest nation of all. ⁸But the Lord chose you because he loved you, and he kept his promise to your ancestors. So he brought you out of Egypt by his great power and freed you from the land of slavery, from the power of the king of Egypt. ⁹So know that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God. He will keep his agreement of love for a thousand lifetimes for people who love him and obey his commands. ¹⁰But he will pay back those people who hate him. He will destroy them, and he will not be slow to pay back those who hate him. ¹¹So be careful to obey the commands, rules, and laws I give you today.

¹²If you pay attention to these laws and obey them carefully, the Lord your God will keep his agreement and show his love to you, as he promised your ancestors. ¹³He will love and bless you. He will make the number of your people grow; he will bless you with children. He will bless your fields with good crops and will give you grain, new wine, and oil. He will bless your herds with calves and your flocks with lambs in the land he promised your ancestors he would give you. ¹⁴You will be blessed more than any other people. Every husband and wife will have children, and all your cattle will have calves. ¹⁵The Lord will take away all disease from you; you will not have the terrible diseases that were in Egypt, but he will give them to all the people who hate you. ¹⁶You must destroy all the people the Lord your God hands over to you. Do not feel sorry for them, and do not worship their gods, or they will trap you.

¹⁷You might say to yourselves, “Because these nations are stronger than we are, we can’t force them out.” ¹⁸But don’t be afraid of them. Remember what the Lord your God did to all of Egypt and its king. ¹⁹You saw for yourselves the troubles, signs, and miracles he did, how the Lord’s great power and strength brought you out of Egypt. The Lord your God will do the same thing to all the nations you now fear. ²⁰The Lord your God will also send terror among them so that even those who are alive and hiding from you will die. ²¹Don’t be afraid of them, because the Lord your God is with you; he is a great God and people are afraid of him. ²²When the Lord your God forces those nations out of the land, he will do it little by little ahead of you. You won’t be able to destroy them all at once; otherwise, the wild animals will grow too many in number. ²³But the Lord your God will hand those nations over to you, confusing them until they are destroyed. ²⁴The Lord will help you defeat their kings, and the world will forget who they were. No one will be able to stop you; you will destroy them all. ²⁵Burn up their idols in the fire. Do not wish for the silver and gold they have, and don’t take it for yourselves, or you will be trapped by it. The Lord your God hates it. ²⁶Do not bring one of those hateful things into your house, or you will be completely destroyed along with it. Hate and reject those things; they must be completely destroyed.

Remember the Lord

8Carefully obey every command I give you today. Then you will live and grow in number, and you will enter and take the land the Lord promised your ancestors. ²Remember how the Lord your God has led you in the desert for these forty years, taking away your pride and testing you, because he wanted to know what was in your heart. He wanted to know if you would obey his commands. ³He took away your pride when he let you get hungry, and then he fed you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had ever seen. This was to teach you that a person does not live on bread alone, but by everything the Lord says. ⁴During these forty years, your clothes did not wear out, and your feet did not swell. ⁵Know in your heart that the Lord your God corrects you as a parent corrects a child.

⁶Obey the commands of the Lord your God, living as he has commanded you and respecting him. ⁷The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with rivers and pools of water, with springs that flow in the valleys and hills, ⁸a land that has wheat and barley, vines, fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey. ⁹It is a land where you will have plenty of food, where you will have everything you need, where the rocks are iron, and where you can dig copper out of the hills.

¹⁰When you have all you want to eat, then praise the Lord your God for giving you a good land. ¹¹Be careful not to forget the Lord your God so that you fail to obey his commands, laws, and rules that I am giving to you today. ¹²When you eat all you want and build nice houses and live in them, ¹³when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase, when you have more of everything, ¹⁴then your heart will become proud. You will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, where you were slaves. ¹⁵He led you through the large and terrible desert that was dry and had no water, and that had poisonous snakes and stinging insects. He gave you water from a solid rock ¹⁶and manna to eat in the desert. Manna was something your ancestors had never seen. He did this to take away your pride and to test you, so things would go well for you in the end. ¹⁷You might say to yourself, “I am rich because of my own power and strength,” ¹⁸but remember the Lord your God! It is he who gives you the power to become rich, keeping the agreement he promised to your ancestors, as it is today.

¹⁹If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and worship them and bow down to them, I warn you today that you will be destroyed. ²⁰Just as the Lord destroyed the other nations for you, you can be destroyed if you do not obey the Lord your God.

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