He has deliberately chosen them as his elect people. He twice addresses them here by their special name Israel (3, 4), emphasizing that they are a people bound to him in the special relationship of covenant-love. The loving initiative is with him, not them (7:8).7 That love did not begin with these desert pilgrims about to enter the land; it reached back into their history. He was their fathers’ God, true to his word,
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