Deuteronomy 9

³¹For you are about to cross the Jordan to enter and possess the land that the Lord your God is giving you. When you take possession of it and settle in it,

³⁸to drive out before you nations greater and mightier than you, and to bring you into their land and give it to you for your inheritance, as it is this day.

²⁸Where can we go? Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying: ‘The people are larger and taller than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the heavens. We even saw the descendants of the Anakim there.’”

²³then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and stronger than you.

¹¹“Go through the camp and tell the people, ‘Prepare your provisions, for within three days you will cross the Jordan to go in and take possession of the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess.’”

¹When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to possess, and He drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—

²²They went up through the Negev and came to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak, dwelled. It had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.

²¹They were a people great and many, as tall as the Anakites. But the Lord destroyed them from before the Ammonites, who drove them out and settled in their place,

⁶Who can withstand His indignation? Who can endure His burning anger? His wrath is poured out like fire; even rocks are shattered before Him.

¹¹Like the Anakites, they were also regarded as Rephaim, though the Moabites called them Emites.

¹²The Horites used to live in Seir, but the descendants of Esau drove them out. They destroyed the Horites from before them and settled in their place, just as Israel did in the land that the Lord gave them as their possession.)

¹⁶The invader will do as he pleases, and no one will stand against him. He will establish himself in the Beautiful Land, with destruction in his hand.

²⁴He will hand their kings over to you, and you will wipe out their names from under heaven. No one will be able to stand against you; you will annihilate them.

²⁴For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.

³¹What then shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?

²⁹“For our God is a consuming fire.”

⁴For the Lord your God goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory.”

²³But the Lord your God will give them over to you and throw them into great confusion, until they are destroyed.

²⁴He will hand their kings over to you, and you will wipe out their names from under heaven. No one will be able to stand against you; you will annihilate them.

²⁹I will not drive them out before you in a single year; otherwise the land would become desolate and wild animals would multiply against you.

³⁰Little by little I will drive them out ahead of you, until you become fruitful and possess the land.

¹⁷You might say in your heart, “The power and strength of my hands have made this wealth for me.”

⁹He has saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but by His own purpose and by the grace He granted us in Christ Jesus before time began.

⁵It is not because of your righteousness or uprightness of heart that you are going in to possess their land, but it is because of their wickedness that the Lord your God is driving out these nations before you, to keep the promise He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

⁹When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not imitate the detestable ways of the nations there.

¹⁰Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, practices divination or conjury, interprets omens, practices sorcery,

²⁴Do not defile yourselves by any of these practices, for by all these things the nations I am driving out before you have defiled themselves.

²⁵Even the land has become defiled, so I am punishing it for its sin, and the land will vomit out its inhabitants.

⁷For who makes you so superior? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

⁵He saved us, not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to His mercy, through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.

⁸And to you and your descendants I will give the land where you are residing—all the land of Canaan—as an eternal possession; and I will be their God.”

⁴I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and I will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations of the earth will be blessed,

⁷The Lord also told him, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.”

¹⁵for all the land that you see, I will give to you and your offspring forever.

⁷Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I will give this land to your offspring.” So Abram built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

¹⁶Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and stiffen your necks no more.

¹³The Lord also said to me, “I have seen this people, and they are indeed a stiff-necked people.

⁹The Lord also said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and they are indeed a stiff-necked people.

⁵¹You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit, just as your fathers did.

²⁷For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you are already rebelling against the Lord while I am still alive, how much more will you rebel after my death!

³Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people; otherwise, I might destroy you on the way.”

¹¹They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us into the wilderness to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt?

²And there in the desert the whole congregation of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron.

⁵and spoke against God and against Moses: “Why have you led us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread or water, and we detest this wretched food!”

²who also invited them to the sacrifices for their gods. And the people ate and bowed down to these gods.

⁴Meanwhile, the rabble among them had a strong craving for other food, and again the Israelites wept and said, “Who will feed us meat?

¹¹Therefore remember that formerly you who are Gentiles in the flesh and called uncircumcised by the so-called circumcision (that done in the body by human hands)—

¹⁹At Horeb they made a calf and worshiped a molten image.

²⁰They exchanged their Glory for the image of a grass-eating ox.

¹⁶The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.

⁷Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.

⁸How quickly they have turned aside from the way that I commanded them! They have made for themselves a molten calf and have bowed down to it. They have sacrificed to it and said, ‘These, O Israel, are your gods, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’”

²⁸So Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

¹⁸Moses entered the cloud as he went up on the mountain, and he remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights.

⁸So he got up and ate and drank. And strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.

¹⁵When Moses went up on the mountain, the cloud covered it,

¹²Then the Lord said to Moses, “Come up to Me on the mountain and stay here, so that I may give you the tablets of stone, with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction.”

²After fasting forty days and forty nights, He was hungry.

¹⁸When the Lord had finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.

¹⁰For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put My laws in their minds and inscribe them on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people.

⁴And the Lord wrote on the tablets what had been written previously, the Ten Commandments that He had spoken to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the assembly. The Lord gave them to me,

¹⁶This is what you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, “Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God or see this great fire anymore, so that we will not die!”

¹⁰The day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, the Lord said to me, “Gather the people before Me to hear My words, so that they may learn to fear Me all the days they live on the earth, and that they may teach them to their children.”

¹¹You came near and stood at the base of the mountain, a mountain blazing with fire to the heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness.

¹⁷Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain.

¹⁸Mount Sinai was completely enveloped in smoke, because the Lord had descended on it in fire. And the smoke rose like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently.

⁹When I went up on the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I ate no bread and drank no water.

⁶Now, however, Jesus has received a much more excellent ministry, just as the covenant He mediates is better and is founded on better promises.

⁷For if that first covenant had been without fault, no place would have been sought for a second.

³³So they set out on a three-day journey from the mountain of the Lord, with the ark of the covenant of the Lord traveling ahead of them for those three days to seek a resting place for them.

⁴containing the golden altar of incense and the gold-covered ark of the covenant. Inside the ark were the gold jar of manna, Aaron’s staff that had budded, and the stone tablets of the covenant.

⁷Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.

⁸How quickly they have turned aside from the way that I commanded them! They have made for themselves a molten calf and have bowed down to it. They have sacrificed to it and said, ‘These, O Israel, are your gods, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’”

¹⁷Israel, however, did not listen to their judges. Instead, they prostituted themselves with other gods and bowed down to them. They quickly turned from the way of their fathers, who had walked in obedience to the Lord’s commandments; they did not do as their fathers had done.

²⁹For I know that after my death you will become utterly corrupt and turn from the path I have commanded you. And in the days to come, disaster will befall you because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke Him to anger by the work of your hands.”

⁶I am amazed how quickly you are deserting the One who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—

⁴What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? For your loyalty is like a morning mist, like the early dew that vanishes.

⁵His people have acted corruptly toward Him; the blemish on them is not that of His children, but of a perverse and crooked generation.

⁶Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.

¹⁶Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and stiffen your necks no more.

¹⁴But they would not listen, and they stiffened their necks like their fathers, who did not believe the Lord their God.

²⁷For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you are already rebelling against the Lord while I am still alive, how much more will you rebel after my death!

⁹The Lord also said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and they are indeed a stiff-necked people.

¹⁰Now leave Me alone, so that My anger may burn against them and consume them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

⁵“Then I will draw near to you for judgment. And I will be a swift witness against sorcerers and adulterers and perjurers, against oppressors of the widowed and fatherless, and against those who defraud laborers of their wages and deny justice to the foreigner but do not fear Me,” says the Lord of Hosts.

²⁰The Lord will never be willing to forgive him. Instead, His anger and jealousy will burn against that man, and every curse written in this book will fall upon him. The Lord will blot out his name from under heaven

¹⁰Now leave Me alone, so that My anger may burn against them and consume them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

¹¹But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God, saying, “O Lord, why does Your anger burn against Your people, whom You brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?

⁵You have rebuked the nations; You have destroyed the wicked; You have erased their name forever and ever.

⁵Like them, he who overcomes will be dressed in white. And I will never blot out his name from the Book of Life, but I will confess his name before My Father and His angels.

¹¹And the Lord said to Moses, “How long will this people treat Me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in Me, despite all the signs I have performed among them?

¹²I will strike them with a plague and destroy them—and I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they are.”

⁵¹You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit, just as your fathers did.

¹⁸Mount Sinai was completely enveloped in smoke, because the Lord had descended on it in fire. And the smoke rose like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently.

²³And when you heard the voice out of the darkness while the mountain was blazing with fire, all the heads of your tribes and your elders approached me,

¹¹You came near and stood at the base of the mountain, a mountain blazing with fire to the heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness.

¹⁴So the Lord relented from the calamity He had threatened to bring on His people.

¹⁵Then Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back.

²³So Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and lightning struck the earth. So the Lord rained down hail upon the land of Egypt.

¹⁸For you have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom, and storm;

¹⁹As Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, he burned with anger and threw the tablets out of his hands, shattering them at the base of the mountain.

⁴⁰They said to Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go before us! As for this Moses who led us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.’

⁴¹At that time they made a calf and offered a sacrifice to the idol, rejoicing in the works of their hands.

²⁸So Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

⁹When I went up on the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I ate no bread and drank no water.

²³So He said He would destroy them—had not Moses His chosen one stood before Him in the breach to divert His wrath from destroying them.

¹⁶David pleaded with God for the boy. He fasted and went into his house and spent the night lying in sackcloth on the ground.

¹⁰Now leave Me alone, so that My anger may burn against them and consume them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

¹¹But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God, saying, “O Lord, why does Your anger burn against Your people, whom You brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?

¹⁰I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, like the first time, and that time the Lord again listened to me and agreed not to destroy you.

¹⁴So the Lord relented from the calamity He had threatened to bring on His people.

¹⁶Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail.

¹⁷Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.

¹⁰I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, like the first time, and that time the Lord again listened to me and agreed not to destroy you.

¹⁰Now leave Me alone, so that My anger may burn against them and consume them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

¹¹But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God, saying, “O Lord, why does Your anger burn against Your people, whom You brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?

⁶Moses and Aaron were among His priests; Samuel was among those who called on His name. They called to the Lord and He answered.

¹⁷So the Lord said to Moses, “I will do this very thing you have asked, for you have found favor in My sight, and I know you by name.”

²¹“What did this people do to you,” Moses asked Aaron, “that you have led them into so great a sin?”

³⁵And the Lord sent a plague on the people because of what they had done with the calf that Aaron had made.

²⁶Such a high priest truly befits us—One who is holy, innocent, undefiled, set apart from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.

²⁷Unlike the other high priests, He does not need to offer daily sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the sins of the people; He sacrificed for sin once for all when He offered up Himself.

²So Aaron told them, “Take off the gold earrings that are on your wives and sons and daughters, and bring them to me.”

³Then all the people took off their gold earrings and brought them to Aaron.

²⁰Then he took the calf they had made, burned it in the fire, ground it to powder, and scattered the powder over the face of the water. Then he forced the Israelites to drink it.

⁷For on that day, every one of you will reject the idols of silver and gold that your own hands have sinfully made.

²²So you will desecrate your silver-plated idols and your gold-plated images. You will throw them away like menstrual cloths, saying to them, “Be gone!”

¹⁸and the idols will vanish completely.

¹⁹Men will flee to caves in the rocks and holes in the ground, away from the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of His majesty, when He rises to shake the earth.

¹¹Though Ephraim multiplied the altars for sin, they became his altars for sinning.

³⁴So they called that place Kibroth-hattaavah, because there they buried the people who had craved other food.

⁷He named the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites quarreled, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

¹Soon the people began to complain about their hardship in the hearing of the Lord, and when He heard them, His anger was kindled, and fire from the Lord blazed among them and consumed the outskirts of the camp.

²And the people cried out to Moses, and he prayed to the Lord, and the fire died down.

²⁴They despised the pleasant land; they did not believe His promise.

²⁵They grumbled in their tents and did not listen to the voice of the Lord.

²For we also received the good news just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, since they did not share the faith of those who comprehended it.

¹⁰But they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit. So He turned and became their enemy, and He Himself fought against them.

²²because they did not believe God or rely on His salvation.

¹⁸And to whom did He swear that they would never enter His rest? Was it not to those who disobeyed?

¹⁹So we see that it was because of their unbelief that they were unable to enter.

¹⁰But the whole congregation threatened to stone Joshua and Caleb. Then the glory of the Lord appeared to all the Israelites at the Tent of Meeting.

¹¹And the Lord said to Moses, “How long will this people treat Me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in Me, despite all the signs I have performed among them?

²⁷For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you are already rebelling against the Lord while I am still alive, how much more will you rebel after my death!

⁵¹You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit, just as your fathers did.

⁶Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.

⁷Remember this, and never forget how you provoked the Lord your God in the wilderness. From the day you left the land of Egypt until you reached this place, you have been rebelling against the Lord.

¹⁸Then I fell down before the Lord for forty days and forty nights, as I had done the first time. I did not eat bread or drink water because of all the sin you had committed in doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord and provoking Him to anger.

¹⁶And I saw how you had sinned against the Lord your God; you had made for yourselves a molten calf. You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you.

¹¹But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God, saying, “O Lord, why does Your anger burn against Your people, whom You brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?

¹²Why should the Egyptians declare, ‘He brought them out with evil intent, to kill them in the mountains and wipe them from the face of the earth’? Turn from Your fierce anger and relent from doing harm to Your people.

¹⁴He gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds.

²¹For the sake of Your name do not despise us; do not disgrace Your glorious throne. Remember Your covenant with us; do not break it.

²Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom He has redeemed from the hand of the enemy

¹³With loving devotion You will lead the people You have redeemed; with Your strength You will guide them to Your holy dwelling.

⁹And they sang a new song: “Worthy are You to take the scroll and open its seals, because You were slain, and by Your blood You purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.

²¹For the sake of Your name do not despise us; do not disgrace Your glorious throne. Remember Your covenant with us; do not break it.

¹⁸Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity and passes over the transgression of the remnant of His inheritance—who does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in loving devotion?

¹⁹He will again have compassion on us; He will vanquish our iniquities. You will cast out all our sins into the depths of the sea.

²⁴You have not bought Me sweet cane with your silver, nor satisfied Me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened Me with your sins; you have wearied Me with your iniquities.

²⁵I, yes I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake and remembers your sins no more.

⁶Then He said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

¹²The Righteous One considers the house of the wicked and brings the wicked to ruin.

²⁵My lord should pay no attention to this scoundrel Nabal, for he lives up to his name: His name means Fool, and folly accompanies him. I, your servant, did not see my lord’s young men whom you sent.

¹⁶‘Because the Lord was unable to bring this people into the land He swore to give them, He has slaughtered them in the wilderness.’

¹²Why should the Egyptians declare, ‘He brought them out with evil intent, to kill them in the mountains and wipe them from the face of the earth’? Turn from Your fierce anger and relent from doing harm to Your people.

¹⁰They are Your servants and Your people. You redeemed them by Your great power and mighty hand.

⁵¹For they are Your people and Your inheritance; You brought them out of Egypt, out of the furnace for iron.

³⁴Or has any god tried to take as his own a nation out of another nation—by trials, signs, wonders, and war, by a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors—as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt, before your eyes?

²⁶And I prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord God, do not destroy Your people, Your inheritance, whom You redeemed through Your greatness and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

⁷For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, the sheep under His care. Today, if you hear His voice,

²⁰Yet the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people of His inheritance, as you are today.