Deuteronomy 29

God commanded Moses to have the Israelites commit to all the following things when they were in the Moab region {on the east side of the Jordan River}. This was in addition to what they and God promised each other at Horeb: \*

Moses summoned all the Israelites and said to them, “You saw for yourselves what God did to the king of Egypt and to his officials and to his entire country.

You saw all the plagues that God sent on them, and all the various miracles that he performed.

But to this day, God has not enabled you to understand the meaning of all that you have seen and heard. \*

For forty years God has led you while you traveled through the desert. During that time, your clothes and your sandals have not worn out.

You did not have bread to eat or wine or other fermented drinks to drink, {but God took care of you,} in order that you would know that he is your God. \*

And when we came to this place, Sihon, the king who ruled in the city of Heshbon, and Og, the king who ruled the region of Bashan, came out with their armies to attack us, but we defeated them.

We took their land and divided it among the tribes of Reuben and Gad, and half of the tribe of Manasseh.

So obey faithfully all that you have promised God you will do, in order that you will prosper in everything that you do. \*

Today all of us are standing in the presence of God our God—I, the leaders of all your tribes, your elders, your officials, all you Israelite men,

your wives, your children, and the foreigners who live among us and cut wood for us and carry water for us. \*

You are all here today to agree with God our God, and to commit to obey him.

He is agreeing with you in order to make sure that you are his people, and that he is your God. This is what he promised to do for you, and what he solemnly promised to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that he would do. \*

It is not just that you and God are agreeing today.

What we agree with God our God here today we are committing for us and also for our descendants who are not yet born.

You remember the things that our ancestors suffered in Egypt, and how they traveled through the land that belonged to other people groups after they came out of Egypt. \*

In those countries they saw those disgusting idols made of wood and stone and decorated with silver and gold.

So be sure that no man or woman or family or tribe that is here today stops worshiping God our God and starts worshiping any of the gods of those people groups. That would start to make you seem like something very bad tasting to God.

Be sure that no one here today who hears us agreeing with God says to himself, ‘Everything will go well with me, even if I stubbornly do what I want to.’ If you do that, the result will be that God will eventually destroy all of you, both good people and evil people. \*

God will not forgive anyone who is stubborn like that. Instead, he will be extremely angry with that person. He will cause all the curses that I have written down here to happen to that person, until God destroys that person and his family forever.

From all the tribes of Israel, God will choose that individual to suffer all the disasters that I have listed in the scroll that contains this agreement and its laws. \*

In future years, your descendants and people from other countries will see the disasters and the illnesses that God has caused to happen to you. They will exclaim,

‘This land is a wasteland full of sulfur and burning salt! No one is planting anything! Nothing grows, not even weeds! This land is like the place where the cities Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboyim used to be. God destroyed those when he was very angry with those people.’

And the people from those other people groups will ask, ‘Why did God do this to this land? Why was he so angry with the people who lived here?’ \*

Then other people will reply, ‘It is because they refused to do what they had agreed with God, the God whom their ancestors worshiped, when he brought them out of Egypt.

Instead, they worshiped other gods that they had never worshiped before, gods that God had told them not to worship. \*

So God became very angry with the people of this land, and he has caused to happen to them all the disasters that their leader warned them about.

God became extremely angry with them and took them out of their land, and threw them into another land, and they are still there.’ \*

There are some things that God our God has kept secret, but he has revealed his law to us, and he expects us and our descendants to obey it forever. \*