The Israelites must love the Lord
1Moses said: ‘You must love the Lord your God and you must always do what his laws say. 2You must remember that the Lord your God did not teach your children to live in the right way. No, He taught you, who have seen how great the Lord is. You have seen his great power, 3the signs that He showed you and everything He did to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and all the people in his land. 4You saw what the Lord did to the army of Egypt, to their horses and war-chariots. You saw how He made the water of the Red Sea flow over them when they followed_and_chased you. The Lord defeated them forever.
5You saw how He helped you all the way in the desert until you came here. 6You saw what He did to Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, the descendants of Reuben. You saw how the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them with their families and their tents and everyone who rebelled with them. All the Israelites saw it. 7Yes, you have seen these great things that God did.
8Now you must do everything that the laws that I give you today say. If you do this, you will be strong and you will have the land where you are going. 9Then you will live for many years in the land that the Lord promised your forefathers. He promised to give it to them and their descendants. This is a land with a lot of food, milk and honey. 10Yes, you are going to that land to take it for yourselves. It is not like the land of Egypt where you came from. In Egypt you had to sow seed and work very hard to water the plants in the fields. 11But the land that you are now going to take for yourselves is a land that has mountains and valleys. It gets water from the rain that falls from the sky. 12The Lord cares for this land, from the beginning to the end of the year.
13The Lord says: “I want you to do what my laws that I am giving you today say. You must love Me, the Lord your God. You must serve Me with all your heart. 14If you do that, then I will give your land rain at the right time, in autumn and in spring. There will be enough wheat, wine and olive oil for you to store and use later, 15and I will give your animals grass in the field. You will have enough food to eat.”
16But you must be very careful. The people of other nations will try to seduce you and turn you away from the Lord to go and serve other gods and bow down and worship them. 17If this happens, the Lord will become angry with you and He will close the heavens so that there will be no rain and nothing will grow in the ground. Then you will disappear from the good land that the Lord is giving you. 18Tie something to your hands and write it on your foreheads so that you will remember these things when you do anything. Think about these things when you work with your hands and when you look at something. Write them down and tie it to your hands and your foreheads 19and teach these things to your children. Think about these things when you sit in your homes or when you walk somewhere on the road, when you lie down or when you get up.
20You must think about these things when you go out or come into the doors of your houses and the city gates. 21If you do all of this, you and your children will live here for many years, in the land that the Lord promised to give to your forefathers. You will live here for as long as the sky is above the earth.
22Yes, you must do what it says in all these commandments that I give you today. You must love the Lord your God, you must do what He tells you and you must keep on serving Him. 23If you do this, the Lord will chase away all these nations and give this land to you. You will take the land from nations that are bigger and stronger than you. 24Every place where you come will belong to you, from the desert to the Lebanon Mountains, from the Euphrates River to the sea in the west. It will all become your land. 25No one will be able to defeat you. The Lord your God will make all the people in the land afraid of you and they will fear you, like He has promised.
26You must choose today: Do you want the Lord to bless you or do you want Him to curse you? 27He will bless you if you obey the laws that I give you today 28and He will curse you if you do not obey his laws, if you stop living as I tell you today and if you start serving other idols and gods that you did not know before. 29When the Lord brings you into the land that you must take for yourselves, you must go and stand on Mount Gerizim to tell the people that the Lord will bless them and you must go and stand on Mount Ebal to tell those people that God will curse them. 30These 2 mountains are on the other side of the Jordan River, next to the road that goes from the sea in the west to the Jordan Valley. That is where the Canaanites live, on the other side of the town of Gilgal, near the sacred tree of Moreh. 31You will go through the Jordan River to take for yourselves the land that the Lord your God gives you. When you take it and you start living there, 32you must do exactly as the laws that I give you today say.’
