NO TRESPASSING
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Opening Prayer
Father, thank you for the gift of your Son, for your Word that showed him to me, and for your Spirit who brought me to faith in him.
Read DEUTERONOMY 29
For additional translations of the passage, use this link to Bible Gateway.
Renewal of the Covenant
29 [a]These are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in Moab, in addition to the covenant he had made with them at Horeb.
2 Moses summoned all the Israelites and said to them:
Your eyes have seen all that the Lord did in Egypt to Pharaoh, to all his officials and to all his land. 3 With your own eyes you saw those great trials, those signs and great wonders. 4 But to this day the Lord has not given you a mind that understands or eyes that see or ears that hear. 5 Yet the Lord says, “During the forty years that I led you through the wilderness, your clothes did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet. 6 You ate no bread and drank no wine or other fermented drink. I did this so that you might know that I am the Lord your God.”
7 When you reached this place, Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out to fight against us, but we defeated them. 8 We took their land and gave it as an inheritance to the Reubenites, the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh.
9 Carefully follow the terms of this covenant, so that you may prosper in everything you do. 10 All of you are standing today in the presence of the Lord your God—your leaders and chief men, your elders and officials, and all the other men of Israel, 11 together with your children and your wives, and the foreigners living in your camps who chop your wood and carry your water. 12 You are standing here in order to enter into a covenant with the Lord your God, a covenant the Lord is making with you this day and sealing with an oath, 13 to confirm you this day as his people, that he may be your God as he promised you and as he swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 14 I am making this covenant, with its oath, not only with you 15 who are standing here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God but also with those who are not here today.
16 You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries on the way here. 17 You saw among them their detestable images and idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold. 18 Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.
19 When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, “I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way,” they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. 20 The Lord will never be willing to forgive them; his wrath and zeal will burn against them. All the curses written in this book will fall on them, and the Lord will blot out their names from under heaven. 21 The Lord will single them out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this Book of the Law.
22 Your children who follow you in later generations and foreigners who come from distant lands will see the calamities that have fallen on the land and the diseases with which the Lord has afflicted it. 23 The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim, which the Lord overthrew in fierce anger. 24 All the nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?”
25 And the answer will be: “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt. 26 They went off and worshiped other gods and bowed down to them, gods they did not know, gods he had not given them. 27 Therefore the Lord’s anger burned against this land, so that he brought on it all the curses written in this book. 28 In furious anger and in great wrath the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now.”
29 The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.
Footnotes
- Deuteronomy 29:1 In Hebrew texts 29:1 is numbered 28:69, and 29:2-29 is numbered 29:1-28.
New International Version (NIV)Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Reflect
Are there persistent temptations that challenge your day-to-day walk with God?
God’s covenant with Israel, made 40 years earlier at Horeb, is now reconfirmed with a new generation of Israelites before they enter the Promised Land. Moses urges them once again to keep the covenant and thus avoid the dire consequences that arise from breaking it. Could God have explained things any more plainly? It is hard to imagine so, yet the lure of sin would prove stronger than Israel’s commitment to remain faithful to him. We all know something about that, don’t we?
Speaking of knowledge, God makes it abundantly clear to the Israelites in verse 29 that they and, by extension, we have received absolutely everything we need for understanding why and how we must obey the Lord. Revelation is the process by which God shows us truths that would otherwise be impossible for us to discover. Those truths are preserved in written form in the Bible so that the divine message can be heard and transmitted from generation to generation. The importance of Scripture for teaching us to live in the way that pleases God cannot be exaggerated.
Nevertheless, God has placed limits on what is revealed to us. ‘… all the words of this law’ (v. 29) are given to guide our path, but they do not include knowledge that God has deliberately put beyond our reach. Much that happens in the unseen spiritual realm is kept from us. To delve too deeply into such things can lead us into the forbidden zone of occultism (from Latin occultus—hidden). God expressly prohibits this throughout Scripture.1 The very first temptation was an enticement to know as God knows.2 Eve’s story and verse 29 in today’s reading warn us against trespassing on forbidden territory.
Apply
If you haven’t already done so, consider reading the whole Bible through in one year and getting an overall grasp of God’s revelation.
Closing prayer
Thank you, Father, for revealing to us in your Word everything we need to know to be saved and live for you.
1 E.g., Lev 19:31; 20:6, 27; Isa 8:19; 2 Kings 21:6; Acts 19:19; Rev 21:8 2 Gen 3:4, 5
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