Deuteronomy 7:1 – 11 “When 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— and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you to defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.
Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, because they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD will burn against you, and He will swiftly destroy you.
Instead, this is what you are to do to them: tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, cut down their Asherah poles, and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His prized possession, above all peoples on the face of the earth.
The LORD did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than the other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But because the LORD loved you and kept the oath He swore to your fathers, He brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps His covenant of loving devotion for a thousand generations of those who love Him and keep His commandments. But those who hate Him He repays to their faces with destruction; He will not hesitate to repay to his face the one who hates Him.
So keep the commandments and statutes and ordinances that I am giving you to follow this day.”
TOTAL DESTRUCTION!!! That is God’s will for the tribes that are currently inhabiting Canaan. There are seven tribes, each one much bigger than the Israelites – the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. God wants all of these tribes to be completely destroyed, In addition, God also is ordering that everything pertaining to the religions of these tribes also be destroyed – altars, pillars, Asherah poles, and idols. Anything that can be burned should be burned. Anything made of stone should be smashed. Anything made of metal should be melted. Why is God being so insistent that these people and their devoted objects be destroyed?
God has no illusions about the Israelites. This is the same bunch that couldn’t even wait forty days for Moses to come down off Mount Sinai before they pressured Aaron into making an idol of a golden calf. If items connected with the worship of these pagan gods survive, the Israelites are likely to seize them and begin worshiping them, rather than the God who has delivered them.
We want to believe that God favors us because we have special gifts that set us apart. Here God advising the Israelites that in fact, they are a very small tribe. “The LORD did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than the other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But because the LORD loved you and kept the oath He swore to your fathers, He brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” Hundreds of years ago, God made a promise to Abraham, and God always keeps His promises. God has delivered Israel from the most powerful nation in the world to demonstrate His power and His goodness.
God wants to use Israel to demonstrate to the world the vision of a nation wholly devoted to Him. By taking the smallest and weakest nation of all and then helping them conquer all these others, God wants the remaining nations to see His power and His grace and to turn to worship Him as well.
APPLICATION: Sometimes we feel that we are so unique that God will do things for us just because of our outstanding attributes. It’s pretty humbling if we realize that God has actually chosen us because we are weak and insignificant! 1 Corinthians 1:27 – 31 tells us, “But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence. But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God—and righteousness and sanctification and redemption— that, as it is written, “He who glories, let him glory in the Lord.”
We are safest when we understand how vulnerable we are. We are in the most danger when we think that we can handle all our problems ourselves. The saddest part of the admonitions Moses is giving in Deuteronomy 7 is that later on, the Israelites failed to destroy all those tribes and they paid a huge price spiritually as a result.
PRAYER: Father God, help us to be obedient. When You order us to do something, let us not whine and complain but let us obey immediately, realizing that this will be for our good. Thank You for loving us and for caring for us. In the mighty Name of King Jesus. Amen.
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