Deuteronomy 4:27-49 ▼

27 Moreover, the LORD will scatter you among the nations, and you'll be fewer in number in the nations where the LORD your God will drive you.

28 There you'll serve gods made by human hands, serving trees and stones that cannot see, hear, eat, nor smell.

29 If from there you will seek the LORD your God, then you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and soul.

30 In your distress, when all these things happen to you in days to come and you return to the LORD your God, then you will hear his voice.

31 For God is compassionate. The LORD your God won't fail you. He won't destroy you or forget the covenant that he confirmed with your ancestors.|

32 |Indeed, ask from one end of the heavens to the other about days of old, before your time, when God created mankind on the earth. Did we ever have anything as great as this, or ever hear of anything like it?

33 Has any people heard the voice of God speaking from the middle of a fire just as you did, and survived it?

34 Or has any god ever taken for himself one nation out from another nation with testings, signs, wonders, wars, awesome power, and magnificent, terrifying deeds as the LORD your God did in Egypt before your eyes?

35 |You have been shown this in order to know that 'the LORD is God' and there is no one like him.

36 You have been made to hear his voice from heaven so you may be instructed. And he showed you his great fire here on earth, and you heard his voice from the middle of that fire.

37 Moreover, he loved your ancestors, chose their descendants after them, and brought you out of Egypt, accompanied by his presence and great power,

38 in order to drive out nations that are stronger and more powerful than you, to bring you into this land, and to give you their land as an inheritance, as it is today.

39 |May you acknowledge and take to heart this day that the LORD is God in the heavens above and over the earth below—there is no other God.

40 May you observe his statutes and keep his commands that I'm giving you today, so that life may go well for you and for your descendants after you. That way, you'll live a long life in the land that the LORD your God is about to give you permanently.|

41 Then Moses designated three cities on the east side of the Jordan,

42 where a person who accidentally killed someone could flee, if he killed his neighbor without having enmity toward him in the past. He may flee to one of these cities and live:

43 Bezer in the desert plain for the descendants of Reuben, Ramoth in Gilead for the descendants of Gad, and Golan in Bashan for the descendants of Manasseh.

44 This is the Law that Moses reviewed in the presence of the Israelis.

45 These are the instructions, decrees, and ordinances that Moses declared to the Israelis when they came out of Egypt.

46 He did this east of the Jordan, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, in the land of Sihon, king of the Amorites, who lived in Heshbon, and whom Moses and the Israelis defeated after leaving Egypt.

47 So they took possession of his land, as well as the land of King Og of Bashan. Both Amorite kings lived east of the Jordan—

48 from Aroer on the edge of the Wadi Arnon as far as Mount Sirion, which is also called Hermon,

49 and all the Arabah east of the Jordan as far as the Dead Sea below the slopes of Pisgah.