Hey, you are watching A Year in the Bible with Daily Grace.

This is Shelby and Paul, and we're here to walk you through Deuteronomy chapters 7 through 9.

Take it away, Paul.

Yeah, so in these chapters, we're going to get some instructions from Moses about how the Israelites are supposed to live

in the promised land.

And one of the most important commands that he's giving them is that when they get there,

they're supposed to conquer all the people that live there, and especially not take on

any of their practices or worship any of the gods that they worship.

And already this is kind of,

can be a bit thorny for our modern minds about, you know, conquering and killing everyone that

they find there, right? But thankfully, scripture kind of gives us a bit of an answer of why

God is commanding this. And it's in Deuteronomy 9, 4, where it says, when the Lord your God

drives them out before you, do not say to yourself, the Lord brought me in to take possession

of this land because of my righteousness. Instead, the Lord will drive out these nations before

you because of their wickedness. And so this is a command to Israel to say, hey, it's not because you're special that you're winning these battles, right? It's because of the wickedness of the people that are there. And we'll talk more about this kind of difficult concept of conquest in Joshua, but, you know, this kind of gives us a little precursor to what we're going to see there.

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that. And I know we'll talk about this a lot more because we're going to see this take place in the book of Joshua.

So what do we learn from God's instructions in these chapters?

Yeah. So I think these chapters show us something that's pretty important about the Bible in general and not just Deuteronomy. And that's something I've heard said before, which is basically that the

Bible always gives the indicative before it gives the imperative. And all of that really means is

that God is going to tell us who we are before he tells us what we're supposed to do. And we

saw this in Exodus, namely, where God basically delivered them from slavery before

they had done anything.

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