Why God was giving Canaan to Israel
9
📚Hear, O Israel! You are to pass over the Jordan this day, to go in to dispossess nations greater and stronger than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, 2 📚a people great and tall, the children of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you have heard it said, “Who can stand before the children of Anak?” 3 📚Therefore today understand that the LORD your God is the one who goes over before you. He will destroy them like a consuming fire, and bring them down before your face. So you will drive them out, and destroy them quickly, just as the LORD has said to you. 4 📚After the LORD your God has driven them out from before you, do not say in your heart, “Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land”. It is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD drives them out from before you. 5 📚You are not going in to possess their land because of your righteousness or because of the uprightness of your heart, but because of the wickedness of these nations the LORD your God drives them out from before you, and so that he may fulfil the word which the LORD swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Israel's Rebellion at Horeb
6 📚So understand that the LORD your God does not give you this good land to possess because of your righteousness; for you are a stiff-necked people.
9:6 They had nothing to boast about in self. The promised land was a gift. Compare Eph 2:8-9; Titus 3:4-7.⚜
7 📚Remember, and do not forget, how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the desert. From the day that you left the land of Egypt, until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD.
8 📚Also in Horeb you provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was angry enough with you to have destroyed you. 9 📚When I went up on the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the LORD made with you, then I stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. I did not eat bread or drink water. 10 📚And the LORD entrusted to me two stone tablets written with the finger of God; and what was written on them was in accordance with all the words which the LORD spoke with you on the mountain from the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.
11 📚And it came about at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the LORD gave me the two tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant. 12 📚And the LORD said to me, “Get up and quickly go down from here, for your people whom you brought out of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made an idol of cast metal for themselves”.
13 📚The LORD spoke to me further, saying, “I have seen this people, and, look, it is a stiff-necked people. 14 📚Let me alone, so that I may destroy them, and blot out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation stronger and greater than they”.
15 📚So I turned and came down from the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire; and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. 16 📚And I looked, and saw that you had sinned against the LORD your God, and had made a calf of cast metal for yourselves. You had turned aside quickly from the way which the LORD had commanded you. 17 And I took the two tablets, and threw them out of my two hands, and broke them before your eyes.
18 📚And I fell down before the LORD, as at the first, for forty days and forty nights. I did not eat bread or drink water, because of all your sins which you had committed, in doing wickedly in the sight of the LORD, provoking him to anger. 19 📚For I was afraid of the LORD’s anger and hot displeasure with which he was wrathful against you to destroy you. But the LORD listened to me at that time also. 20 📚And the LORD was angry enough with Aaron to have destroyed him; and I prayed for Aaron also at the same time. 21 📚And I took your sin, the calf which you had made, and burned it with fire, and crushed it, and ground it up very small, until it was as fine as dust. And I threw its dust into the stream that came down from the mountain.
22 📚And at Taberah, and at Massah, and at Kibroth Hattaavah, you provoked the LORD to wrath. 23 📚Likewise when the LORD sent you from Kadesh-Barnea, saying, “Go up and possess the land which I have given you”, then you rebelled against the command of the LORD your God, and you did not believe or listen to his voice. 24 📚You have been rebellious against the LORD from the day that I knew you.
9:24 This is the story of all mankind as well as Israel’s history.⚜
25 📚So I prostrated myself before the LORD for forty days and forty nights, as I prostrated myself at the first, because the LORD had said he would destroy you. 26 📚Therefore I prayed to the LORD, and said, “O Lord God, do not destroy your people and your inheritance, whom you have redeemed through your greatness, whom you have brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. 27 📚Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do not look at the stubbornness of this people, or to their wickedness, or to their sin, 28 📚or else the land from which you brought us out will say, ‘Because the LORD was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them, and because he hated them, he has brought them out to kill them in the desert.’ 29 📚Yet they are your people and your inheritance, whom you brought out by your mighty power and by your stretched out arm”.