Deuteronomy 7:1-11 - Called Out and Chosen

Deuteronomy 7:1-11

A Chosen People (Exodus 34:10–16)

1 “When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, 2 and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. 3 Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. 4 For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the LORD will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly. 5 But thus you shall deal with them: you shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire.

6 “For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. 7 The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; 8 but because the LORD loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

9 “Therefore know that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; 10 and He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay him to his face. 11 Therefore you shall keep the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments which I command you today, to observe them.

This reminder of God’s covenant with His chosen people speaks of deliverance from sin and from their adversaries.  Their victory over the enemy occupying the land promised to them was told to remind them of the hand of God in it all; He delivered them and fought their battles because the battle belongs to the LORD alone, and they just faithfully put their feet forward into the fray as He did say.  The warning was given to lead holy lives since they were set apart as His to be like Him in holiness (1 Peter 1:16) and righteousness in godly marriages and in avoiding the idolatry of the world around them there.  He called them His holy people whom He had chosen for Himself, a special treasure (1 Peter 2:9-10) out of all His creation, just as we are in Christ along with them.  They were small in number but mighty in Him.  We are also.  It is because He loves us (John 3:16) that He chose us out of the world for Himself and not because we earned the right to be His.  His promise of the New Covenant in the sacrifice of His lifeblood given in our place on the tree of the curse (Galatians 3:13) of our sin is the certainty of this promise.  He had drawn out His people from the bondage of Egypt to bring them into the promised land of earthly Canaan, just as He has now drawn us (John 6:44) to Himself in His Son out of the bondage of sin (Romans 6:17-18, 22-23, Galatians 4:3-4) that held us all our lives since we were born.  Yes, we who are in Christ have been called out and chosen (1 Peter 2:4, 9, Revelation 17:14) as John 6:65, 69 reminds us.  We have this deliverance from the consequences of sin, eternal punishment, by grace alone in the person and work of Christ alone who delivers us from His wrath of justice in judgment (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10) to come on the world by His life, suffering, death, and resurrection.  This especially resonates in my own soul on this day because it is the forty-fifth anniversary of my own soul’s resurrection from death to life (John 1:12-13, 5:24, 6:47) through the gospel of Jesus Christ in whom the light of the knowledge of the glory of God (2 Corinthians 4:6) burst into my hopeless soul, revealing the path of His righteousness and not my own efforts to reach God (Titus 3:5-6, 7), by loosing the shackles of sin by His work of grace to set me free at last!  I have been called out and chosen in Him who alone can deliver by grace from sin’s inescapable penalty.  Have you?