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30
Bringing them back to Israel
1 “I have now told you about the ways that Yahweh our God will bless you if you obey him and the ways that he will curse you if you disobey him. I am saying that you must choose which you want. But when you choose not to obey his laws, some day you will be living in the countries to which he will scatter you, and you will remember what I told you. 2 Then, if you return to Yahweh our God and faithfully [IDI] obey all that I have today commanded you to do, 3 he will act mercifully toward you. He will bring you back from the nations to which he scattered you, and he will cause you to be prosperous again. 4 Even if you have been scattered to the most distant places on the earth, Yahweh our God will gather you from there and bring you back to your land. 5 He will enable you to possess again the land where your ancestors lived. And he will cause you to be more prosperous and more numerous than you are now. 6 Yahweh our God will change [MET] your inner beings, with the result that you will love him more than you love anything else and want to do only what he wants you to do. And then you will continue to live in that land. 7 Yahweh our God will send all the disasters that I have told you about on your enemies and on those who oppressed/persecuted you. 8 You will do what Yahweh wants you to do, as you did before, and you will obey all the commands that I have given to you today. 9 Yahweh our God will cause you to be very prosperous in all that you do. You will have many children [IDI], and a lot of cattle, and you will produce abundant crops. He will again be happy to enable you to prosper, just like he was happy to enable your ancestors to prosper. 10 But he will do those things only if you do what he has told you to do, and if you obey all his rules and regulations that I have written about in this scroll, and if you will love him more than you love anything else and want to do only what he wants you to do.
God's commands are very accessible
11 The commands that I am giving to you today are not very difficult for you to obey, and they are not difficult to know because of being far from you. 12 They are not in heaven, with the result that you need to say, ‘◄Who will need to go up to heaven for us to bring them down here to us in order that we can hear them and obey them?/Someone will need to go up to heaven for us to bring them down here to us in order that we can hear them and obey them.►’ [RHQ] 13 And they are not on the other side of the sea, with the result that you need to say, ‘◄Who will need to cross the sea for us and bring them back to us, in order that we can hear them and obey them?/Someone will need to cross the sea for us and bring them back to us, in order that we can hear them and obey them.►’ [RHQ] 14 You do not need to do that because his commands are here with you. You know them [MTY] and you have ◄memorized them/put them in your minds►. So you can easily obey them.
15 So listen! Today I am allowing you to choose between doing what is evil and doing what is good, between what will enable you to live for a long time and what will cause you to die while you are still young. 16 I say again, if you obey the commands of Yahweh our God that I am giving to you today, and if you love him and conduct your lives as he wants you to do, and if you obey all his rules and regulations, you will prosper and become very numerous, and Yahweh our God will bless you in the land that you are about to enter and possess.
17 But if you turn away from Yahweh and refuse to heed what he says, and if you allow yourselves to be led away to worship other gods, 18 I am warning you today that you will soon die. You will not live for a long time in the land that you are about to cross the Jordan River to enter and possess.
19 I am requesting that* heaven and the earth testify to you, that today I am allowing you to choose whether you want to live for a long time or to soon die, whether you want Yahweh to bless you or to curse you. So choose to live. 20 Choose to love Yahweh our God, and to obey him [MTY], and to ◄be faithful to/have a close relationship with► him. If you do that, you and your descendants will live for a long time in the land that Yahweh solemnly promised to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he would give to them.”

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© 2008-2016 Ellis W. Deibler, Jr.