000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

120 Thanksgiving Day/Year A
etc.” Such displacement is hardly just. Deuteronomy 7:2 commands Israel
to “utterly destroy” the inhabitants of the promised land. On the surface,
such a command is morally repugnant and is inconsistent with a God of
unconditional love. The preacher can critique these notions while pointing
out the intent of these texts on another level. Deuteronomy 6:10–15
aims to stress the land as an act of grace. Deuteronomy 7:2 stresses that
Israel cannot compromise itself with false values (especially idolatry and
injustice). In any event, commentators note that the strategies of 7:3–5
assume that the command to “utterly destroy” was not carried out with the
thoroughness prescribed by the text.
In 8:1, the Deuteronomic Moses stresses the importance of the community
observing “the entire commandment” so they may “live and
increase and go in and occupy the land.” Deuteronomy 8:2–6 reminds the
community that God’s faithfulness in the past is reason for observing
the commandments today. God made the people hunger in the wilderness
but then provided manna to help them see that “one does not live by bread
alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of [God],” that is,
on the basis of what God commands. Their clothes did not wear out;
their feet did not swell. They have seen in the past that what God says
comes true.
Consequently, Deuteronomy 8:7–20 indicates that what God will do in
the future is further reason for obeying the entire commandment. If they
live as God wishes, they will revel in the land described in 8:7–10 with its
ever-flowing water, abundance of grain, fruit, vegetables, as well as raw
materials such as iron and copper.
A fear of the Deuteronomic theologians is that “prosperity can lead to
complacency and forgetting one’s dependence on God.” Thus, the text
“warns that the effects of satiety are liable to be exacerbated with the passage
of time when Israel’s own labors yield further prosperity, and it credits
that prosperity to its labors alone.” 38 To guard against this malady,
Deuteronomy 7:11–18 counsels the community neither to exalt itself nor
to forget that blessing comes from God and not solely from its own
achievement. According to 7:18a, God does not simply give the community
its prosperity but rather God “gives you power to get wealth” (v. 18a).
The community has actual power that it can use in cooperation with (or
resistance to) God’s purposes.
The passage closes with the threat that forgetting God and worshiping
idols will result in national collapse (8:19–20). To a congregation around
the time of the exile, this threat is not hypothetical but will be (or has been)
realized in their own history.