(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)
Deuteronomy 7:1–11, “When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, 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 thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly. But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations; And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face. Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them.”
The first thing that we notice about this section is that the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt in order to bring them into the Promised Land. Even though the first generation of freed slaves were afraid of the giants and refused to go in to the Land, the Lord just waited and their children went into the Land. We cannot stop the Lord from acting although we might remove ourselves from the joy of His goodness through unbelief. Israel had been slaves and then they had been desert nomads while the seven nations that lived in the Land of Canaan were warlike and fierce. However, Israel had the Lord while Canaan didn’t. One of the things that Israel had to be careful about was making any treaties with the people of the Land. When the Lord told Abraham that He was going to give his descendants the Promised Land, the Lord told Abraham that the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full (Gen 15:16, “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”) The Amorites had four centuries to repent of their iniquity but the refused and finally the Lord was going to give them the fruit of that choice. Israel had to be careful not to rebel against the Lord and refuse to carry out His judgement. They had to be careful not to marry these people because in marriages between cultures there is great tension between the mores of one culture and those of the other. After all, everybody thinks that they do things the right way, even if they are different to other people. In marriage there must be compromise for the marriage to prosper but the Lord’s people were not to compromise, hence marriage to the people of the Land was forbidden. Israel was called by the Lord to serve the Lord. He hadn’t been slack about delivering them from slavery so they were not to be slack about obeying Him.
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