CHAPTER 7 Apr. 23 
The Nations to Be Driven Out
When Yahweh your God brings you into the land where you go to possess it and casts out many nations before you, the Hittite, the Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than you, 2and when Yahweh your God delivers them up before you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. You must make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them, 3neither shall you arrange marriages with them; your daughter you shall not give to his son, nor shall you take his daughter for your son. 4For he will turn away your son from following me to serve other gods; so the anger of Yahweh would be kindled against you and He would destroy you quickly. 5But you must deal with them like this: break down their altars and dash their pillars in pieces and cut down their Asherim poles and burn their engraved images with fire. 6For you are a holy people to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession above all peoples who are on the face of the earth. 7Yahweh didn’t set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any people, for you were the fewest of all peoples; 8but because Yahweh loves you and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, therefore has Yahweh brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of bondage from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9Know therefore that Yahweh your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and loving kindness with them who love Him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations, 10and repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them; He will not be slack to him who hates Him, He will repay him to his face. 11You must therefore keep the commandment, the statutes and the ordinances which I command you this day, to do them.
Blessings for Obedience 
12If you listen to these ordinances and keep and do them, Yahweh your God will keep with you the covenant and the loving kindness which He swore to your fathers. 13He will love you and bless you and multiply you; He will also bless the fruit of your body and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your new wine and your oil, the increase of your livestock and the young of your flock, in the land which He swore to your fathers to give you. 14You will be blessed above all peoples. There shall not be male or female barren among you or among your livestock. 15Yahweh will take away from you all sickness, and none of the evil diseases of Egypt which you know, will He put on you, but will lay them on all those who hate you. 16You shall consume all the peoples whom Yahweh your God shall deliver up unto you; your eye shall not pity them, neither shall you serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you. 17If you say in your heart, These nations are more than I, how can I dispossess them?, 18you shall not be afraid of them; you shall well remember what Yahweh your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, 19the great trials which your eyes saw and the signs, the wonders, the mighty hand and the stretched out arm by which Yahweh your God brought you out; so shall Yahweh your God do to all the peoples of whom you are afraid. 20Moreover Yahweh your God will send the hornet among them until those who are left and hide themselves perish from before you. 21You shall not be scared of them, for Yahweh your God is in the midst of you, a great and awesome God. 22Yahweh your God will cast out those nations before you by little and little; you may not consume them at once, lest the animals of the field increase on you. 23But Yahweh your God will deliver them up before you and will confuse them with a great confusion until they are destroyed. 24He will deliver their kings into your hand and you shall make their name perish from under the sky; no man shall be able to stand before you, until you have destroyed them. 25You must burn the engraved images of their gods with fire. You must not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, nor take it for yourself, lest you be snared by it; for it is an abomination to Yahweh your God. 26You must not bring an abomination into your house and become a devoted thing like it. You shall utterly detest it and you shall utterly abhor it, for it is a devoted thing.

Commentary

7:1 God and Moses had stated that the Canaanite tribes would only be cast out if Israel were obedient, but here Moses enthuses that those tribes would indeed be cast out- so positive was he about Israel’s obedience (see too 6:18,19). And yet on the other hand he realistically was aware of their future failures. He said those positive words genuinely, because he simply loved Israel, and had the hope for them which love carries with it. Throughout his speech in Deuteronomy, Moses is constantly thinking of Israel in the land; he keeps on telling them how to behave when they are there, encouraging them to be strong so that they will go into the land. Roughly 25% of the verses in Moses' speech speak about this. Israel's future inheritance of the Kingdom absolutely filled Moses' mind as he faced up to his own death. And remember that his speech was the outpouring of 40 years meditation. Their salvation, them in the Kingdom, totally filled his heart; just as like Paul we should enthuse about others’ salvation, not simply our own. And likewise with the Lord Jesus. Psalms 22 and 69 show how His thoughts on the cross, especially as he approached the point of death, were centred around our salvation. 
7:7,9,13 Analyzing usage of the word "love" in the Pentateuch reveals that "love" was a great theme of Moses at the end of his life (Moses uses it 16 times in Deuteronomy, and only four times in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers). Love is indeed the bond or proof of spiritual maturity (Col. 3:14).
7:16 Despite such great love for Israel, Moses knew them so well that he fully appreciated that they were extremely prone to weakness. This is one of the major themes of Moses in Deuteronomy. He did not turn a blind eye to their sins; Deuteronomy is punctuated with reminders of how grievously they had sinned during their journey, and yet at the same time Moses is so positive about them- setting a wonderful pattern for us in how to deal with others. Time and again he comments on how easily they will be tempted to disobey commandments. "Take heed" runs like a refrain throughout Moses' speech. He warns them here not to "take pity" on false teachers, but to purge them from the community (7:16; 13:8; 19:13,21; 25:12). Not once in the earlier giving of the Law does this warning occur. Moses had come to know Israel so well that he could see how they were tempted to fail, and so he warned them forcibly against it. The way the Lord Jesus knows our thought processes, the mechanism of our temptations, is wondrously prefigured here.