Deuteronomy 8:19-20 If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed. Like the nations the Lord destroyed before you, so you will be destroyed for not obeying the Lord your God.
(In two simple, declarative statements, the Lord lays out before His people then and us today the simple truth. If we are oblivious to the Lord, either through our failure to remember His works on our behalf or simply because of our inattention to and focus on Him,
He reminds us through this pronouncement
that just as nations are destroyed through their disobedience, so we will also be destroyed through our lack of acknowledgment of Him. This destruction will not be because the Lord finds pleasure in punishing us, but our destruction will come from our own choices, from our own free will. The plain truth of turning our backs on the Lord results in our ruin. It is a law of the Kingdom of God that we can use our free will to choose Him or to walk away from Him, but to walk away from Him brings consequences that result in destruction. The Lord holds out to us the glorious, opposite truth that choosing Him also brings inevitable results of deliverance and salvation and provision and victory in Him.)
