God

“Take this Book of the Law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, so that it may remain there as a witness against you.

For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you are already rebelling against the LORD while I am still alive, how much more will you rebel after my death!

For I know that after my death you will become utterly corrupt and turn from the path I have commanded you. And in the days to come, disaster will befall you because you will do evil in the sight of the LORD to provoke Him to anger by the work of your hands.”

For I will proclaim the name of the LORD. Ascribe greatness to our God!

He is the Rock, His work is perfect; all His ways are just. A God of faithfulness without injustice, righteous and upright is He.

His people have acted corruptly toward Him; the spot on them is not that of His children, but of a perverse and crooked generation.

Is this how you repay the LORD, O foolish and senseless people? Is He not your Father and Creator? Has He not made you and established you?

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.

But the LORD’s portion is His people, Jacob His allotted inheritance.

He found him in a desert land, in a barren, howling wilderness; He surrounded him, He instructed him, He guarded him as the apple of His eye.

The LORD alone led him, and no foreign god was with him.

But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked— becoming fat, bloated, and gorged. He abandoned the God who made him and scorned the Rock of his salvation.

They provoked His jealousy with foreign gods; they enraged Him with abominations.

They sacrificed to demons, not to God, to gods they had not known, to newly arrived gods, which your fathers did not fear.

You ignored the Rock who brought you forth; you forgot the God who gave you birth.

When the LORD saw this, He rejected them, provoked to anger by His sons and daughters.

He said: “I will hide My face from them; I will see what will be their end. For they are a perverse generation— children of unfaithfulness.

They have provoked My jealousy by that which is not God; they have enraged Me with their worthless idols. So I will make them jealous by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a nation without understanding.

I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend My arrows against them.

They will be wasted from hunger and ravaged by pestilence and bitter plague; I will send the fangs of wild beasts against them, with the venom of vipers that slither in the dust.

I would have said that I would cut them to pieces and blot out their memory from mankind,

if I had not dreaded the taunt of the enemy, lest their adversaries misunderstand and say: ‘Our own hand has prevailed; it was not the LORD who did all this.’”

How could one man pursue a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, unless the LORD had given them up?

“Have I not stored up these things, sealed up within My vaults?

Vengeance is Mine; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly.”