4. If you do, they will turn your children away from following me. Then your children will serve other gods, and the Lord will be very angry with you. He will quickly destroy you!
5. “This is what you must do to those nations: You must smash their altars and break their memorial stones into pieces. Cut down their Asherah poles and burn their statues.
6. Do this because you are the Lord’S own people. From all the people on earth, the Lord your God chose you to be his special people—people who belong only to him.
7. Why did the Lord love and choose you? It was not because you are such a large nation. You had the fewest of all people!
8. But the Lord brought you out of Egypt with great power and made you free from slavery. He freed you from the control of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. The Lord did this because he loves you and he wanted to keep the promise he made to your ancestors.
9. “So remember that the Lord your God is the only God, and you can trust him! He keeps his agreement. He shows his love and kindness to all people who love him and obey his commands. He continues to show his love and kindness through a thousand generations,
10. but the Lord punishes people who hate him. He will destroy them. He will not be slow to punish those who hate him.
11. So you must be careful to obey the commands, laws, and rules that I give you today.
12. “If you listen to these laws, and if you are careful to obey them, the Lord your God will keep his agreement of love with you. He promised this to your ancestors.
13. He will love you and bless you. He will make your nation grow. He will bless your children. He will bless your fields with good crops and will give you grain, new wine, and oil. He will bless your cows with calves and your sheep with lambs. You will have all these blessings in the land that he promised your ancestors to give you.
14. “You will be blessed more than all people. Every husband and wife will be able to have children. Your cows will be able to have calves.
15. The Lord will take away all sickness from you and he will not let you catch any of the terrible diseases that you had in Egypt. But he will make your enemies catch those diseases.
16. You must destroy all the people the Lord your God helps you defeat. Don’t feel sorry for them, and don’t worship their gods! They will trap you—they will ruin your life.
17. “Don’t say in your heart, ‘These nations are stronger than we are. How can we force them out?’
18. You must not be afraid of them. You must remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all the people of Egypt.
19. You saw the great troubles he gave them and the amazing things he did. You saw the Lord use his great power and strength to bring you out of Egypt. The Lord your God will use that same power against all the people you fear.
20. “The Lord your God will send the hornet against them. He will do this until he destroys all the people who escaped and tried to hide.
21. Don’t be afraid of them, because the Lord your God is with you. He is a great and awesome God.
22. The Lord your God will force those nations to leave your country little by little. You will not destroy them all at once. If you did, the wild animals would grow to be too many for you.