18. And now you are doing the same thing. You are turning against the Lord. Will you refuse to follow the Lord? If you don’t stop what you are doing, he will be angry with everyone in Israel.
19. “‘If your land is not a good place to worship God, come over to the Lord’S land. This is where the Lord’S Tent is. You can have some of the land and live here. But don’t turn against the Lord or against us by building another altar. We already have the altar of the Lord our God at the Meeting Tent.
20. “‘Remember how Achan son of Zerah refused to obey the command about things that must be destroyed. That one man broke God’s law, but all the Israelites were punished. Achan died because of his sin, but also many other people died.’”
21. The people from the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh answered the eleven men. They said,
22. “The Lord is our God! Again we say that the Lord is our God! And God knows why we did this thing. We want you to know also. You can judge what we did. If you think we did it because we are against the Lord or refuse to obey him, you can kill us today.
23. Do you think we built our own altar because we want to turn away from the Lord? Do you think we built another altar for burnt offerings, grain offerings, and fellowship offerings? If that is why we built this altar, we ask the Lord himself to punish us.
24. But that is not why we built it. We built it because we were afraid that in the future your descendants might not accept us as part of God’s people. So your children might say to our children, ‘You people have no reason to worship the Lord, the God of Israel.
25. The Lord separated you people of Reuben and Gad from us by giving you the land on the other side of the Jordan River. So you are not part of the Lord’S people.’ If your children said that, it might make our children stop worshiping the Lord.
26. “So we decided to build this altar. But we did not plan to use it for burning offerings and sacrifices.