24. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire; he is a jealous God.
25. After you have produced children and grandchildren and have been in the land a long time, if you become corrupt and make an image of any kind and do other evil things before the Lord your God that enrage him,
26. I invoke heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that you will surely and swiftly be removed from the very land you are about to cross the Jordan to possess. You will not last long there because you will surely be annihilated.
27. Then the Lord will scatter you among the peoples and there will be very few of you among the nations where the Lord will drive you.
28. There you will worship gods made by human hands – wood and stone that can neither see, hear, eat, nor smell.
29. But if you seek the Lord your God from there, you will find him, if, indeed, you seek him with all your heart and soul.
30. In your distress when all these things happen to you in the latter days, if you return to the Lord your God and obey him
31. (for he is a merciful God), he will not let you down or destroy you, for he cannot forget the covenant with your ancestors that he confirmed by oath to them.
32. Indeed, ask about the distant past, starting from the day God created humankind on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether there has ever been such a great thing as this, or even a rumor of it.
33. Have a people ever heard the voice of God speaking from the middle of fire, as you yourselves have, and lived to tell about it?
34. Or has God ever before tried to deliver a nation from the middle of another nation, accompanied by judgments, signs, wonders, war, strength, power, and other very terrifying things like the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?
35. You have been taught that the Lord alone is God – there is no other besides him.
36. From heaven he spoke to you in order to teach you, and on earth he showed you his great fire from which you also heard his words.
37. Moreover, because he loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants who followed them and personally brought you out of Egypt with his great power