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Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire:
Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female,
The likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air,
The likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth:
And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven.
But the LORD hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day.
Furthermore the LORD was angry with me for your sakes, and sware that I should not go over Jordan, and that I should not go in unto that good land, which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance:
But I must die in this land, I must not go over Jordan: but ye shall go over, and possess that good land.
Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee.
For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.

New Defender's Study Bible Notes

4:24 consuming fire. This verse is quoted and applied relative to professing Christian believers in Hebrews 12:29.

4:28 ye shall serve gods. This is a prophecy remarkably fulfilled in later ages. Not only were the Israelites scattered among the nations of the world, but great multitudes of these apostates abandoned the faith of their fathers in favor of many forms–ancient and modern–of evolutionary pantheism. Modern “Reform Judaism,” for example, is little more than evolutionary humanism.

4:30 tribulation. This prophecy, given by Moses as Israel prepared to enter the promised land, apparently looks into the distant future, 3500 years or more, to “the latter days” when Israel will be in the “great tribulation” (Revelation 7:14). At that “time of trouble...thy people shall be delivered,” (Daniel 12:1), and “immediately after the tribulation of those days...He shall send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” (Matthew 24:29,31).

4:32 God created man. “The days that are past,” to which Moses referred, “since the day that God created man upon the earth,” had been some 2500 years (assuming no “gaps” in the received chronological genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11). That was a long time, of course, but was at least a reasonable point of reference to which the people could relate–nothing like the eternal evolutionary ages postulated by the Egyptians, Canaanites and other ancient pagan nations.

4:37 he loved thy fathers. Israel was not God’s chosen people because they deserved to be, but “because He loved thy fathers.” He had made an unconditional promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because of their faithfulness, not that of their “seed after them.”


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