25. Once you have had children and grandchildren and have grown old on the land, if you ruin things by making an idol, in any form whatsoever, and do what is evil in the eyes of the Lord your God and anger him,
26. I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you today: You will definitely disappear—and quickly—from the land that you are crossing over the Jordan River to possess. You won’t extend your time there but will instead be totally destroyed.
27. The Lord will scatter you among the nations. Only a very few of you will survive in the countries where the Lord will drag you.
28. There you will worship other gods, made of wood and stone by human hands—gods that cannot see, listen, eat, or smell.
29. You will seek the Lord your God from there, and you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your being.
30. In your distress, when all these things happen to you in the future, you will return to the Lord your God and you will obey his voice,
31. because the Lord your God is a compassionate God. He won’t let you go, he won’t destroy you, and he won’t forget the covenant that he swore to your ancestors.
32. Now look into it: into days long past, before your time—all the way back to the day God first created human beings on earth, from one end of heaven to the other. Has anything this amazing ever happened? Has anything like it ever been heard of before?
33. Has any people ever listened to a god’s voice speaking out of fire, as each of you have, and survived?
34. Or has any god ever tried to take one nation out of another nation using tests, miracles, wonders, war, a strong hand and outstretched arm, or awesome power like all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt while you watched?
35. You were shown these things so that you would know this: The Lord is the only God. There’s no other god except him.
36. From heaven he made you hear his voice in order to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire. You heard his words from that very fire.
37. And because he loved your ancestors and chose their descendants after them, God brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his own great power,