28. There you will worship gods made by people, gods made of wood and stone, that cannot see, hear, eat, or smell.
29. But even there you can look for the Lord your God, and you will find him if you look for him with your whole being.
30. It will be hard when all these things happen to you. But after that you will come back to the Lord your God and obey him,
31. because the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you. He will not forget the Agreement with your ancestors, which he swore to them.
32. Nothing like this has ever happened before! Look at the past, long before you were even born. Go all the way back to when God made humans on the earth, and look from one end of heaven to the other. Nothing like this has ever been heard of!
33. No other people have ever heard God speak from a fire and have still lived. But you have.
34. No other god has ever taken for himself one nation out of another. But the Lord your God did this for you in Egypt, right before your own eyes. He did it with tests, signs, miracles, war, and great sights, by his great power and strength.
35. He showed you things so you would know that the Lord is God, and there is no other God besides him.
36. He spoke to you from heaven to teach you. He showed you his great fire on earth, and you heard him speak from the fire.
37. Because the Lord loved your ancestors, he chose you, their descendants, and he brought you out of Egypt himself by his great strength.
38. He forced nations out of their land ahead of you, nations that were bigger and stronger than you were. The Lord did this so he could bring you into their land and give it to you as your own, and this land is yours today.
39. Know and believe today that the Lord is God. He is God in heaven above and on the earth below. There is no other god!
40. Obey his laws and commands that I am giving you today so that things will go well for you and your children. Then you will live a long time in the land that the Lord your God is giving to you forever.
41. Moses chose three cities east of the Jordan River,
42. where a person who accidentally killed someone could go. If the person was not killed because of hatred, the murderer’s life could be saved by running to one of these cities.
43. These were the cities: Bezer in the desert high plain was for the Reubenites; Ramoth in Gilead was for the Gadites; and Golan in Bashan was for the Manassites.
44. These are the teachings Moses gave to the people of Israel.