DEUTERONOMY 7
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Deuteronomy Chapter 7

Verses 1-5. The evils of the soul must be persistently and utterly destroyed or they will draw away the soul from heaven.
Verses 6-11. The regenerate must only receive into their souls the truths that flow from the Lord's Divine Humanity, all else is of no avail (John 10:1-16).
Verses 12-15. The blessedness resulting from following the Divine instructions.
Verses 16-26. The necessity of utterly destroying evil out of the soul.

When the LORD your God shall bring you into the land whither you go to possess it, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you;

When the Lord your God shall bring you to those heavenly states to which His Providence is leading you that you may be gifted with them, and has cast out many evils from the interiors of your soul—the false religious principles originally in your mind which beget evil, and those derived from hereditary evil; the loves of self and the world, and all your other hereditary evils and the falsities derived from them; the love of external things without internal, and all the falses thence derived, even evil in all its complex, far stronger and more powerful than the soul would be in its unaided strength; [Note.—By the nations in Canaan before the advent of the Israelites are described, according to the New Church writings, those hidden evils which exist hereditarily in depraved human nature and must be driven out during regeneration. In these writings it is abundantly shown that it is natural to every man from hereditary evil to prefer himself to others, and desire to be served by, admired, and even worshiped by others; it is also natural to him to desire all the goods of others, and to take them by force or fraud if it could be done without being found out; and that these evils are deeply hidden under the apparent rectitude and probity which a man has from education, fear of the law, or of the loss of reputation; that still they exist, and if their existence is not known, it is simply an evidence of self-ignorance. (See AC Index.)]

And when the LORD your God shall deliver them before you; you shall smite them, and utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them:

And when they are subjected under you by the goodness and wisdom of the Lord, you shall beat them down and deprive them of all life; you shall not make any compact with them, or give them any harbour in your soul:

Neither shall you make marriages with them; your daughter you shall not give to his son, nor his daughter shall you take to your son.

You shall not form any conjunction with them; your affections shall be kept clear of the false principles derived from them; nor shall you take the affections which are derived from these evil principles and unite them to your truths.

For they will turn away your son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy you suddenly.

For they will draw away the principles of action which you have acquired from the pure service of the Lord, that they may worship other things in the first place; thus will you reject from yourself the influx of the Divine Love and Wisdom, and your spiritual life will utterly perish.

But thus shall you deal with them; you shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.

But thus shall you deal with them: you shall destroy everything that panders to evil within the soul, and all falses which put on the appearance of good in externals are to be utterly destroyed, and all the worldly wisdom and specious arguments which surround them are altogether to be cut off, and every appearance of good from self-derived intelligence must be destroyed by the genuine and Divine love of good derived from the Lord.

For you are an holy people to the LORD your God: the LORD your God has chosen you to be a special people to himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

For the regenerate must only admit into the soul the pure truth proceeding from the Divine Love and Wisdom: the Lord desires that they should receive the pure and exalted truths proceeding from His Divine Humanity in the place of the falsified and perverted appearances of truths existing surface-deep only amongst those who are merely external.

The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all people:

The Lord has not set His love upon the regenerate nor chosen them because they are more grounded in these external truths and goods derived from education and habit, but because they perceive the utter valuelessness of all these seeming goods and truths derived from themselves:

But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn to your fathers, has the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

And because their souls are thus open to receive the good and truth flowing from the Lord, and can receive the promises given in the Word to those who are in good, therefore the Lord has brought them out of their unregenerate state by Divine Omnipotence, and delivered them from a state of spiritual bondage and from the power of the falsities which dominate in the natural unregenerate heart,

Know therefore that the LORD your God, he is God, the faithful God, which keeps covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations;

And has given them a clear perception that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only God, the incarnation of the Divine Love, whose only desire is to conjoin to Himself and to bless all those who will receive the spiritual good that flows from Him, and strive to conform their lives to His will, with the greatest blessings they can receive to eternity.

And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hates him, he will repay him to his face.

And those who reject Him close up the interiors of their mind and destroy their spiritual life: this destruction will most assuredly come to those who reject the Lord's Humanity, and the interiors of their minds will thereby be closed to all influx from heaven.

You shall therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgements, which I command you this day, to do them.

Let the regenerate, therefore, take heed to obey all the revelations of His will and all His requirements, and act on the principles laid down by Him, and according to the perception given in each difficulty as to life, which they receive through the Word in a state of illustration, and to govern their lives thereby.

Wherefore it shall come to pass, if you hearken to these judgements, and keep, and do them, that the LORD your God shall keep to you the covenant and the mercy which he swore to your fathers:

And it will certainly happen, if the soul strives to learn the will of the Lord, and to keep it and to carry it out in the life, that the Divine Goodness and Wisdom will flow in and conjoin you with Himself, and have mercy upon you according to His promises to those who are in good (John 14:23).

And he will love you, and bless you, and multiply you: he will also bless the fruit of your womb, and the fruit of your land, your corn, and your wine, and your oil, the increase of your kine, and the flocks of your sheep, in the land which he swore to your fathers to give you.

And He will love you, and bless you, and abundantly store your mind with wisdom; He will also bless you with aspirations after good, and the fruition thereof in your inmost heart, and in all the developments of your natural mind, and with goods and truths in external things, and with spiritual truth in your understanding, and with celestial love in Your will, and in the increase of all good affections both in external and spiritual things in those heavenly states which He has promised in the Word to give to those who seek after genuine good from Himself.

You shall be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.

There is nothing which can render man so happy eventually as these spiritual blessings: by them everything which is good and useful in the understanding or the will or in the external affections is fruitful and increases.

And the LORD will take away from you all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which you know, upon you; but will lay them upon all them that hate you.

And the Lord will take away from the soul all sickness, and will permit none of those spiritual diseases which come upon the mind which sets its affections upon merely external and natural things and which you have experienced in the unregenerate state, to fall upon you; but they will come upon those who oppose themselves to spiritual truth.

And you shall consume all the people which the LORD your God shall deliver you; your eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shall you serve their gods; for that will be a snare to you.

And you shall blot out of your mind all those thoughts and principles in the soul which the Divine Love and Wisdom shall show you to be false; your understanding shall not favour them, neither shall you suffer your affections to be drawn away by the arguments in favour of the objects of their love and worship, for they will draw away the soul from heaven.

If you shall say in your heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?

If the thought shall arise in the mind that the hereditary evils of the soul are more powerful than the new regenerate will, how can they possibly be driven out?

You shall not be afraid of them: but shall well remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh, and to all Egypt;

You shall not be afraid of them, but shall well remember what the Divine Love and Wisdom within the soul have done upon the false theories arising from the domination of the natural principle over the spiritual which opposed truth in the soul, and upon all the cupidities and appetites originally in the mind in the unregenerate state,

The great temptations which your eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the LORD your God brought you out: so shall the LORD your God do to all the people of whom you are afraid.

The great temptations by which the falsities in them were displayed before the understanding, the confirmations of Divine truth, and the manifest operation of Providence and of Divine Omnipotence acting in the outer life and from interiors, whereby Divine Love and Wisdom brought the soul out from that state of spiritual bondage; so also will the Divine Love and Wisdom do upon all those false principles; derived from hereditary evil which now seem so powerful to the spiritual man.

Moreover the LORD your God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from you, be destroyed.

For the Love and Wisdom of the Lord will induce an abhorrence of these false principles, until those that remain and lurk within the soul are brought to light by truth and destroyed.

You shall not be frightened at them: for the LORD your God is among you, a mighty God and terrible.

The soul should not be dismayed at them; for Love itself and Wisdom itself are on the side of the regenerate, and these are omnipotent and strike terror into the evil and the false.

And the LORD your God will put out those nations before you by little and little: you may not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon you.

And the Divine Love and Wisdom will drive out the hereditary evils of the unregenerate heart by degrees; they cannot be driven out at once, for thereby the lower evil lusts would multiply upon the soul.

But the LORD your God shall deliver them to you, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.

But the Divine Love and Wisdom will reduce them at length under the power of the regenerate will, and destroy their power entirely, so that they will no longer oppose good.

And he shall deliver their kings into your hand, and you shall destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before you, until you have destroyed them.

And he will also put all their false principles under the power of the regenerate will, so that their influence will no longer remain in the interiors of the mind; there is no false doctrine which shall be able to withstand the clear perception of truth which will be given to the regenerate soul, and which will drive all falsity out of the mind.

The graven images of their gods shall you burn with fire: you shall not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it to you, lest you be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the LORD your God.

All the false theories which are formulated by the unregenerate heart shall be consumed by the influx of Divine Love into the soul: you shall not be enticed by the appearances of good and truth with which their interior evil is concealed, nor accept those appearances (which are in reality from self-love, AE 242, end), lest you be thereby drawn away from heaven; for the evil and false covered with appearances of what is good and true, more than all things draw away the soul from Divine Goodness and Wisdom.

Neither shall you bring an abomination into your house, lest you be a cursed thing like it: but you shall utterly detest it, and you shall utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.

Neither shall you admit into your will anything which draws away the soul from the Lord, lest the whole man, like it, be alienated from heaven; you shall utterly detest it, and you shall utterly abhor it, for nothing can be more cursed than what draws awav the soul from the Lord.

DEUTERONOMY 7 Other translations - previous - next - notes - discussion - Deuteronomy - BM Home - Full Page

When the LORD your God shall bring you into the land whither you go to possess it, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you;	When the Lord your God shall bring you to those heavenly states to which His Providence is leading you that you may be gifted with them, and has cast out many evils from the interiors of your soul—the false religious principles originally in your mind which beget evil, and those derived from hereditary evil; the loves of self and the world, and all your other hereditary evils and the falsities derived from them; the love of external things without internal, and all the falses thence derived, even evil in all its complex, far stronger and more powerful than the soul would be in its unaided strength; [Note.—By the nations in Canaan before the advent of the Israelites are described, according to the New Church writings, those hidden evils which exist hereditarily in depraved human nature and must be driven out during regeneration. In these writings it is abundantly shown that it is natural to every man from hereditary evil to prefer himself to others, and desire to be served by, admired, and even worshiped by others; it is also natural to him to desire all the goods of others, and to take them by force or fraud if it could be done without being found out; and that these evils are deeply hidden under the apparent rectitude and probity which a man has from education, fear of the law, or of the loss of reputation; that still they exist, and if their existence is not known, it is simply an evidence of self-ignorance. (See AC Index.)]
And when the LORD your God shall deliver them before you; you shall smite them, and utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them:	And when they are subjected under you by the goodness and wisdom of the Lord, you shall beat them down and deprive them of all life; you shall not make any compact with them, or give them any harbour in your soul:
Neither shall you make marriages with them; your daughter you shall not give to his son, nor his daughter shall you take to your son.	You shall not form any conjunction with them; your affections shall be kept clear of the false principles derived from them; nor shall you take the affections which are derived from these evil principles and unite them to your truths.
For they will turn away your son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy you suddenly.	For they will draw away the principles of action which you have acquired from the pure service of the Lord, that they may worship other things in the first place; thus will you reject from yourself the influx of the Divine Love and Wisdom, and your spiritual life will utterly perish.
But thus shall you deal with them; you shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.	But thus shall you deal with them: you shall destroy everything that panders to evil within the soul, and all falses which put on the appearance of good in externals are to be utterly destroyed, and all the worldly wisdom and specious arguments which surround them are altogether to be cut off, and every appearance of good from self-derived intelligence must be destroyed by the genuine and Divine love of good derived from the Lord.
For you are an holy people to the LORD your God: the LORD your God has chosen you to be a special people to himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.	For the regenerate must only admit into the soul the pure truth proceeding from the Divine Love and Wisdom: the Lord desires that they should receive the pure and exalted truths proceeding from His Divine Humanity in the place of the falsified and perverted appearances of truths existing surface-deep only amongst those who are merely external.
The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all people:	The Lord has not set His love upon the regenerate nor chosen them because they are more grounded in these external truths and goods derived from education and habit, but because they perceive the utter valuelessness of all these seeming goods and truths derived from themselves:
But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn to your fathers, has the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.	And because their souls are thus open to receive the good and truth flowing from the Lord, and can receive the promises given in the Word to those who are in good, therefore the Lord has brought them out of their unregenerate state by Divine Omnipotence, and delivered them from a state of spiritual bondage and from the power of the falsities which dominate in the natural unregenerate heart,
Know therefore that the LORD your God, he is God, the faithful God, which keeps covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations;	And has given them a clear perception that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only God, the incarnation of the Divine Love, whose only desire is to conjoin to Himself and to bless all those who will receive the spiritual good that flows from Him, and strive to conform their lives to His will, with the greatest blessings they can receive to eternity.
And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hates him, he will repay him to his face.	And those who reject Him close up the interiors of their mind and destroy their spiritual life: this destruction will most assuredly come to those who reject the Lord's Humanity, and the interiors of their minds will thereby be closed to all influx from heaven.
You shall therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgements, which I command you this day, to do them.	Let the regenerate, therefore, take heed to obey all the revelations of His will and all His requirements, and act on the principles laid down by Him, and according to the perception given in each difficulty as to life, which they receive through the Word in a state of illustration, and to govern their lives thereby.
Wherefore it shall come to pass, if you hearken to these judgements, and keep, and do them, that the LORD your God shall keep to you the covenant and the mercy which he swore to your fathers:	And it will certainly happen, if the soul strives to learn the will of the Lord, and to keep it and to carry it out in the life, that the Divine Goodness and Wisdom will flow in and conjoin you with Himself, and have mercy upon you according to His promises to those who are in good (John 14:23).
And he will love you, and bless you, and multiply you: he will also bless the fruit of your womb, and the fruit of your land, your corn, and your wine, and your oil, the increase of your kine, and the flocks of your sheep, in the land which he swore to your fathers to give you.	And He will love you, and bless you, and abundantly store your mind with wisdom; He will also bless you with aspirations after good, and the fruition thereof in your inmost heart, and in all the developments of your natural mind, and with goods and truths in external things, and with spiritual truth in your understanding, and with celestial love in Your will, and in the increase of all good affections both in external and spiritual things in those heavenly states which He has promised in the Word to give to those who seek after genuine good from Himself.
You shall be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.	There is nothing which can render man so happy eventually as these spiritual blessings: by them everything which is good and useful in the understanding or the will or in the external affections is fruitful and increases.
And the LORD will take away from you all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which you know, upon you; but will lay them upon all them that hate you.	And the Lord will take away from the soul all sickness, and will permit none of those spiritual diseases which come upon the mind which sets its affections upon merely external and natural things and which you have experienced in the unregenerate state, to fall upon you; but they will come upon those who oppose themselves to spiritual truth.
And you shall consume all the people which the LORD your God shall deliver you; your eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shall you serve their gods; for that will be a snare to you.	And you shall blot out of your mind all those thoughts and principles in the soul which the Divine Love and Wisdom shall show you to be false; your understanding shall not favour them, neither shall you suffer your affections to be drawn away by the arguments in favour of the objects of their love and worship, for they will draw away the soul from heaven.
If you shall say in your heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?	If the thought shall arise in the mind that the hereditary evils of the soul are more powerful than the new regenerate will, how can they possibly be driven out?
You shall not be afraid of them: but shall well remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh, and to all Egypt;	You shall not be afraid of them, but shall well remember what the Divine Love and Wisdom within the soul have done upon the false theories arising from the domination of the natural principle over the spiritual which opposed truth in the soul, and upon all the cupidities and appetites originally in the mind in the unregenerate state,
The great temptations which your eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the LORD your God brought you out: so shall the LORD your God do to all the people of whom you are afraid.	The great temptations by which the falsities in them were displayed before the understanding, the confirmations of Divine truth, and the manifest operation of Providence and of Divine Omnipotence acting in the outer life and from interiors, whereby Divine Love and Wisdom brought the soul out from that state of spiritual bondage; so also will the Divine Love and Wisdom do upon all those false principles; derived from hereditary evil which now seem so powerful to the spiritual man.
Moreover the LORD your God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from you, be destroyed.	For the Love and Wisdom of the Lord will induce an abhorrence of these false principles, until those that remain and lurk within the soul are brought to light by truth and destroyed.
You shall not be frightened at them: for the LORD your God is among you, a mighty God and terrible.	The soul should not be dismayed at them; for Love itself and Wisdom itself are on the side of the regenerate, and these are omnipotent and strike terror into the evil and the false.
And the LORD your God will put out those nations before you by little and little: you may not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon you.	And the Divine Love and Wisdom will drive out the hereditary evils of the unregenerate heart by degrees; they cannot be driven out at once, for thereby the lower evil lusts would multiply upon the soul.
But the LORD your God shall deliver them to you, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.	But the Divine Love and Wisdom will reduce them at length under the power of the regenerate will, and destroy their power entirely, so that they will no longer oppose good.
And he shall deliver their kings into your hand, and you shall destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before you, until you have destroyed them.	And he will also put all their false principles under the power of the regenerate will, so that their influence will no longer remain in the interiors of the mind; there is no false doctrine which shall be able to withstand the clear perception of truth which will be given to the regenerate soul, and which will drive all falsity out of the mind.
The graven images of their gods shall you burn with fire: you shall not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it to you, lest you be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the LORD your God.	All the false theories which are formulated by the unregenerate heart shall be consumed by the influx of Divine Love into the soul: you shall not be enticed by the appearances of good and truth with which their interior evil is concealed, nor accept those appearances (which are in reality from self-love, AE 242, end), lest you be thereby drawn away from heaven; for the evil and false covered with appearances of what is good and true, more than all things draw away the soul from Divine Goodness and Wisdom.
Neither shall you bring an abomination into your house, lest you be a cursed thing like it: but you shall utterly detest it, and you shall utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.	Neither shall you admit into your will anything which draws away the soul from the Lord, lest the whole man, like it, be alienated from heaven; you shall utterly detest it, and you shall utterly abhor it, for nothing can be more cursed than what draws awav the soul from the Lord.