The Grands Letter

Dear Grands,

Deuteronomy 7:1-8, “When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away 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 stronger than you,
2 and when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you
shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to
them.
3 “Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to
their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.
4 “For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods; then the anger
of the LORD will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you.
5 “But thus you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire.
6 “For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen
you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of
the earth.
7 “The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in
number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples,
8 but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers,
the LORD brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”

When I was but a small boy, my dad built me some remarkable toys! There were instances
when I actually got in the way, trying with all my might to help him in the construction. The
thing was, dad knew what he was building and how to do it. I possessed no notion of either.
Oh, I handed him some tools, but the real construction was his idea and his doing.

When the LORD does something, He does it in a big way! Further, He also does it with genuine purpose! It will be ultimately be beneficial to Israel (as in this instance), although it does not appear so at the start. That’s how the LORD works! Had He not wanted us to be
here, He would have chosen something to replace humanity in the Creation.

In this instance, however, the LORD erases the vitality of some seven nations in order to provide for His own people. (Why do we doubt that the LORD’s ability to remove things we assess to be a hindrance?) Nothing is too difficult for the LORD” (Jer. 32:17 & 27).

Why, then, doesn’t the LORD just erase all the nations that worship other gods? That would
be easy for Him. The storms and plagues that are in His hands do fall upon us and eradicate
scores of people. Is the LORD demonstrating His power to destroy or His power to protect
all that survive? Certainly, it is both. What is more, He does it out of love! His ways are not
our ways; and it often frustrates us to not understand why He does what He does. Yet,

“Ours is not to reason why;
Ours is but to do or die.”

We should pray that the LORD will always make us amenable to His ways. He always does
what is best for His people.

Heartily in Christ Jesus,

(Dado III)

Gene L. Jeffries, Th.D.
Springdale, Arkansas 72764
United States of America

“We will never know that Christ is all we need
until He becomes all that we have.”
– Corrie ten Boom