Deuteronomy 8:11-20

Common English Bible

Against wealth and overconfidence

¹¹But watch yourself! Don’t forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commands or his case laws or his regulations that I am commanding you right now. ¹²When you eat, get full, build nice houses, and settle down, ¹³and when your herds and your flocks are growing large, your silver and gold are multiplying, and everything you have is thriving, ¹⁴don’t become arrogant, forgetting the Lord your God:

the one who rescued you from Egypt, from the house of slavery;

¹⁵the one who led you through this vast and terrifying desert of poisonous snakes and scorpions, of cracked ground with no water;

the one who made water flow for you out of a hard rock;

¹⁶the one who fed you manna in the wilderness, which your ancestors had never experienced, in order to humble and test you, but in order to do good to you in the end.

¹⁷Don’t think to yourself, My own strength and abilities have produced all this prosperity for me. ¹⁸Remember the Lord your God! He’s the one who gives you the strength to be prosperous in order to establish the covenant he made with your ancestors—and that’s how things stand right now. ¹⁹But if you do, in fact, forget the Lord your God and follow other gods, serving and bowing down to them, I swear to you right now that you will be completely destroyed. ²⁰Just like the nations that the Lord is destroying before you, that’s exactly how you will be destroyed—all because you didn’t obey the Lord your God’s voice.

Read full chapter