Deuteronomy 7; Deuteronomy 8; Deuteronomy 9; Mark 11:19-33

1 The Lord your God will bring you into the land that you are entering and that you will have as your own. As you go in, he will force out these nations: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites -- seven nations that are stronger than you.

2 The Lord your God will hand these nations over to you, and when you defeat them, you must destroy them completely. Do not make a peace treaty with them or show them any mercy.

3 Do not marry any of them, or let your daughters marry their sons, or let your sons marry their daughters.

4 If you do, those people will turn your children away from me, to begin serving other gods. Then the Lord will be very angry with you, and he will quickly destroy you.

5 This is what you must do to those people: Tear down their altars, smash their holy stone pillars, cut down their Asherah idols, and burn their idols in the fire.

6 You are holy people who belong to the Lord your God. He has chosen you from all the people on earth to be his very own.

7 The Lord did not care for you and choose you because there were many of you -- you are the smallest nation of all.

8 But the Lord chose you because he loved you, and he kept his promise to your ancestors. So he brought you out of Egypt by his great power and freed you from the land of slavery, from the power of the king of Egypt.

9 So know that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God. He will keep his agreement of love for a thousand lifetimes for people who love him and obey his commands.

10 But he will pay back those people who hate him. He will destroy them, and he will not be slow to pay back those who hate him.

11 So be careful to obey the commands, rules, and laws I give you today.

12 If you pay attention to these laws and obey them carefully, the Lord your God will keep his agreement and show his love to you, as he promised your ancestors.

13 He will love and bless you. He will make the number of your people grow; he will bless you with children. He will bless your fields with good crops and will give you grain, new wine, and oil. He will bless your herds with calves and your flocks with lambs in the land he promised your ancestors he would give you.

14 You will be blessed more than any other people. Every husband and wife will have children, and all your cattle will have calves.

15 The Lord will take away all disease from you; you will not have the terrible diseases that were in Egypt, but he will give them to all the people who hate you.

16 You must destroy all the people the Lord your God hands over to you. Do not feel sorry for them, and do not worship their gods, or they will trap you.

17 You might say to yourselves, "Because these nations are stronger than we are, we can't force them out."

18 But don't be afraid of them. Remember what the Lord your God did to all of Egypt and its king.

19 You saw for yourselves the troubles, signs, and miracles he did, how the Lord's great power and strength brought you out of Egypt. The Lord your God will do the same thing to all the nations you now fear.

20 The Lord your God will also send terror among them so that even those who are alive and hiding from you will die.

21 Don't be afraid of them, because the Lord your God is with you; he is a great God and people are afraid of him.

22 When the Lord your God forces those nations out of the land, he will do it little by little ahead of you. You won't be able to destroy them all at once; otherwise, the wild animals will grow too many in number.

23 But the Lord your God will hand those nations over to you, confusing them until they are destroyed.

24 The Lord will help you defeat their kings, and the world will forget who they were. No one will be able to stop you; you will destroy them all.

25 Burn up their idols in the fire. Do not wish for the silver and gold they have, and don't take it for yourselves, or you will be trapped by it. The Lord your God hates it.

26 Do not bring one of those hateful things into your house, or you will be completely destroyed along with it. Hate and reject those things; they must be completely destroyed.

1 Carefully obey every command I give you today. Then you will live and grow in number, and you will enter and take the land the Lord promised your ancestors.

2 Remember how the Lord your God has led you in the desert for these forty years, taking away your pride and testing you, because he wanted to know what was in your heart. He wanted to know if you would obey his commands.

3 He took away your pride when he let you get hungry, and then he fed you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had ever seen. This was to teach you that a person does not live by eating only bread, but by everything the Lord says.

4 During these forty years, your clothes did not wear out, and your feet did not swell.

5 Know in your heart that the Lord your God corrects you as a parent corrects a child.

6 Obey the commands of the Lord your God, living as he has commanded you and respecting him.

7 The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with rivers and pools of water, with springs that flow in the valleys and hills,

8 a land that has wheat and barley, vines, fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey.

9 It is a land where you will have plenty of food, where you will have everything you need, where the rocks are iron, and where you can dig copper out of the hills.

10 When you have all you want to eat, then praise the Lord your God for giving you a good land.

11 Be careful not to forget the Lord your God so that you fail to obey his commands, laws, and rules that I am giving to you today.

12 When you eat all you want and build nice houses and live in them,

13 when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase, when you have more of everything,

14 then your heart will become proud. You will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, where you were slaves.

15 He led you through the large and terrible desert that was dry and had no water, and that had poisonous snakes and stinging insects. He gave you water from a solid rock

16 and manna to eat in the desert. Manna was something your ancestors had never seen. He did this to take away your pride and to test you, so things would go well for you in the end.

17 You might say to yourself, "I am rich because of my own power and strength,"

18 but remember the Lord your God! It is he who gives you the power to become rich, keeping the agreement he promised to your ancestors, as it is today.

19 If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and worship them and bow down to them, I warn you today that you will be destroyed.

20 Just as the Lord destroyed the other nations for you, you can be destroyed if you do not obey the Lord your God.

1 Listen, Israel. You will soon cross the Jordan River to go in and force out nations that are bigger and stronger than you. They have large cities with walls up to the sky.

2 The people there are Anakites, who are strong and tall. You know about them, and you have heard it said: "No one can stop the Anakites."

3 But today remember that the Lord your God goes in before you to destroy them like a fire that burns things up. He will defeat them ahead of you, and you will force them out and destroy them quickly, just as the Lord has said.

4 After the Lord your God has forced those nations out ahead of you, don't say to yourself, "The Lord brought me here to take this land because I am so good." No! It is because these nations are evil that the Lord will force them out ahead of you.

5 You are going in to take the land, not because you are good and honest, but because these nations are evil. That is why the Lord your God will force them out ahead of you, to keep his promise to your ancestors, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

6 The Lord your God is giving you this good land to take as your own. But know this: It is not because you are good; you are a stubborn people.

7 Remember this and do not forget it: You made the Lord your God angry in the desert. You would not obey the Lord from the day you left Egypt until you arrived here.

8 At Mount Sinai you made the Lord angry -- angry enough to destroy you.

9 When I went up on the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets with the Agreement the Lord had made with you, I stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights; I did not eat bread or drink water.

10 The Lord gave me two stone tablets, which God had written on with his own finger. On them were all the commands that the Lord gave to you on the mountain out of the fire, on the day you were gathered there.

11 When the forty days and forty nights were over, the Lord gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets with the Agreement on them.

12 Then the Lord told me, "Get up and go down quickly from here, because the people you brought out from Egypt are ruining themselves. They have quickly turned away from what I commanded and have made an idol for themselves."

13 The Lord said to me, "I have watched these people, and they are very stubborn!

14 Get away so that I may destroy them and make the whole world forget who they are. Then I will make another nation from you that will be bigger and stronger than they are."

15 So I turned and came down the mountain that was burning with fire, and the two stone tablets with the Agreement were in my hands.

16 When I looked, I saw you had sinned against the Lord your God and had made an idol in the shape of a calf. You had quickly turned away from what the Lord had told you to do.

17 So I took the two stone tablets and threw them down, breaking them into pieces right in front of you.

18 Then I again bowed facedown on the ground before the Lord for forty days and forty nights; I did not eat bread or drink water. You had sinned by doing what the Lord said was evil, and you made him angry.

19 I was afraid of the Lord's anger and rage, because he was angry enough with you to destroy you, but the Lord listened to me again.

20 And the Lord was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, but then I prayed for Aaron, too.

21 I took that sinful calf idol you had made and burned it in the fire. I crushed it into a powder like dust and threw the dust into a stream that flowed down the mountain.

22 You also made the Lord angry at Taberah, Massah, and Kibroth Hattaavah.

23 Then the Lord sent you away from Kadesh Barnea and said, "Go up and take the land I have given you." But you rejected the command of the Lord your God. You did not trust him or obey him.

24 You have refused to obey the Lord as long as I have known you.

25 The Lord had said he would destroy you, so I threw myself down in front of him for those forty days and forty nights.

26 I prayed to the Lord and said, "Lord God, do not destroy your people, your own people, whom you freed and brought out of Egypt by your great power and strength.

27 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Don't look at how stubborn these people are, and don't look at their sin and evil.

28 Otherwise, Egypt will say, 'It was because the Lord was not able to take his people into the land he promised them, and it was because he hated them that he took them into the desert to kill them.'

29 But they are your people, Lord, your own people, whom you brought out of Egypt with your great power and strength."

19 That evening, Jesus and his followers left the city.

20 The next morning as Jesus was passing by with his followers, they saw the fig tree dry and dead, even to the roots.

21 Peter remembered the tree and said to Jesus, "Teacher, look! The fig tree you cursed is dry and dead!"

22 Jesus answered, "Have faith in God.

23 I tell you the truth, you can say to this mountain, 'Go, fall into the sea.' And if you have no doubts in your mind and believe that what you say will happen, God will do it for you.

24 So I tell you to believe that you have received the things you ask for in prayer, and God will give them to you.

25 When you are praying, if you are angry with someone, forgive him so that your Father in heaven will also forgive your sins."

26

27 Jesus and his followers went again to Jerusalem. As Jesus was walking in the Temple, the leading priests, the teachers of the law, and the older leaders came to him.

28 They said to him, "What authority do you have to do these things? Who gave you this authority?"

29 Jesus answered, "I will ask you one question. If you answer me, I will tell you what authority I have to do these things.

30 Tell me: When John baptized people, was that authority from God or just from other people?"

31 They argued about Jesus' question, saying, "If we answer, 'John's baptism was from God,' Jesus will say, 'Then why didn't you believe him?'

32 But if we say, 'It was from other people,' the crowd will be against us." (These leaders were afraid of the people, because all the people believed that John was a prophet.)

33 So they answered Jesus, "We don't know." Jesus said to them, "Then I won't tell you what authority I have to do these things."