Deuteronomy 8

1Be careful to carry out every commandment that I am giving you today, so that you may live and grow in number, and go in and take possession of the land that the LORD promised on oath to your ancestors. 2Remember the whole journey on which the LORD your God led you these forty years in the wilderness. He did it to humble you and to test you, to know what was in your heart: would you keep his commandments or not? 3He brought you low and let you go hungry, then gave you manna to eat, a food that neither you nor your ancestors had ever known. He did this to teach you that people do not live on bread alone, but people live on everything that comes from the mouth of the LORD. 4The clothes on your back did not wear out, and your feet did not swell, all these forty years. 5So understand in your heart that the LORD your God disciplines you just as a father disciplines his son. 6Keep the commandments of the LORD your God, living by his ways and holding him in awe. 7For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters that pour out in the valleys and the hills, 8a land of wheat and barley, of vines, fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey, 9a land where you will eat food without shortage and lack nothing, a land whose rocks hold iron and from whose hills you can dig copper. 10When you have eaten and are full, you are to bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. 11Be on your guard against forgetting the LORD your God by neglecting his commandments, his rulings and his statutes that I am giving you today, 12otherwise, when you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks grow large, and your silver and gold increase, and everything you own multiplies, 14your heart may grow proud and you may forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15who guided you through that vast and dreadful wilderness, a land of fiery snakes and scorpions, of parched ground without water, who made water come out of flint rock for you, 16who gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, a food unknown to your ancestors, so as to humble you and test you and in the end to bring you good, 17and you may say to yourself, ‘My own power and the strength of my own hands have won me this wealth.’ 18Remember the LORD your God instead. It is he who gives you the ability to grow wealthy, in order to carry out the covenant he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.

19If you ever do forget the LORD your God and follow other gods, serving them and bowing down to them, I declare to you today, as a witness, that you will certainly perish. 20Like the nations that the LORD is destroying ahead of you, so you will perish, because you would not obey the LORD your God.