November 19, 2025

Deuteronomy 29:22-29 (HCSB)
22 “Future generations of your children who follow you and the foreigner who comes from a distant country will see the plagues of the land and the sicknesses the Lord has inflicted on it. 23 All its soil will be a burning waste of sulfur and salt, unsown, producing nothing, with no plant growing on it, just like the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord demolished in His fierce anger.24 All the nations will ask, ‘Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this great outburst of anger?’ 25 Then people will answer, ‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of Yahweh, the God of their fathers, which He had made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt. 26 They began to worship other gods, bowing down to gods they had not known—gods that the Lord had not permitted them to worship. 27 Therefore the Lord’s anger burned against this land, and He brought every curse written in this book on it. 28 The Lord uprooted them from their land in His anger, rage, and great wrath, and threw them into another land where they are today.’ 29 The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law.

Alan Davis
Moses starts verse 22 talking about how future generations, and how foreigners from far away, will be able to see the destruction that has happened because of the people falling away from God and turning to false idols. He says that plagues and sickness will spread through the land. People seeing this will question why it is happening and they will realize that God has done what he promised he would do in his covenant. This will happen because people turned away from God, and caused a ripple effect to happen, spreading sin around to the entire group. We have to be careful with the people we welcome into our lives. We cannot let their bad habits rub off on us. If you notice a friend or family member starting to do something that does not seem right, step up and talk to them about it. Ask them what’s going on, and try to help them, but do not let that start to creep into your life. Protect yourself and your faith as you try to help them. Sometimes you have to let them out of your life though, like Moses explains here, before they cause that sin to spread to someone else. This is hard to do, but the most important thing is protecting your relationship with God.