Deuteronomy 32:1-26

Pay attention, heavens, and I will speak; listen, earth, to the words from my mouth.  Let my teaching fall like rain and my word settle like dew, like gentle rain on new grass and showers on tender plants. For I will proclaim the LORD’s name.  Declare the greatness of our God! The Rock   — his work is perfect; all his ways are just.  A faithful God,  without bias, he is righteous and true. His people have acted corruptly toward him;  this is their defect   — they are not his children but a devious and crooked generation.  Is this how you repay the  LORD, you foolish and senseless people?  Isn’t he your Father and Creator?  , Didn’t he make you and sustain you? Remember the days of old; consider the years of past generations. Ask your father, and he will tell you, your elders, and they will teach you. When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance  and divided the human race,  he set the boundaries of the peoples  according to the number of the people of Israel.  But the  LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob, his own inheritance.  He found him in a desolate land, in a barren, howling wilderness; he surrounded him, cared for him,  and protected him as the pupil of his eye.  He watches over   his nest like an eagle and hovers over his young; he spreads his wings, catches him, and carries him on his feathers.  The LORD alone led him, with no help from a foreign god. He made him ride on the heights of the land  and eat the produce of the field. He nourished him with honey from the rock and oil from flinty rock, curds from the herd and milk from the flock, with the fat of lambs, rams from Bashan,  and goats, with the choicest grains of wheat; you drank wine from the finest grapes.  Then  Jeshurun  , became fat and rebelled — you became fat, bloated, and gorged. He abandoned the God who made him and scorned the Rock of his salvation. They provoked his jealousy with different gods; they enraged him with detestable practices.  They sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods they had not known, new gods that had just arrived, which your ancestors did not fear.  You ignored the Rock who gave you birth; you forgot the God who gave birth to you. When the LORD saw this, he despised them, angered by his sons and daughters. He said, “I will hide my face from them;  I will see what will become of them, for they are a perverse generation — unfaithful children. They have provoked my jealousy with what is not a god;  they have enraged me with their worthless idols.  So I will provoke their jealousy with what is not a people;  I will enrage them with a foolish nation.  For fire has been kindled because of my anger and burns to the depths of Sheol;  it devours the land and its produce, and scorches the foundations of the mountains. “I will pile disasters on them; I will use up my arrows against them. They will be weak from hunger, ravaged by pestilence and bitter plague; I will unleash on them wild beasts with fangs, as well as venomous snakes that slither in the dust. Outside, the sword will take their children, and inside, there will be terror; the young man and the young woman will be killed, the infant and the gray-haired man.  “I would have said: I will cut them to pieces  and blot out the memory of them from mankind