God the Lord, the One who controls everything

everywhere, told Moses, In the seventh month of the year, on the first day, have a special party for Me. Don’t do any work that day, but bring offerings that show how much I love you.

Then on the 10^th day of the seventh month do the special ceremony that covers all your sins for the whole year. And for that week, each day for 7 days bring the offerings to remember My great love and be happy for all the good that I do for you.

When any man promises something to me, be sure to do what you say you will do. If a woman promises me something, and her Dad or her husband hears it, they can cancel the promise and nothing bad will happen to her if she doesn’t keep her promise. But if the Dad or husband hear it and don’t cancel it, she must do what she has promised.

Then God told Moses, Get the men of Israel ready to go hurt the Midianites for the way they hurt you. Have each family send 1,000 warriors. So they sent the warriors with Phinehas, the priest, and the holy throne and trumpets.

So the Israelites killed all the men of Midian who were following the bad one, but they kept all the beautiful women alive.

When they got back to camp with all the gold and silver and animals and the beautiful women, Moses was angry, Don’t you remember these are the women that tricked us and caused such great trouble? So they only kept the little ones and cleaned up all the stuff and gave part of it to the Levites who did the work at God’s house.

Before the children of Israel got into the special land God promised, some of the families liked the place that they were in. The country was perfect for their animals and themselves, so they talked to Moses and asked if they could stay there on that land.

Moses said, What? You’ll just sit here happy while your brothers go fight the bad ones for their land God has given them? Why do you bring the hearts of the people down from going up into the land?

When this happened before, God was so angry that none of those men who brought the peoples hearts down got to go into that special place. If you turn away from God, He will leave them in the wilderness to be destroyed.

So the men of these families said, We will go up and fight to take the land, but let us build safe places for our families and let them stay here.

Moses said, If you will do this, go up and fight with your brothers to take the special land, then you can have this good land to keep it as your own. If not, you must all come with us into God’s special land.

Moses wrote down the travels of the children of Israel, all the places God led them and brought them to rest on their way to His special place for them.

He brought them out of Egypt the day after the Passover ceremony when God had delivered them with His 10 mighty miracles. He brought them to a resting place with 12 fountains of water for the 12 families of Israel and 70 palm trees.

Then the Lord opened the Red Sea for them to walk through on dry land.

And then God led them to the place where there was no water and God brought them water to drink out of the rock.

Then God led them on the Mt Sinai where He came down from heaven to the mountain and gave them His rules to show them they needed His help to be good enough to be with Him forever.

The children of Israel were wandering around in the wilderness for 40 years because they didn’t believe God’s promises. God built faith inside them by His faithfulness because He was always with them, helping them and giving them what they needed.

After that, God told Moses to tell the children of Israel, When you go in and take the land that I am giving you, break down all the statues of gods that are supposed to be Me, because I do not look like that. Kick out all those people who only follow the bad one and give a part of the land to each of My families to be theirs forever.

If you do not kick out all the people who live there, they will be stickers in your eyes and points jabbing into your sides and will cause you lots of trouble in the land I give you. And you will follow the bad ones and I will have to do the same thing to you for your badness that I am doing to them.

God told Moses to tell the children of Israel, When you come into the land I promised to give you, the land is very big. Your south boundary line is at the salt sea in the east then make the line go completely around to the Nile River in Egypt. To the west your border is the Mediterranean Sea. Then take the line up to Mt. Hor for your north border going down the Jordan River.

When you get into My special land, Eleazer the priest and Joshua will take one prince from each family to divide up the land. They all get a fair choice before Me. Then God told Moses the name of the princes who would divide the land to the families.

The Lord told Moses, Since the Levites don’t get any land to inherit in My special land, have the children of Israel give them cities in their land and fields around the cities for their animals.

And have them put six cities of safety in the land where someone who kills another person but didn’t hate him or mean to do it can run there and be safe.

But anyone who hates someone and kills them must be put to death. They are a murderer, following the bad one. The closest family member of the dead one is to kill the murderer. Don’t let the murderer pay money to get away with it.

And don’t let those staying in the cities of safety pay money to get out and go back home.

Do not let the land I give you be dirty by letting murderers keep living. The land is only cleaned from their blood by the death of the one who killed him.

Keep this land I give you clean from the bad ones because I live with you there in the middle of My people.