Lord, why are you pushing us\par away from you?\par Why are you making it hard\par for us to follow you?\par Come back to us Lord!\par We are your servants.\par Come to us and help us!\par Our families belong to you.\par
This is what the Lord says about the people of Judah: “The people of Judah really love to leave me. Those people don’t stop themselves from leaving me. So now, the Lord will not accept them. Now the Lord will remember the bad things they do. The Lord will punish them for their sins.”
“The Lord was very angry against the people of Israel. So the Lord made the people stay in the desert for 40 years. The Lord made them stay there until all the people who had sinned against the Lord were dead.
So Moses led the people out. He did powerful things and miracles. {\cf2\super [138]} Moses did these things in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and then in the desert for 40 years.
People did not think it was important to have a true knowledge of God. So God left them and allowed those people to have their own worthless thinking. And so those people do the things that they should not do.
But it was 40 years from the time the people of Israel left Egypt until the time they came to this place. On the first day of the eleventh month of the 40th year, Moses spoke to the people. Moses told them all the things the Lord commanded.