Describing the situation, Moses sets the accents with complete clarity: the people receive the land not because of their own righteousness, but because of the wickedness of the peoples who inhabit it at the moment...
Describing the situation, Moses sets the accents with complete clarity: the people receive the land not because of their own righteousness, but because of the wickedness of the peoples who inhabit it at the moment. Here we have the logic of history that stands behind many events, especially conquests, coups, and revolutions. Most often what stands behind all these is not the will of God but, as theologians usually say in such cases, His allowance. In the overwhelming majority of cases God does not take the side of one group against another. He simply steps aside, withdraws, not because He is indifferent to everything, but because, as a rule, He supports neither side. And this is no surprise: in the same overwhelming majority of cases the parties involved in the events have no concern either for God or for His will. God takes no one's side because no one is on His side, and God will not force Himself on those who do not need Him.
With His people, however, the situation is unusual. The people of God are included in history just like all other peoples, and at the same time they are no better, no more righteous, no more spiritual than any other people. But God has a special plan, a special intention concerning His people, and that is what makes His people unusual, distinguishing them from all other peoples of the earth. Of course, the people themselves do not become better merely because God has a particular plan for them, but their path will still differ from the path of any other people on earth. God needs to bring His people to the place where He wants to see them, where He has appointed a meeting with Himself for them.
The path of any other people may be determined by a chain of God's allowances, which for the people themselves will look like accidents and turns of their historical fate, just as happens with a person who, not knowing the way, moves from one accident to another and calls such movement fate. The path of the people of God, however, is in any case determined by God; but it runs among ordinary peoples, such as the peoples who inhabited pre-Israelite Palestine. They were no worse, but also no better, than any other people, and therefore they were subject to the same changes and chances of fallen history as all other peoples. Yet God deprives them of the land not for their special sins, but for the ordinary wickedness characteristic of all fallen peoples. Likewise, He gives His own people the land not for their special righteousness, but because that is His plan. Yet the wickedness of the peoples whom God drives from the land makes such expulsion possible, allowing God to carry out His plan concerning His people.
