NOTES for Deu 8:1-20
Describing the path the people have traveled, the book of Deuteronomy presents it to us as the way of the Torah. There is no room here for the theory of rewards and punishments so common among religious people, according to which a person receives a reward for carrying out what God has prescribed and punishment for violating His prescriptions. Here the logic is entirely different. A person follows God because only such movement can be called a way. Everything else is tracklessness leading nowhere. Walking God's way, a person arrives where God wants to bring him.
God wants to bring the person to the place of meeting with Himself, to the place of His presence, in order to sanctify the person and give him the possibility of a new and full life. In the book of Deuteronomy the Promised Land becomes such a place. God leads His people there in order to renew both them and the land itself, making it a prototype of the Kingdom. That is precisely why the traditional religious scheme of rewards and punishments does not work here. The point is that, by definition, the people cannot deserve what they receive: this concerns fallen humanity, and the people of God are no exception, since they too consist of fallen people.
By definition, the fallen person is not ready for a meeting with God, and also by definition does not deserve either the Kingdom or the Promised Land as its prototype. Only God Himself makes both individual people and the whole people as a whole ready, and He does so in the process of moving along the way by which He leads them. If the people travel the path laid out for them by God, step for step behind the One who laid that path out, they will become ready for a meeting with God and for life in God's presence on the land given by God.
Life itself on this land is also unthinkable outside the context of relations with God. The land is given to the people not as property, but for use, on the condition that they do not forget God and do not begin to rely on themselves instead of Him. This is not a statute or a disciplinary measure, but a simple fact: without God it is impossible to live on God's land. It exists first of all as a place of God's presence, and only afterward as a natural phenomenon, as a place, a territory, a geographical reality. Change the order of priorities, and the land is lost. This is what Moses warns his people about, speaking on God's behalf.