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“It shall come about that as the Lord delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the Lord will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it” (Deuteronomy 28:63).
Some have referred to this verse as the most difficult in all the Bible. It says something that causes most readers to stop and go back and read it again. Is there a typo or a translational mistake? Surely God does not delight in destroying a people group. Someone must have dropped the literary ball on this one.
In fact, there is a recognized tension between Deuteronomy 28:63 and passages like Ezekiel 18:32, where God explicitly states, "I have NO pleasure in the death of the wicked" (Ezekiel 18:32). One of the major themes of the Bible is that we were created by a God of mercy and love. Even if that God had to do something severe to His creation, we would never imagine that He takes actual joy in doing so.
But there is no grammatical error in this verse. The original Hebrew word for "delight" is “sus” (שׂוּשׂ). It literally means “to rejoice” and the many verses where this is found indicate that the meaning is essentially the same.
So, what does it mean that God will delight in the destruction of Israel and to be torn from the land He promised?
Most scholars believe that the author of Deuteronomy employed this word with a little bit of poetry. This would be similar to when a parent sees that their teenage son or daughter has taken off with the family car without asking and they utter, “I’m going to kill that kid.” It’s a shocking way of saying, “I am disappointed that my child did this and we will have a serious and potentially unpleasant conversation when I see them next.” Similarly, when the author says that God will delight in the perishing and destruction of His chosen people, we could translate that to mean “God is firmly committed to exacting justice on His children when they disobey the covenant He made with them, and He will see to it that they are corrected accordingly.” This firm commitment to justice is what the author means when he says that God will “delight” in their destruction.
But after all the linguistics and poetry have been dealt with, we still have a difficult verse. It’s hard to read that justice includes such harshness. Some today might say the punishment here doesn’t fit the crime. God comes across as mean here, they would say.
But what we must always remember is that God is all good. There is no evil within Him. He isn’t simply a God of justice; He IS justice. That means whatever God does, says, or thinks, it will always be just. He has already said that to turn away from Him and be defiant is a complete negation of the reason humanity was created in the first place. And the One who made us for His good pleasure is absolutely entitled to destroy what He created if it fails to meet the reason for its creation.
Finally, what God does with people groups often looks harsher than what He does with individuals. Israel “as a nation” had rebelled against God. They had been at it for a long time. They had chosen to worship other gods. They had abandoned following the Law altogether. Were there individuals in that nation who were trying to trust God? Almost certainly. But God chose to punish the nation “as a nation” for the rebellion. The punishment was designed to get the nation’s attention, to turn them back toward Him. It had a restorative objective to it. He wanted them to choose right.
Today, God is still God. And while mercy has been extended to the human race through the work of Christ on the cross, that doesn’t stop God from using harsh circumstances to get people’s attention. And we would do well to remember is that when God deals with humanity in a tougher way, He is just in doing so, and He is trying to draw all people to Him.
This doesn’t mean that all harshness and unpleasantness is a direct act of God for the purpose of course correcting people. We live in a fallen world. A hurricane that destroys a town is not necessarily an act of God (contrary to what the legal system might say). It is not yet a restored earth in which we live. We endure darkness because that's in part how the world still is. Sometimes, the harshness we deal with is simply the consequences of our own making. It’s not so much that God is punishing; rather He has ordered the world in such a way that when we make poor decisions, harsh consequences often follow.
The point of Deuteronomy 28:63 is this; fear God and keep His commandments (Ecclesiastes 12:13). He is holy. He is sovereign. He is just. His ways are perfect. So, if you fall, get up. In other words, when you experience a moral failure, let your heart always be to return to God with repentance and a desire to live rightly. God is firmly committed to loving you, which includes correction along the way.