God set His affection on you and chose you to be holy.
Deuteronomy 7:1-10 (NIV)
CONTEXT: The book of Deuteronomy is a collection of the instructions Moses gave the Israelites as they prepared to enter the Promised Land.
7 When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
7Â The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8Â But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your fathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9Â Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. 10Â But
those who hate him he will repay to their face by destruction;
he will not be slow to repay to their face those who hate him.
Canons of Dordt
Point 1 - God's Unconditional Election
7 - Election
Election is God’s unchangeable purpose by which he did the following:
Before the foundation of the world,
 by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will,Â
God chose in Christ to salvationÂ
a definite number of particular peopleÂ
out of the entire human race,Â
which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin.Â
Those chosen were neither better nor more deserving than the others, but lay with them in the common misery.Â
God did this in Christ,Â
whom he also appointed from eternity to be the mediator,Â
the head of all those chosen, and the foundation of their salvation.
And so God decreedÂ
to give to Christ those chosen for salvation,Â
and to call and draw them effectively into Christ’s fellowship through the Word and Spirit.Â
In other words, God decreedÂ
to grant them true faith in Christ, to justify them,Â
to sanctify them,Â
and finally, after powerfully preserving them in the fellowship of the Son, to glorify them.
God did all this in order to demonstrate his mercy, to the praise of the riches of God’s glorious grace.
Summary
For many people, the fact that the LORD directed the total, merciless destruction of the Canaanite nations is the excuse they hide behind in their own rejection of God. In their minds, such an order represents the antithesis of what a good and loving God ought to command of His people. To them it reeks of intolerance, xenophobia and pure hatred.
But in their haste to demonstrate that their own sense of goodness surpasses that of the God of the Bible, they miss the reason God issued such a harsh directive. Any sort of treaty negotiation or marriage arrangements would pose an existential threat to God's people. The Canaanites would never budge from their idolatry, no matter how nice the Israelites were to them, and worse yet, they would turn Israelite children away from following the LORD to serve other gods.
Theologian Meredith Kline explains this well: "Many have found a stumbling block in this command to exterminate the Canaanites, as though it represented a sub-Christian ethic. Actually, the offense taken is taken at the theology and religion of the Bible as a whole... For, because of Israel’s frailty, the proximity of the Canaanites would lead to the dissolution of Israel’s covenantal distinctiveness (v. 3), to foreign and idolatrous allegiances (v. 4a), and hence to Israel’s own destruction (v. 4b). The program of conquest (chap. 7) is thus a consistent application of the principle of consecration (chap. 6; esp. 6:12–15).
 Dig Deeper Â
Consecration: That's how this episode about God's ancient people conquering a plot of land thousands of years ago relates to you, and why you should understand it well and use it as a guiding principle for your own interaction with the world.
You, just like those Israelites of old, have been chosen out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be His people - a people holy to the LORD God. The word holy is often misunderstood to only mean pure / perfect / without sin. It does mean that, but even more, holy describes something that's been cut away and made distinct.
In today's passage, the LORD reminded the Israelites the same thing the Canons continue to remind His people of today: that those chosen were neither better nor more deserving than the others. In other words, God didn't elect you because you were somehow holier than others. Rather, God picked you up out of the common misery (sin) you laid in and consecrated you - that is, made you holy in Christ.
This means that in Christ you are now pure / perfect / without sin. But it also means that you've been cut away and made distinct from the sinful world. So keep yourself separate from it - don't make treaties with it or intermarry with it (both literally and figuratively speaking). Always know that the LORD your God is God.
ACKNOWLEDGE WHO GOD IS: Our Father, the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love;
ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH GOD'S WILL: Pray that you will will reflect God's sovereign choice to belong to Him by loving Him and keeping His commandments;
ASK GOD FOR WHAT YOU NEED:
Read the New Testament in a year! Today: Acts 14
