NOTES for Deu 7:1-26
Speaking about the land the people are to enter, Moses mentions pagan altars that are to be completely torn down and destroyed. He is speaking first of all about the altars, not about the pagans themselves, because the pagan cults were the main spiritual problem for the people. One thing, however, was inseparable from the other: in those days and in those places every city and every tribe had its own altars, without which the life of the city or tribe was unthinkable, so an altar could be destroyed only together with those to whom it belonged. Even then people still had a choice: to fight to the end or to flee, leaving in search of a new place where they could settle.
The people, meanwhile, faced painstaking spiritual work connected with mastering the skill of following the Torah. This is what is meant by the commandments, statutes, and judicial decisions mentioned in the text, which had to be observed. In the Synodal translation the statutes are called "ordinances," and the judicial decisions are called "laws." Here the logic of following the Torah is described, the logic of observing the commandments of the Decalogue in everyday life. Indeed, what does a judicial decision mean, and how does it arise? A judge who judges according to the laws of the Torah must first evaluate the situation and the actions of specific people within it, assessing all of this for conformity to the commandments and existing laws. Of course, it is not the person who is evaluated, but the specific act; only God can judge the person. After evaluating and weighing everything, the judge must make a decision concerning the actions of everyone he judges: whether they conform to the commandments of the Decalogue and to the Torah as a whole, or not.
Yet every person stands in exactly the same position with respect to himself. Anyone who wants to follow the Torah evaluates the situations in which he finds himself and his own actions in relation to the commandments of the Decalogue, keeping in mind the laws of the Torah as a kind of body of precedent, since all those laws arose from the experience of following, or rather not following, those same commandments. Each person becomes the judge of his own actions before God. If, when a person meets God face to face, God confirms the rightness of that judgment, the person is justified before Him. This is the kind of God's judgment, God's evaluation of every situation, every choice made, every decision taken, and every deed committed, that the people had to learn. Of course, not everyone was ready for this work, and not everyone wanted to engage in it, but that was the choice of each concrete person, while the way itself was open to everyone.