two references to the Song of Moses
Lxx: Dt 32:35 = ekdikeseos antapodoso 1SFAI:
Lxx: Dt 32:36 = krinei kurios ton laon autou

FOR WE KNOW HIM WHO SAID VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY:oidamen (1PRAI) gar ton eiponta (AAPMSA) : hemoi ekdikesis, ego antapodoso (1SFAI): (Deuteronomy 32:35; Psalms 94:1; Isaiah 59:17; 61:2; 63:4; Nahum 1:2; Romans 12:19; 13:4)

From Dt 32:35 Ro 12:19 Isa 59:17 61:2 Isa 13:9 Jer 7:20 Mt 3:12 Ro 2:5 Vengeance is the full meting out of justice to all parties.

AND AGAIN, "THE LORD WILL JUDGE HIS PEOPLE":kai palin: krinei (3SFAI) kurios ton laon autou:  (Deuteronomy 32:36; Psalms 50:4; 96:13; 98:9; 135:14; Ezekiel 18:30; 34:17; 2 Corinthians 5:10)

This quote is from Dt 32:36 Ps 135:14. looks more to the severity of God on those of his own who presumptuously play with sin even when knowing better. Such a case is that of David in 2Sa 24, who is given a choice of three painful penalties because of his sin in numbering the people of Israel against the express prohibition of the Lord. If even a greatly beloved believer like David could be dealt with severely by God, how much more would the apostate feel the full extent of divine wrath!

They are described, surprisingly to our ears, as part of "God's people." To explain what is happening in the divine vengeance the writer says in v30, "His people." This seems to mean that the writer sees the visible church , the external church , the way he saw the OT people of God , they are a mixed group. Some of "God's people" will be saved, and some from "God's people" will be lost.

For example, in Eze34:17, God says,

"As for you, My flock [= the people of God, the external church], thus says the Lord God, 'Behold, I will judge between one sheep and another, between the rams and the male goats.'"

As Paul says in Ro 9:6,

"Not all those from Israel are Israel."

That's the way this writer seems to be thinking. This is very important for understanding the language he uses and the way he warns. Externally, he calls the church the "people of God." He calls them brothers , even "holy brothers", giving the benefit of the doubt to any who has professed faith in Christ. But he knows that the visible church and the true church of God's elect are not the same. There are many hypocrites. And, as this text shows, many of these eventually become visible by "willfully sinning" and forsaking the gathered body (see v25).

A growing trend among evangelicals is annihilationism, the doctrine that the wicked will cease to exist after this life (e.g., Edward William Fudge, The Fire That Consumes [Houston: Providential Press, 1982], endorsed by F F Bruce, Clark Pinnock, and John Wenham.

That doctrine of annihilationism is opposed to the biblical teaching of eternal, conscious torment in hell. It is an admittedly emotional issue. John Stott one of the most respected evangelical leaders wrote

“I find the [biblical] concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it” (John Stott, p. 32) (Also see “John Stott on Hell,” World Christian [May 1989]:31–37)

As Spurgeon said

 "a low view of Hell usually is associated with a low view of the Cross."

Let God speak in His Word and don't add or detract from what He says.

R A Torrey wrote:

IT IS A TERRIFYING THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD: phoberon to empesein (AAN) eis cheiras theou zontos (PAPMSG): (27; Isaiah 33:14; Luke 21:11) (12:29; Psalms 50:22; 76:7; 90:11; Matthew 10:28; Luke 12:5)

King David, after he had sinned against God by counting the number of fighting men in Israel and Judah, evidently viewed falling into God’s hands as divine judgment, because when God commanded him to choose between three alternatives, his wise reply was, “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great” (2Sa24:14). Very possibly this exact passage was on our author’s mind and governed the form of the words he chose. However that may be, for the true believer there is nothing better than to fall repentantly into the hands of God. His hands are our hope!

As someone has well said

You can have tons of religion without an ounce of salvation.

“Falling into [someone’s] hands” and “living God” were both regular Jewish expressions.

When Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon over 260 years ago, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," his text came from Dt 32:35, but the words for his title came from this text. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

The hands of Christ are very frail
For they were broken with a nail.
But only those reach Heaven at last
Whom those broken hands hold fast.

Living God (See Ps 42:2)

John Piper comments that...

"If the real world that God has created includes the reality of divine judgment and vengeance and the terrifying, furious fire of God's wrath, then HONESTY and LOVE and WISDOM will all INCLUDE WARNINGS OF DANGER, not just promises of blessing..... WE ARE SOFT AND WE ARE PRESUMPTUOUS. And, what's most appalling , though very few regard it as most appalling , is that when it comes to God, all we want to hear is the sweet side , the tender side, the warm side. We believe that the only good motivation comes from hearing about GRACE, not JUDGMENT. And little by little we let that motivational conviction (as unbiblical as it is) creep into our view of God himself, until we have no categories anymore to understand, let alone love, a God whose wrath is a fury of fire against sinners. But the writer of this book of Hebrews will not be silent about the wrath of God.

It is a book utterly devoted to living by faith in future grace. O, the grace of God in this book! Chapter after chapter celebrates the glorious provision of God in Jesus Christ to free us from our sin and turn our future into a paradise of hope. The book begins and ends with Christ making purification for sins and sitting down at the right hand of God , our perfect sacrifice and priest and shepherd, who will never leave us or forsake us. But, like no other book of the New Testament, this book is also relentless in its warnings about the dangers of carelessness in the Christian life. And the warnings are not that we might forfeit a few heavenly rewards, but that we might forfeit our souls in the fury of God's wrath.

So here is a book that stands against the motivational assumption that the only motivating news is good news. There is both the promise of joy and the warning of pain. We saw it in Heb2:3, "HOW SHALL WE ESCAPE if we neglect so great a salvation." We saw it in Heb3:11-12, AS I SWORE IN MY WRATH, they shall never enter my rest. Take care, brethren, lest there should be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart, in falling away from the living God." We saw it in Heb6:4,v6,v8 "IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO RESTORE AGAIN TO REPENTANCE those who have once been enlightened . . . if they then commit apostasy . . . [they are like land that is] worthless and near to being cursed."" (Read full message)

During the Franco-German War of 1870-71, a homeowner found two unexploded shells near his house. He cleaned them up and put them on display near his fireplace. A few weeks later he showed them to a visitor. His friend, an expert in munitions, had a horrible thought. "What if they're still loaded?" After examining the shells, he ex-claimed, "Get them away from the fire immediately! They're as deadly as the day they were made!" Without realizing it, the homeowner had been living in peril.

Likewise, many people unknowingly live in constant jeopardy of something far worse—a Christ-less eternity in hell. Failing to recog­nize the consequences of unbelief, they risk sealing their doom at any moment. We cannot exaggerate the danger of rejecting Christ and living in unbelief, for what we do with Him and His offer of salvation determines where we will spend eternity.

The words of our text are among the most chilling found in the Bible. They emphasize the truth of Hebrews 10:31 : that it is "a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." Our Lord describes hell as a terrible place of outer darkness (Matt. 22:13 ) and eternal hope­lessness (Matt. 18:8-9) . —H.G.B. (Our Daily Bread, Copyright RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, MI. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved)

When it comes to salvation, he who hesitates may be lost!

It was an immense tragedy. More than two million pilgrims had gathered outside Mecca to take part in an annual religious event when something caused a stampede. After the dust had settled, nearly 200 people lay dead, trampled in the mad rush.

Imagine the irony! These worshipers were attempting to get closer to God. When they died, however, they found out sooner than they ever imagined whether their devotion had brought them nearer to God or not.

The real tragedy of the situation was not in the deaths themselves, as heart-wrenching as that is. Death spares no one, though its icy grip ensnares some before others. It's not death that is the ultimate tragedy but death without Jesus Christ. For any person who does not know Jesus Christ as Savior, the tragedy of death is compounded by eternal separation from God (2 Thessalonians 1:9; Hebrews 10:31).

Acts of religious devotion do not gain for us access into God's eternal presence. Entrance to heaven is a free gift, received by faith in Christ—believing that He lived, died, and rose from the grave to rescue us from the penalty of sin.

If you're not depending on Jesus, you'll suffer the ultimate tragedy. Don't let it happen to you. —JDB —Dave Branon (Ibid)

Salvation is a gift of God,
Not something earned or won;
He freely gives eternal life
To all who trust His Son. —Sper

You can have tons of religion without an ounce of salvation.

JONATHAN EDWARDS didn't forget about the righteous wrath of God and presented one of given in July, 1841 at Enfield, Mass," SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD":

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment....Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock. . . There are the black clouds of God’s wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God, it would immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing floor"

He was by all accounts never a spellbinding speaker, and he did not wish to be. All of his sermons were delivered in the same calm fashion—but with penetrating force. For three days Edwards had not eaten a mouthful of food: for three nights he had not closed his eyes in sleep. Over and over again, he had been saying to God, “Give me New England! Give me New England!” and when he arose from his knees, and made his way into the pulpit they say that he looked as if he had been gazing straight into the face of God. They say that before he opened his lips to speak, conviction fell upon his audience.

When the congregation at Enfield could not control themselves as they listened to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and Edwards could not be heard for the commotion, he stopped and requested that they be quiet to hear the rest of the sermon, and refrain from weeping and crying out! Edwards had the manuscript held up so close to his face that they could not see his face. He went on and on until the people in that crowded church were moved almost beyond control. One man sprang up, rushed down the aisle and cried, “Mr. Edwards, have mercy!”

Others caught hold of the backs of pews lest they should slip into the pit. Most thought that the day of judgment had dawned on them. The power of that sermon is still felt in the United States today.  However, the secret of that sermon’s power is known to few Christians. Some believers in that vicinity of Enfield, Mass., had become alarmed that, while God was blessing other places, He should in anger pass them by. And so they met on the evening before the sermon—and spent that whole night in agonizing prayer. The rest is history. Edwards has often been portrayed as a hell-fire and brimstone preacher because of this sermon. Unfortunately, most people only think of this one sermon when they think of Edwards. But, as the historian Sydney Ahlstrom pointed out, Edwards, who wrote over 1,000 sermons, wrote less than a dozen of this type. Rather than gleefully picturing the doom of sinners, as English teachers often have portrayed him, Edwards would shudder to think that any of his hearers might not heed his warnings about eternal damnation:

O Sinner! Consider the danger you are in!
’Tis a great Furnace of Wrath, a wide and bottomless Pit, full of the Fire of Wrath … !

Controversy arose between Edwards and his congregation when he sought to restrict admission to Communion to only those who could give satisfactory evidence of conversion. In 1750 he was dismissed from his charge at Northampton and the following year resettled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he led the small Stockbridge church and served as teacher and missionary to the Housatonnoc Indians who resided in the vicinity. In 1758 he reluctantly assumed duties as president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) but died a month later (March 22, 1758) at age 55 of a smallpox inoculation.

In 1734 Edwards preached two sermons on the subject of justification, which caused a spiritual awakening among his and neighboring congregations. News of the revival spread as far as Britain and elicited from Edwards a written account of the events that was published in 1737 as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. In it Edwards interpreted the revival as a genuine work of God’s redemptive grace among the people of New England. Three years later, during the first Great Awakening, Edwards wrote two influential works in defense of the revival that established him as the leading theologian of the movement. The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God was published in 1741 and set forth a theological defense of the revival, explicating and defending it as authentic by distinguishing “true signs” of religious experience from “false signs.” In 1743 this work was expanded and published as Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival. In addition to answering the critics of the revival, here Edwards also stressed the aberrant nature of religious experience in order to temper revival enthusiasts. Edwards’ most mature analysis of religious experience, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, was published in 1746, several years after the revival was spent.

The work is divided into three parts. The first defines the nature of religious experience as a matter primarily of the heart, stating that true religion is seated in the affections or inclinations. The second identifies and examines those manifestations that are not sure signs of true religion. The third, which takes up nearly three quarters of the Treatise, describes twelve marks that arise from a genuine religious conversion. True religion is essentially a changed heart that manifests itself in Christian practice. Edwards’ position was attacked by Charles Chauncey, minister of the First Church of Boston, in his sermons “The Late Religious Commotions in New England Considered” and “Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion.” These sum up the position taken by the critics of Edwards and the revival.

Edwards’ emphasis on visible religion eventually placed him in conflict with his congregation at Northampton. By limiting church membership and participation in Communion to only those who professed their Christian faith as founded upon a definite religious experience, he reversed the position instituted by his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, who had eliminated tests for Communion. In A Humble Inquiry Concerning Qualifications for Communion, published in 1749, Edwards set forth in characteristically explicit terms his position, which led to his dismissal in 1750.
Edwards lived with a sense of the imminency of Christ's return as shown by this entry: "It is not unlikely that this Work of God’s Spirit, so extraordinary and wonderful, is the Dawning, or at least a Prelude of that glorious Work of God, so often foretold in Scripture, which, in the Progress and Issue of it, shall renew the World of Mankind … And there are many things that make it probable that this Work will begin in America. "