Choose Life, Week 6 Day 5, Deuteronomy 9-34

Choose Life, Week 6 Day 5, Deuteronomy 9-34

Way back in Genesis we started with Adam and Eve.  They didn't have a lot of rules.  Take care of the garden.  Name the animals.  Be fruitful and multiply.  Do “not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."  Basically one rule, one don’t.  And they did.  And in making that choice they chose death.

Now, with all the commandments, all the decrees, all the rules, Moses gives the people of Israel his final instructions.  It starts off with a kind of a challenge.  “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.”  No excuses.  And what is that challenge?  The challenge is to make a simple choice.

“See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.  For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the lad you are entering to possess.”

But there is another choice that can be made.  “But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed.”

I suspect that my view of the world is much too black and white for many.  We live in a world gone grey.  We live a world full of unclear choices and moral relativism.  We live in a world faced with choices that someone from back in Moses’ couldn't have even imagined. 

We have choices in medicine that people decades or just years ago didn't face.  We have entertainment choices to numerous to count.  Choices of life style and dress are off the charts.  We have legal and business possibilities that are hard to keep up with.  And I could go on.

But the words of Moses take all of life’s choices and narrow them down to just two.  Choose life or choose death.  Choose prosperity or choose destruction.  Love God and His commandments or turn your heart away and be disobedient.  Choose God or choose other gods.  And he encourages them to choose life.  Choose God.

Can it really be that simple?  The world is so much more complex now than in the past.  There’s so much more to consider.  There are so many more options.  We know so much more.  We understand more about our world today than we even have before.

But if the choice is God or not God, then there are and always have been only two choices.  We have a lot more ways to do not God today than we did in years past.  We have so many more options today.  But from a Biblical point of view, a lot of those new options are just another way of make the same bad choice, Not God.

I’ll admit that it can often be hard in a given circumstance to determine if a choice is God or Not God.  Many choices aren't really that kind of choice at all.  No real moral dilemma in choosing a bagel for breakfast or sausage and eggs.  So I don’t think we need to go crazy on everything being God or Not God.  But I don’t think the world is quite as gray was we might like it to be.

And I hope, I pray that you choose life.

God, only You are God.  Keep my heart fixed on You.  Help me remember Your faithfulness in the past.  Help me remember how You have worked in my life.  Lord, I choose You.  I choose Life.  I pray that all that I know would make the same choice.  Amen

Leonard