FRIDAY 16th
Deuteronomy 30:11-20
NIV (v19) – ‘This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live, . . .’
ESV (v19) – ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, . . .’
As we go through life we are constantly having to make choices, there are the simple every day choices like ‘what will I wear’, ‘what shall I have for lunch today’ etc, then there are choices which we need to spend a bit more time thinking about, and then there are choices which carry with them consequences that can have long term effect, for example a career choice, a marriage choice where more consideration and wisdom needs to be applied. We can probably all look back over time and see where we have made a choice that has turned out to be a bad one or the wrong choice or at other times a choice that has turned out to be the best we could ever have made, some choices may have brought regret, sorrow or heartache, while others have brought joy and have led to pleasant and positive results.
In our verses today the people of Israel were being asked to make a choice which would have serious consequences according to the response they made. The choices were rather blunt and yet extremely important, there were only two options – life or death, (life was equal to blessing, death was equal to curse) but the manner in which they would make the choice would be seen by how they lived or responded. To choose life, they would need to obey the commandments of the Lord their God, to disobey, automatically meant that they had chosen death. This is exactly what happened in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, God had given them a commandment, and their response to the command would lead to either life or death, ‘And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’ (Ge 2:16–17) Sadly we know that they disobeyed and as a result the curse (death) came upon them.
Going back to the choices we have to make, there is one choice which counts more importantly than every other choice we have to make, and it also has to do with whether the response is life or death. For us the choice is placed before us by the means of a Cross, and with the man who hung on that Cross, and what we choose to do about the Lord Jesus Christ determines the eternal consequence, to choose Jesus means to choose life, life that is abundant and eternal, (John 3:16) to reject Jesus means that we are choosing death, which is more than physical death, it is eternal death, eternally cut off from God in the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:14-15)
I know I am writing this devotion for the Church, but it is also on-line, and for any who are reading this devotion that have no faith or are indifferent to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, I set before you today life and death and would implore you to choose life, choose it by coming to the one who died in your place, the one who became sin on your behalf, the one who bore the punishment of sin on your behalf, the one who bore the wrath of God on your behalf, his name is Jesus, the only one who is the way, the truth and the life and no one, absolutely no one regardless of race, religion, colour, class etc can come to the Father but through him. (John 14:6, Acts 4:12)
To close today, the same verses before us today continue with these words in Deuteronomy 30:20 ‘. . . loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, . . .’
Three things, which we will start to look at tomorrow. Love, obey and hold fast.