Deuteronomy 30:15-20
15 See, I have set before you
today life and prosperity, death and adversity. 16 If you obey the commandments
of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your
God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and
ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will
bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 17 But if your heart
turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods
and serve them, 18 I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not
live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. 19
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you
life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your
descendants may live, 20 loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding
fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may
live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to
Isaac, and to Jacob.
I remember an interesting
conversation I had with a friend a few years ago. We were talking about the
usual things friends talk about when time and distance have kept them apart:
family, memories of old times, etc. After we had exhausted such pleasantries,
my friend looked at me with all the seriousness one can muster when revealing a
precious secret, and he said, “Chris, I’ve got this amazing idea that I think
will make me real rich, real quick.” I took his bait and replied, “OK. Well,
what is it? I promise I won’t steal your idea; you’ve just struck my
curiosity.”
“I’m going to open a restaurant,” he said with a straight face.
“A restaurant? That’s your ‘get-rich-quick’ idea? You know restaurants are
one of the most difficult businesses to start, right? They fail all the time.
Exactly what kind of restaurant are you thinking about starting anyhow?”
“It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s American,
Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Italian, or Mediterranean. It doesn’t matter
if it’s fast food with a drive-thru, a sit-down diner with laminated menus, or
a fancy place with real cotton tablecloths and napkins. It doesn’t really
matter that much where it’ll be located, just as long as the road is paved to
get there and people can see it from the road.”
At this point, I was pretty sure he hadn’t thought this “brilliant” idea
through, but I had to know what it was that made him so sure this was a
singularly wonderful idea. “Well,” I said, “I suppose if none of that matters
it doesn’t matter what you call the place either does it?” That was when his
face lit up with the fire of his self-assured genius.
“That’s the part that’ll make me a ton of money, Chris. You see, while it
doesn’t matter the kind of food, the style of restaurant, or even its location,
the name—the name—is the crucial, money-making part of the equation.”
I couldn’t take the suspense anymore, so I asked the question you’re all
asking right about now: “Well, what are you going to call it?” He looked me
square in the face and said (as sure as I’m standing here), “I don’t care.”
“But I thought you said that was the important, money-making part of this
idea, so why don’t you care what you call it?”
“No,” he said,” you misunderstand. ‘I Don’t Care’ will be the name of the
restaurant. Think of how many times friends, couples, families have had the
same conversation on Friday or Saturday night: ‘Where do you want to eat
tonight?’ ‘Oh, I don’t care.’ They’ll think they mean my restaurant; people
will come out of sheer confusion and miscommunication! I’ll make money
hand-over-fist and have enough to get out of the business before people ever
catch on!” As silly as his idea was, it was rooted in a very present reality;
people do often have a hard time deciding where they’ll eat if they eat out.
Choosing a restaurant is just one of the choices we make on an
ever-growing list of life’s decisions. We wake up each morning faced with the
new decisions that come with a new day: what clothes to wear, what words to
say, what actions to take at work. And we wake up each morning faced with the
same decisions we’ve faced for so many days that they hardly feel like
decisions at all: which road to take to work, how we’ll take our coffee, when we’ll
head home for the day. Then there are those exceptional times in our lives when
we are faced with decisions that could very well alter that course of the rest
of our lives: to risk the surgery, to quit the job, to go back to school, to
adopt a child. The truth is, there are many times in my life when I wish the
path was clearly laid before me, when I wish the hours and years were
programmed and I could just go along for the ride, trusting the program. I’m
afraid, however, life isn’t programmed for us, and the way of God is often
shrouded by the dark fog of our own sin.
If anyone has ever known about the shrouded way of God, it was that group
of Israelites that followed Moses through the winding wilderness towards the
Promised Land’s milk and honey. They also knew a thing or two about decisions:
in fact, their whole story up to this point in our text today has read like a
“choose your own adventure” novel. When the Torah (the books of the Law, the
first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) begins in Genesis
(appropriately enough) with the words “In the beginning…” it isn’t too much
longer before we hear about a decision being made about whether or not to eat
from a certain tree in a certain part of a certain garden. Then we hear about decisions being made about
which gods to worship, about whether or not to sell birthrights and brothers,
about whether or not to let a few hundred thousand slaves walk freely out of
the most powerful empire on Earth…you get the idea. As much as the Torah is about
laws, it is about decisions, so it is only appropriate that, as the Promised
Land looms over the horizon, Moses gives a grand exhortation to the Israelites
to reinforce the necessity of one very important decision.
The wandering Israelites have found
their way to Moab, where they have renewed their covenant with YHWH after
witnessing all the wonders in the land of Egypt and the miraculous ways in
which God had provided for them in their wilderness wandering. It’s there in
Moab that Moses addresses the people with words about the importance of
continuing in the covenant, of following God’s ways and obeying God’s commands.
In the verses preceding our text today, Moses even goes so far as to tell them
that the covenant they have made with God is not some lofty, unreachable ideal.
Rather, he says in verse 14, “No, the word is very near to you; it is in
your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”
They knew the way; it resided within
them. Even so, Moses knows that a cognitive recognition of God’s way is not
enough to abide in it—knowing God’s commands and obeying them are two very
different things. That is why Moses says to the people then (and to us now) in verses 15 through 18: “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and
adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am
commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and
observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and
become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are
entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are
led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today
that you shall perish…” Moses knew it was one thing to hear the
well-put words of a divine covenant and click the box that says one agrees to
the “terms and conditions,” and that it was a completely different thing to
hear those words and follow through with them in one’s life.
How often do we make decisions based
solely on the terms set before us? How often do we allow ourselves to enter
into actions simply because we believe we have all the facts straight and can
follow through simply because “the math works out”? How many times have we told
ourselves that something is going to be easy, simple, only to find ourselves in
waist-deep, with seemingly no end in sight, wondering how we ever allowed
ourselves to get in such a mess in the first place? Judging from the recent
economic crisis, the rate of high school and college dropouts, and the
percentages of marriages that end in divorce, I’d say we’ve made these sorts of
decisions more times than we’re willing to admit.
The Israelites were no different.
They happily left Egypt, following Moses into the wilderness, only to spend the
next decades in a cycle of complaining. Some wanted to go back to Egypt where
they had food and shelter, while others were ready to simply give up and be
consumed by the wilderness. I believe Moses knew how those people thought—how
we still think—so, in verses 19 and 20,
Moses calls witnesses to verify the people’s decision to follow God’s way and
obey God’s commands. He says, “I call heaven and earth to witness against
you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.
Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your
God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length
of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your
ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”
It was common in those days for the
gods of those parties entering into a contract to be invoked by the mediator of
the contract. For the Israelites, however, the name of God was not to be used
in such a way (this is what is meant by the fourth commandment in Exodus 20:7, “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for
the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name”), so Moses
symbolically calls heaven and earth as witnesses.[1]
He has set before the people a decision—one which is not to be entered into
lightly—and to show just how serious the decision is, he literally puts the
weight of creation on the table.
Moses knew the people had jumped at
the chance to leave Egypt so they could save their own skin. He knew they had
made rash decisions about the shape and manner of God in the wilderness in
order to boost their own levels of comfort. And just as those people were quick
to make decisions in order to feel better about themselves, we too are quick to
make decisions that boost our ego and give us some piece of mind about our
spiritual wellbeing. Whether it’s making the decision to buy groceries for the
family behind us in the checkout line, whether it’s making the choice to buy
organic/fair-trade coffee, whether it’s the decision to put an extra five in
the offering plate, or whether it’s choosing to join a church, if we make such
a decision to help ourselves feel better about the kind of person we are, we miss the point. If we make such
decisions because we feel as if the choice itself is enough to classify us as a
so-called “good Christian,” we miss the
point.
You see, the Promised Land was just
around the corner for the Israelites: the sweet scent of milk and honey may
have even been wafting in the breeze. They may have thought the end was in
sight, the consequences of their decisions not too far off. But Moses knew
better. He knew it wasn’t as simple as agreeing to be God’s people and simply
possessing the land. There were going to battles, struggles, droughts, famines,
and enemies, just as there had been in Egypt. Their decision to follow the way
of God and obey God’s commandments would not be an easy decision to follow
through. That is why Moses emphasized the people’s decision, and that is why he
called heaven and earth as witnesses, because this decision to follow God’s way
was not going to be an easy one.
And now you and I sit on the other
side of Moab, on the other side of the Promised Land of Canaan. We sit in this
room knowing the rest of the Israelites’ story, of how they fought terrible
wars with the peoples waiting in Canaan, how they turned aside to worship other
gods, how they longed to be like other nations, how they were conquered and
carted off by different empires. We sit on the other side of history with their
decision; we sit with the same perspective as those who once gathered around
Jesus, knowing what happened when the Israelites reached the Promised Land.
Those people were faced with a similar decision from Jesus. In Luke 14:27, Jesus turns to a crowd that
had been following him and says, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow
me cannot be my disciple.”
We are faced with the same decision. We are faced with the same decision
Moses put before the Israelites, the same decision Jesus put before the crowds
that followed him: it is not a decision to be made, hoping that it will simply
change our eternal destination; it is not a decision to be made in order to
feel better about ourselves. The call to choose life…to carry the cross and
follow Jesus is a decision one does not make lightly. There will be dark times,
there will be difficulties, and there will be pain. In the end, however, we
will find that God’s way—the way of the Cross—is and has always been the only
way. May you choose today between life and death. May you choose today to take
up your cross and follow Christ—and may you never take such a decision
lightly. Let us pray…
[1]
J.A. Thompson, Deuteronomy: Tyndale Old
Testament Commentaries. Inter-Varsity Press: London (1974) p.287.
No comments:
Post a Comment