I call heaven and earth today to witness against you:
I have set before you life and death,
the blessing and the curse.
In setting these two paths before us the Lord did not set a trap or try to trick us. He did not merely say that there were two possible destinies and then leave us to navigate on our own and fend for ourselves. He fully described the path that would lead to each destination. He himself was not indifferent to our choice, much less malevolent, as though he were secretly hoping to condemn some to death and curse. Rather, if anything, he was more interested that we choose life than we ourselves ever seemed to be.
Choose life, then,
that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God,
heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.
The Lord didn't just ask us the question. He also gave us the right answer. It should have been a simple matter to choose it then, right? If history is any judge, it was not a simple matter for us. We displayed again and again the proclivity to choose death and curse. We had hearts that would not listen to God and were instead led astray to adore and serve false gods. Such gods were always masks for things like pride, greed, and pleasure. When we put such false gods first we never experienced the life they promised by only the curse and death that God taught us would result.
Today I have set before you
life and prosperity, death and doom.
If we can come to see our choices in terms of this overarching principal, as tending toward the Lord and life, or away from him toward isolation and death, then idols will lose their ability to enchant us. We will recognize the limits of any promises that are not rooted in God's own plan. We will therefore be more ready and willing to embrace that plan even when it seems at first to be the more difficult option.
If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
The call to follow Jesus is a call to come and die, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer. Yet Christ only calls us to take up our cross because he wants to teach us that the true way to save our lives is only on the far side of death to the old self dominated by sin. In our current condition as fallen men and women the cross is a necessary reality, but not the end goal. The end goal is still the promise of Moses in Deuteronomy, life rather than death, blessing rather than curse. It is only life of this sort that can truly last forever and that is worth having for all eternity.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?
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