Sermon Text: Deuteronomy 30:15-20
15See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
17But 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, 18I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
19This 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 20and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The Easy/Not So Easy Choice- Life or Death
- Pros and Expectations of the Right Choice
- Cons and Expectations of the Wrong Choice
- God Calls His People to Stick with Him for Life.
Every day, life sets before us a million choices. Some are easy, some are hard, and many don’t carry much impact. What color tie should I wear today? “Easy, my favorite color, blue.” Should I order my usual- cookie dough ice cream or spice it up and go with strawberry cheesecake? Tough decision, but trivial result. Some choices can be big and hard and come with a lot of impact and pros and cons. Which college should I go to? What career path should I take? That decision may affect the rest of your life. Other choices are easy for the brain and hard for the flesh. Should I eat vegetables and go get some exercise or sit on the couch and eat Doritos? Easy to want to be healthy, hard for the flesh to follow through.
In our text, today Moses sets before God’s people an incredibly easy, no brainer choice that comes with the biggest impact you could ever have, and is also a choice that is not so easy, in fact exceptionally hard to carry out in practice. What’s the Easy/Not So Easy Choice? Moses says, “See I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.” (30:15). No brainer, right! No one would intentionally say, “Yeah, I’d really like to go with death and destruction, please!” But this is a choice not just made by our brain, but by our heart and soul and body as well, and choice that has to be carried out with our lives and actions. Easy to choose, hard to follow through!
As Moses sets before us this Easy/Not So Easy choice, he also gives a process for making the decision by counting the cost, as Jesus encouraged people to do in the Gospel lesson.. He tells us the 1) expectations and pros that come with the right choice, and the 2) expectations and cons that come with the wrong choice, so that we can decide wisely. Finally, when we’ve counted the cost, 3) God calls his people, through the prophet Moses, to make the right choice and stick with him for Life.
Now before we jump right into it, we need to clarify something right off the bat. Moses is posing this choice to God’s people, the people he had chosen to be his own, for them to remain with him. He had already graciously called them to be his own, delivered them out of Egypt, initiated his covenant with them for him to be their God and them to be his people, and he had led them through the wilderness by his mighty hand and gracious providence. This chosen people had seen and known the wonders of God’s deliverance and they were already in a covenant relationship with him.
Now Moses was calling God’s believing people, to renew the covenant. Moses wasn’t setting a choice before the entire unbelieving world to choose God or don’t, believe or don’t believe. Make the decision that will either save you or destroy you, and by doing so, become your own Savior. That’s a choice that is completely impossible for unbelievers and people born into the sinful flesh to make. The Bible tells us in Romans, “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the flesh (unbelievers) cannot please God.” (Romans 8:7-8). That’s why Martin Luther explains that “I cannot by my own thinking or choosing believe in Jesus Christ or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel.” The Israelites weren’t choosing to come to God, God had already chosen them and called them into a relationship with him, and now they had the choice to stay with him or forsake him.
So Moses spells out the options. Option 1- Life! And the pros are obvious—life with God under his blessing and the prosperity that comes with it. Moses promised they would live long and prosper in the Promised Land God was giving to them, and this promised land wasn’t really the end goal itself, but was a foreshadowing of a promised land above, the home of righteousness.
All these pros did come with expectations. Long ago, God had called Abram to himself in a one-sided covenant where God did all the work, and now he was calling the people to show the fruit of his one-sided covenant by renewing this two-side covenant. “I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him and to keep his commands, decrees, and laws.” (30:16). Even here in the Old Testament under the Old Covenant, these were not the commands that the people needed to obey in order for them get right with God and get into heaven, these were the commands he was asking his people to fulfill as an expression of love and loyalty to the God who had already chosen them as his own. It’s really the same for believers to this very day. We don’t follow God commands in order to make God happy so he lets us go to heaven. We follow God’s commands because he has graciously given us forgiveness, and salvation, and we want to say, “Thank you, God! I love you, God! You made me your own, and I want to walk by your side!” We love because he first loved us!
Our new self sees everything about Option 1- life and prosperity, life with God blessed by his grace and guided on the good path by his laws and commands—and we know everything about this is the easiest choice on earth. It’s the biggest no brainer. “Where can I sign on the line?” I’m sticking with God. Until the sinful flesh that clings to us begins to suck us in again like quicksand. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. (Matthew 26:41). And the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9).
That’s what makes this easy choice not so easy, because our rebellious hearts can’t help but look back and wonder at everything option 2 claims to offer. “You don’t have to obey all his tedious rules! There’s freedom in option 2 to do what you want. God’s nice and all, but he’s so stringent. Why don’t you look again at everything this world has to offer and live a little, have a little fun, sew a few wild oats. There’s always time to come back.
It reminds me of the story of Lot and his family fleeing from Sodom and Gomorrah. God had decided it was time to destroy these two cities because the outcry of their wickedness was so great. So the two angels God sent there brought Lot and his family out of the city and told them to flee for their lives and not look back or stop anywhere. And as the fire and brimstone was raining down on the city, Lot’s wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt. She couldn’t rid her heart of the attachment that she had grown for cities that characterized option 2–death and destruction, and her life was destroyed along with them. So I ask you, what is it that so desperately pulls you to look back—the lust of your eyes and the pleasures of this world. Whatever it is, it will kill you.
That’s the same kind of fervent warning Moses gives. “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.” (Deu. 30:17-18). The Israelites were about to enter a land where they needed to walk through the land in the power of the Lord and absolutely clean house by destroying every remnant of the false gods of the Canaanites who lived there before them. The Hebrew word for that was Cherem- to devote it all to destruction for the sake of keeping themselves pure and not being led astray to idols.
Similarly in the New Testament, God calls us to crucify the flesh with all its desires and get rid of all the idols and distractions and pleasure, and everything that stands in the way of our relationship with God, even if that comes from inside our own families. That’s what Jesus meant when he said kind of a weird thing in the Gospel lesson today about the need to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes even their own life” in order to be a disciple. (Luke 14:26). That seems like a strange thing for him to say because the Bible also tells us to love our wives and families, but not to the detriment of our soul if our families line themselves up against God.
Moses lays out in crystal clear fashion all the cons of option 2- death and destruction, and a people driven out of the promised land. The person who thinks he’ll be safe while persisting in going astray from the Lord should only have the same expectation of destruction and judgment on the last day.
Once Moses has laid out the options, the expectations, and the pros and cons all in plain sight, then he calls heaven and earth to be a witness. Which is it—life or death? Then he makes a fervent plea on behalf of the Lord God. “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (Deuteronomy 30:19-20).
Here’s what happened in the aftermath. The people chose life with God with their best intentions, at least they did up front, but they didn’t pass it on to the next generation, and their children grew up who didn’t know that Lord. That’s when a cycle started for about the next 600 to 800 years where the people would turn away, God would send someone to bring them to repentance, they would return, and then the cycle would start all over again.
Does that pattern sound familiar in your life? You start out really dedicated, but the pleasures of this life pull you back in, and by God’s grace, he leads you back to repentance. That, my friends, is the constant battle of the Christian life. It’s a good thing for the Israelites in the Old Testament that the blessings of life and salvation did not depend on how faithfully they stuck to the choice that made. Instead, their life depended on the faithfulness and mercy of the LORD God who was always faithful.
The God who was now giving the land he promised to their fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was the same God who had made another better and greater promise to send an offspring who would be a blessing to every nation on earth. And though God did need to be faithful to his threats that physical Israel would be destroyed after about 700 years of patience, God preserved a small little remnant to keep his promise of the Savior alive. And from a people who had been unfaithful, God remained faithful and delivered Jesus, the Savior for the world, the one who came that we might have life and have it to the full!
This is the one Moses said is our very Life, a perfect substitute, who chose life with God every single time, who walked in perfect obedience to his Father’s commands and held fast to his Father’s will. His heart never went astray nor bowed to another, but for our sake, he chose to become obedient to death on the cross and God cut him off from the land of the living and handed him over to destruction, so that he might make atonement for our sins. And when all of this was finished, God raised up his Messiah to see the light of life, and raised us up with him, whose lives are now hidden with Christ in God.
With all of this in view, the choice once again becomes so easy. Stick with Christ, hidden in him and the life he gives, for this life and forevermore. Amen.
Now praise be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. To him be glory forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 1:3-4).