Choose Life

Good morning. Does anybody remember this game of Life? It is a game that basically simulates life. All the choices you have to make in life. Remember the first choice you have to make in the Game of Life? College or career. That is the first choice. Then you go on and make choices whether you are going to marry, have kids, and on and on. Eventually, you don’t really get to choose, but you end up in the retirement home or the poor farm. That is basically how it ends. Although the game is old, it came out in the 60s, the premise is still pretty valid. Life is really a series of choices. One choice after another. Some of those choices are relatively minor like you get up and you have to choose what you are going to eat for breakfast. What are you going to wear? Decide which clothes you are going to put on. We make these choices in life and some are relatively minor and some are more major like are we going to go to church today? That is a major choice. I am glad to see that you chose to come to church today. It reminds me of a story about a man who really just didn’t want to go to church. It was about a half hour before the service would start and the wife is trying to get the husband out of bed. She is shaking him saying you have to get up or we are going to be late for church. He says I don’t want to go. You have to get up. You have to go to church. People are expecting to see you. I don’t want to go to church. She keeps checking on him. You have to get up and go to church. I don’t want to go to church. She says you have to go to church. Finally, he says why? Because you are the pastor! Pastors don’t have the choice. We have to be here. I always thought it would fun if some Sunday Chris and I decided not to show up and see how long you would sit before you would gradually get up and walk out. I am wondering who would walk first. We have these minor choices. We have these major choices. We have to choose our mates. We have to choose what we are going to do for a career. We have to choose what city we are going to live in. Other times we have to make some real life or death choices. Some minor. Some major. Some life-giving and some death-giving.

In today’s passage out of the book of Deuteronomy 30:19 we are going to see that Moses basically presented the Israelites a choice between choosing life or death. If you want to follow along in your own Bible it is Deuteronomy 30:19. If you want to use the red Bible in the pew, I think it is about page 201 or so. A little bit of background because this is a long book and we don’t obviously have time to go through the whole book. We have Moses at about 120 years old at this point in the book. You may recall that Moses was the person who led the Hebrew people out of 400 years of slavery under the hands of the wicked pharaoh. He was the one to go in and become the deliverer of the Hebrew people. He kept pressing pharaoh to let the people go. Finally, Pharaoh let the people go and Moses took them out into the desert and he was able to, through the hand of God, be able to part the Red Sea and the Hebrew people were able to walk through towards the Promised Land. The problem is because the people did not believe that God’s hand was upon them, they were afraid to step into the Promised Land so they had to wander around the desert for close to 40 years.

At this particular point in Deuteronomy, we have Moses facing the Promised Land and facing his people and basically saying listen. Here we are again. I just got done laying out all these laws and regulations for you, and if you are smart you will listen to them. He knew that the people were about to go into the Promised Land, but they were going to face a whole new set of trials. They were going to face a whole new set of temptations of different types of enemies. The good news is that they were going to have a leader that was fresh. Joshua would turn out to be their leader and the one who would actually take them into the Promised Land. Moses was telling them about this and laying out all the rules and regulations not designed to restrict them but to help insure that they would be able to live in community in a safe way in a way that would promote hygiene and spiritual health. When we look at Deuteronomy 30:19 Moses writes (scripture read here).