Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Choices

Deuteronomy 30:15-20 (Evangelical Heritage Version)

15See now, today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and disaster. 16This is what I am commanding you today: Love the LORD your God, walk in his ways, and keep his commandments, his statutes, and his ordinances. Then you will live and increase in number, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are going to possess.

17But if your heart turns away, and you do not listen, and you are lured away, and you bow down to other gods and serve them, 18then I declare to you today that you will most certainly perish. You will not live a long life on the land that you are about to enter and possess by crossing over the Jordan.

19I call the heavens and the earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live 20by loving the LORD your God, by listening to his voice, and by clinging to him, because that means life for you, and you will live a long life on your land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Choices

Choices. We have so many choices, don’t we? I was in a grocery store the other day and I thought I would count the number of options you have if you want to buy a package of Oreos. Can you guess how many? 39; oh, and there was one empty spot on the shelf—apparently whatever those were, they are popular—so there would have been 40. And there weren’t even any of the usual holiday versions of Oreos out yet. Of the 39 on the shelf, 4 were even gluten free.

It’s like that with nearly everything in our society, isn’t it? There are endless varieties of just about everything. Then you have lifestyle choices. You have choices to make every day about which route to take, or which stops to make. Which choices of streaming TV services are you going to subscribe to, and for how long? Which tie should I wear today?

Whatever you are facing in life, there are choices to be made. Some of those choices have repercussions. Once choice might lead to a place where your next batch of choices is limited by what you chose before.

I.

Moses had been giving his farewell speech to the people of Israel. He had been their leader for 40 years now. It was time to pass on the torch; God had told him so.

I don’t know if the book of Deuteronomy was one long sermon, or a whole sermon series. Moses certainly spent a lot of time reminding the People of Israel that God had chosen them and made them his own.

“See now, today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and disaster” (Deuteronomy 30:15, EHV). Moses boiled down all the choices people could make into an either-or. Life and prosperity were on one side; death and disaster on the other.

He further explains: “This is what I am commanding you today: Love the LORD your God, walk in his ways, and keep his commandments, his statutes, and his ordinances. Then you will live and increase in number, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are going to possess” (Deuteronomy 30:16, EHV). Moses lays out the only correct choice: Love God. Obey his commandments.

That ties in with what Moses said a few chapters before, in chapter 28: “If you keep the commandments of the LORD your God and you walk in his ways. 10Then all the people of the earth will see that the name of the LORD has been proclaimed over you, and they will fear you.” (Deuteronomy 28:9-10, EHV). In other words, your obedience of God is a witness to others. When you tell your friends, “Sure I can meet you on Sunday at the lake to go fishing, or kayaking, or waterskiing; but I’ll come out right after church.” That tells them you worship a different God than the gods of recreation. When your language and jokes are clean, rather than always peppered with salty language or rated-R—or X—material, they’ll see that your standards aren’t those of everyone else. When you speak highly of your spouse, rather than airing all your family dirty laundry in public, that, too will set you apart. “All the people of the earth will see that the name of the LORD has been proclaimed over you.”

In other words, you will be blessed. Loving God and keeping his commandments is the “Life and prosperity” choice from the earlier “either-or.” Choose life, Moses says. God blesses the choice of life with prosperity—not always great wealth, but great spiritual wealth comes from choosing life by obeying what God commands.

II.

On the other side is death and disaster.

“But if your heart turns away, and you do not listen, and you are lured away, and you bow down to other gods and serve them, 18then I declare to you today that you will most certainly perish. You will not live a long life on the land that you are about to enter and possess by crossing over the Jordan.” (Deuteronomy 30:17-18, EHV).

Who would want to choose death and disaster? Who would want to turn away from God.

A few verses before today’s text Moses says: “Certainly, this commandment that I am giving you today is not too difficult for you, and it is not far away” (Deuteronomy 30:11, EHV). Isn’t it too difficult, Moses, really? Is choosing life by following God’s commandments easy?

God gave his Moral Law on Mt. Sinai, summarized in the Ten Commandments. The Moral Law really applies to everyone, believer or not, part of God’s Chosen People or not. For the people of Israel, God gave even more laws. There were the laws governing their civil society. There were still other laws that were about their worship life; God spelled out for the people the various ceremonies and the special days, as well as exactly what regular worship was to look like, year after year.

All of these are the commands that Moses says are “not too difficult for you”? Really?

Not long after they first heard God’s Moral Law, the People of Israel took to dancing around a Golden Calf in worship. They chose to violate the very First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods.”

How well do we do? The Apostle Paul says: “Now, the way the sinful flesh thinks results in death... 7For the mind-set of the sinful flesh is hostile to God, since it does not submit to God’s law, and in fact, it cannot” (Romans 8:6-7, EHV). The sinful human nature is actually incapable of choosing God. The sinful nature actually cannot make the right choice—it cannot choose life and prosperity. The sinful nature is only capable of choosing death and disaster.

Not even Moses could keep God’s Law perfectly; yet he says this commandment I am giving you is not too difficult? No one can make the correct choice in Moses’ either-or set of choices.

III.

In the verses before today’s text, Moses said: “The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with the result that you will live” (Deuteronomy 30:6, EHV).

Notice that it is God who will circumcise your heart. It isn’t something he expects you to do on your own. God himself changes human hearts to do his will. He does it by continually showing love to them, even in the midst of their sinfulness and rejection of that very love. Time and time again God shows his love and mercy.

The school children heard the New Testament version of Moses saying God himself would circumcise the peoples’ hearts in the opening service this week: “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, the people who are God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9, EHV).

God did everything for our salvation. God’s love and mercy for all were shown when Jesus died on the cross to pay for the sins of every person who will ever live. You have been chosen by God to be his people. You serve the Lord by proclaiming the praises of the One who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

IV.

Moses said: “Certainly, this commandment that I am giving you today is not too difficult for you, and it is not far away” (Deuteronomy 30:11, EHV). He concluded: “Instead, the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so you can obey it” (Deuteronomy 30:14, EHV). God himself gives us the power to choose life and obey his commandments. It is in our mouths and in our hearts. It is God’s Word that he has given us; the Gospel, which delivers Jesus and his forgiveness to us. Having that undeserved love of God in our hearts, having the faith given to us by the Holy Spirit, faith in the work Jesus did for all people, gives us power to live for God.

In baptism, God washed away the hardness of heart that existed by original sin and created in us a New Self. Luther asks: Second: What does Baptism do for us? He answers: Baptism works forgiveness of sin, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare. Then he asks: Fourth: What does baptizing with water mean? He answers: Baptism means that the old Adam in us should be drowned by daily contrition and repentance, and that all its evil deeds and desires be put to death. It also means that a new person should daily arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.

“I call the heavens and the earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live 20by loving the LORD your God, by listening to his voice, and by clinging to him, because that means life for you” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20, EHV).

Choices. There might be lots of choices when you are trying to decide which package of Oreos to buy. There are all kinds of choices to face out in the world. But when you boil it all down to the essentials, there are only two choices: life and prosperity, or death and disaster.

Only one choice is appropriate for the Christian: choose life. We choose to obey God’s voice, to follow him, to turn aside from the many voices of the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh. Every day we renew our baptismal vows by putting to death the sinful nature and once again choosing to live as the Children of God we are by faith in Jesus—faith that was first given to us in baptism.

Keep gathering around God’s Word to be repeatedly guided and directed to choose life; and to offer to others new life now and eternal life to come. Amen.