Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 299 · October 26
Set Before You
“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:”
Whose choice is this, and how free is it? I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life. It gets read at the end of services and printed on the front of things, the plainest offer in the book.
The complaint against it is thirteen verses up the same page. And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart. If the loving has to be done to a man before he can do it, then setting a choice in front of him is theatre. Anyone who has watched somebody try to want God and fail has felt the force of that.
Moses puts both sentences in one speech and leaves no seam. The chapter that promises the circumcised heart also insists the thing is within reach: the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it. And look at what is being set on the table, because the next verse names it, and it is a person rather than a set of outcomes. That thou mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days.
Go and find the choice in your week that is being made by default. There is one. It is what you have decided not to decide, and the deciding goes ahead anyway, downhill, a day at a time. Deuteronomy refuses to file that as neutrality, and calls heaven and earth as witnesses because a whole nation was about to drift. Settle it before the week ends, put it in a sentence you could repeat to another person, and then repeat it to them.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 299 is Eyes and Ears Toward You (1 Peter 3:12).