Set Before You

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." People read it at the end of services and print it on cards. It sounds like the plainest offer in the Bible.

The objection to it sits thirteen verses earlier in the same chapter: "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." To circumcise the heart means God Himself changing a person on the inside. If God has to work that love in a person before he can love, then setting a choice in front of him can look like a show. Anyone who has watched somebody try to want God and fail has felt the force of that.

Moses puts both sentences in one speech, with no gap between them. The same chapter that promises a new heart also insists that obeying 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 before them, because the next verse names it. It is a person: "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." The God who calls you to choose is the same God who promises to change your heart so that you can.

Now find the choice in your own week that is being made by default. Most of us have one: the thing we have decided not to decide. The deciding goes ahead anyway, a little further downhill each day. Deuteronomy refuses to call that staying neutral; it calls heaven and earth as witnesses. So settle it before the week is out. Put it into one sentence you could say to another person, and then say it to them. You do not choose alone, because the One set before you is your life.

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).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two