Life or Death

I have set before you today life and good, death and evil . . . Therefore choose life . . . Deuteronomy 30:15-20

For reasons I will not go into, I recently found myself 25 feet under water, looking up at the surface. In that moment, I had a choice. I could stay at the bottom and drown or swim desperately up, to the surface and life. It was not much of a choice. My flesh was screaming for air and even if some part of me wanted to linger at the bottom, I don’t think I could have overruled my appetite for air.

I wish my flesh nature would scream for life the same way my body did in that situation. Unfortunately, my flesh nature often craves that which is destructive to me.

The Israelites discovered this truth over and over. Though God delivered them repeatedly, they repeatedly wandered, seeking their own pursuits. In today’s passage, God laid out their situation in painfully plain terms: I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. 

I wrote yesterday of how God asks us to obey Him in daily choices that may not always seem grand. It would be a mistake though, to think that those daily choices are insignificant. It is precisely in those daily choices to follow God – or not – that we pursue life or death.

We may think that our lives will be defined by heroic – or horrific – choices of immense importance, but the truth is, the big decisions have often been made by the time we get to them. It is the small daily choices that prepare us for the major decisions. If we practice wrong, we will not suddenly learn to do right when faced with a major crisis.

Every day, God sets before us the choice between life and death. Do we swim desperately to air and life or do we linger at the bottom? Do we wake up and point our lives at God or do we first check our social media status? Do we continually pursue what God wants or what we want? Daily, God gives us this choice, to pursue ourselves and death, or to find life in Him.