Vive la Differénce (2)
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, Deuteronomy 30:19 ESV
Choose – Do it early! Choose when you are young. Isn’t it interesting that the Hebrew verb bahar (to choose, to elect, to decide for) is the root of bahur, “young man”? TWOT notes that the basic meaning of the verb is to test and examine, to distinguish, with the intention of making choices of eternal and ultimate significance. Reminds you of Proverbs, doesn’t it? Get it right early and stick with it! Understand that the choices you make growing up have life-long consequences.
“Life is a mandate, not the enjoyment of an annuity; a task, not a game; a command, not a favor.”[1] Oh, I want to write that again! “Life is a mandate, not the enjoyment of an annuity; a task, not a game; a command, not a favor.” How crucial it is for us to know this! How tragic that most of the young men and women of our world do not! We are inundated with the opposite thinking about life. A game, a time of pleasure, a favor from God, a bank account. Rubbish! How much of recent Christian prosperity gospel and “good news” preaching has completely distorted the biblical view of being alive! How we have damaged our perception of God and His world in our evangelical efforts to make the sinner comfortable in church, to be “relevant,” to portray “real life” as if it were an invitation of Disney World! The millstone around the neck seems an inevitable outcome.
Heschel continues: “So to the pious man life never appears as a fatal chain of events following necessarily one on another; but comes as a voice with an appeal. It is a flow of opportunity for service, every experience giving the clue to new duty, so that all that enters life is for him a means of showing renewed devotion.”[2]
Where are these people, the ones who think of life in these terms? Are they in the pulpits, the seminaries, the ministries of recruitment and accumulation? Are they on the mission field, worrying about organizational hierarchy, church attendance and budgets? Where are these people; the ones who know the demand of God, the enormity of the call, the seriousness of decisions? You probably know one or two. They are under the radar, attending to God’s work, blessing others with their presence. If you weren’t watching, you wouldn’t even know they were there. They chose early (or late), and their lives are a testimony of devotion. The rest is a footnote.
“Choose life,” pleads Moses. Do you think he meant, “Choose to have it all and God will give it to you”? What if choosing life means choosing to be spent until empty?
Topical Index: choose, bahar, bahur, youth, life, Heschel, Deuteronomy 30:19
[1] Abraham Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, p. 92.
[2] Ibid.
Love is where I lose ‘self’ in the larger picture. Love returns me to the commonwealth of the cosmos, where my identity is a sum of my connectedness to all that IS NOT ME. Love is the reckless abandonment of self in pursuit of that connectedness that continuously spends the present on the future: that constantly flings what is back onto the pile and rolls for bigger stakes – rolls for eternity, no less.
Love constantly unhinges itself from the imperfect past through the mechanism of forgiveness. In fact, love recognizes that forgiveness is one of those peculiar treasures of the Kingdom wherein you get what you give. Love cannot be bothered with trying to answer to the past, for the past represents unholy shackles and unnecessary impediments to the freedom that love must have to create a future that is large enough to contain itself. Through the constant employment of forgiveness, both in seeking it and in offering it, love keeps itself free from that deadly past.
Love seeks continually for ever more and more ways to identify with everyone and everything else. Love looks unflinchingly at every imperfection and recognizes an opportunity. Love’s ego knows no embarrassment in the face of the shame or rejection of others, neither does it flinch at the audacity that lays claim to the worst of problems as its own. Love is totally convinced, in fact, that there is no hole in the fabric of reality too deep or dark for it to jump in and do its thing.
Life itself, in the hands of love, is merely something else to be spent on its relentless pursuit of more, and evermore, objects of its concern. The darkest corners of the universe, where the lack of love seems to be just one huge black hole designed to swallow any and all light alive and spit out the bones, calls to love the strongest of all. As Leonard Cohen sings in his song, Joan Of Arc, the martyr’s flame appears to love to be just another lover. Life itself appears to love to be just that many coins in the pocket to be spent to satisfy the call to love.
Love is stronger than death, and, because it is, it also carries within itself the continuous definition of life. In the mathematics of love, life itself is just a subset: something that can be swapped at any time for the purposes of balancing the equation of the universe, where we find that love is the real sum of everything else. Of course, love already knew that.
Life is a mandate, not the enjoyment of an annuity”….. How countercultural ….what a disservice I do to myself and others when I choose “whatever makes me happy”
The Choice of a Lifetime
~ “Follow Me” ~
“But you do not believe because you are not of My sheep. “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand..”
and again?
~ I AM the Way – the Truth – The Life ~
The Way? Jesus. The Truth? Jesus. The Life? Jesus. My LORD knows the way through the wilderness, – All I have to do is follow.
and again?
~ I have other sheep, too, that are not in this sheepfold. I must bring them also. They [also] will listen to My voice, and there will be one flock with one Shepherd ~ (John 10.16)
and again?
~ the LORD is my Shepherd.. [therefore] – I shall not want ~ Has anyone mentioned lately, “JESUS is LORD?” – [He is.] LORD of all – or not LORD at all.
and?
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake.…
His Name, the Living Word of God, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, is Faithful and True.
and again?
Paul’s proclamation: “Imitate me just as I also do The Messiah”
and again?
~ You became imitators of us and of the Messiah, for you welcomed the message [even] in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Ruach HaKodesh ~ (1 Thessalonians 1.6)
But wait! -There’s more!.. [so much more..]
What is your name? YHVH. I am who I am. I am being who I am being. I exist in my existence. I have breath and I breathe.
Yes, I think I have truly misunderstood, misapplied and misused what life is. I have made it one thing. YHVH is something else. In not being that being-ness he breathed in to me I have lived in idolatry, not his being.
Good word today. Thank you. I have more food to chew on and digest for quite the while.
In reading Matthew 5 this morning I am struck to the core of this very TW! As we desire so badly to walk
as Yeshua and the 1st vs is exactly what is required of us, his talmadin after He sits down (on His throne)
Now is the time we must sit at His feet and learn as his called out ones did, and ACTION is required by us, in HIS perfection! Vs. 48 wraps it up, Be ye perfect as I am perfect, as I see He was teaching His talmidin. There we have it, no exceptions, no ruff-cuts, we had better know the commandments /oaths to the very last yud & nekudah (point mark, period) and to walk righteously in them as He showed us one at a time vs 1-48. He even requires more of us don’t you think by making them harder? Perhaps then our fruit will begin to produce a crop that is according to HIS perfection in order to be called great in the malchut ha shamayim! Oh the mercy of His great Love that He extends to me as I fumble thru my actions in the process of my journey!
Thank you Skip for your growing passion and desire to dig and share even when it hurts because in
my life obedience comes with a price. Great Word.
Hello Skip and others,
The last two reflections citing Deuteronomy are timely for me. We are approaching chapter 28 this week in our Bible study group.
-“choose” is much more weightier than just making a choice between two things.
-“Life is a mandate, not the enjoyment of an annuity,” hit home where it needed to in my recovery process! -Finally, you reminded me I have the opportunity to encourage my nephew (age 11), to pursue interests and such that are going to please God, repair our world in some way, and further better himself. I sometimes get a sour taste for wrongful pleasures that scream enjoy the annuity, the abundant life, the instant gratify! Praise God for those sensory caveats, and thank you for enriching the Word for myself and many!! Amen – with Michael C on this reflection (and most) as food for prayerful ingestion.
David R
Choose. What an amazing word. What an amazing concept. What an amazing risk. And God wants you and I to share in that risk, but risking what others may think of and about us, as we serve and follow the example of our Master, the Messiah. Well, that’s the way it is supposed to be, if we are followers of Yeshua. But the mission of Yeshua, the inauguration of the God’s Kingdom on this Earth as it is in His Heaven, has been ‘hijacked’. How many ‘believers’ are ‘believers’ because they don’t want to go to Hell, to end up ‘extra-crispy’. Evangelism seems ‘fear based’. Say these words and pray this prayer, or you will be tortured for all of eternity by the loving God. Does it seem to you that Yeshua’s message has been hijacked and edited to the point, where He would find it unrecognizable? We are our own worst enemy. We push people away from the faith, by not knowing or not understanding the Kingdom message. Younger people are ‘turned off’ by all this and so easily cling to what makes sense to them. Can you blame them? They don’t sense a ‘mandate’ but do sense ‘madness’, in this message. And so Holy Writ becomes some ancient Middle Eastern cult writing, with no bearing on their modern lives. We will get the younger generation to choose life, to the extent that we change the message and focus on the work God has for each of us to do.
Waxing eloquent. You are right on target, I’m afraid.
Dan and I have a third brother who thinks we are “deep thinkers”. Today he sent us an email mocking creation thinking it was funny. Last year he asked us as we prepared to go to Israel with Skip to let him know the meaning of life when we found it. Now that he is retired his “life” consists of not much more than mindless internet trolling and playing simulator golf each week during the winter. I had to send him the paragraph that begins “Life is a mandate, not the enjoyment of an annuity; a task, not a game; a command, not a favor” ……………
TW applies to a lot more people than just the youth of today Skip.
Yes, it does. To me especially.