I set before you this day blessing and cursing, life and death; therefore, choose lif.That's how God summed up the Law He gave the Israelites through Moses, as path to blessing if obeyed or cursing if disobeyed, life or death. The theme is repeated throughout the Old Testment, particularly in the Psalms and the Proverbs. Psalm One starts out, blessed inss the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scorners, but his delight is in the Law of the Lord and in His Law he meditates day and night. he will be like a tree planted by rivers of water who brings forth fruit in his season and everything he does will prosper. His leaf also shall not wither.
God's Law respected and obeyed is the path to a peaceful and prosperous life. The principle is extended to a whole nation: Righteousness exalteth a nation ...
The psalm goes on, The ungodly are not so but are like the chff driven before the wind...
And disobedience of the Law leads to the cursings listed in the passages about the Law of Moses as the nation is to be defeated by enemies, subjected to economic disaster and so on if it fails
This is a theme God brings me back to from time to time, sometimes with a jolt of surprise as my mind was so completely somewhere else. this time it took a whle to recognize it. I was listening to a speech by a fairly well known "public intellectual" as they are called these days, someone I like and enjoy listening to, a gay man but politically on the right side in my opinion. He was talking about the situation in Israel and described some acts of heroism on the part of Israelis, concluding with the quote of my title and saying "they chose life."
Of course right away I knew he had misused the quote, in the same way I've encountered another quote from scrip;ture being misused a number of times: in the book of Hosea God says "My people are destroyed for lack of kowledge" and this is often misused to refer to some temporal sort of knowledge such as knowledge of the plans of an enemy just as Jihad, or a virus that could break out and destroy millions and that sort of thing. But the scripture is really referring to god's Law, saying that it is the people's disobedience of the Law that is destroying them. they've been described already as committing various sins, swearing, lying, killing, lying, committing adultery, as the reason for their destruction.
the quote is misused in the same way "chhoose life" is misused to describe the Iasaraeli heroies.
Wdon't seem t want to learn about God's law, or for some reason we are dearf to it. Knolwledge is relegated to all kinds of things rather than the Law, and life is imputed to heroic actions instead of to obedience of the Law.
In botgh examples of this misunderstanding I've mentioned I nearly missed the very important fact that the destructive actions put in the place of the knowlege of the Law and its consequences , such as jihad or a virus in thecamese of the Hosea quote, and the war on Israel by Hamas in the other, are themselves consequences of disobedience of the Law. I hate to say this because the Islamists are vicious malicious killers and nothing can justify their murderous cruelty against Israel, which is the subject in both of these examples, at least one of them, the Hosea quote has often been misused in toehr ways, but jihad is certainly a reference to the Islamist attack on israel, and the West too for that matter.
God uses our enemies as punishement for our transgressions of His law, that's what the blessings and cursings ar all babout in the passage from which I took the title of this post. The attack on the twin towers which we are babout to commemorate his welek is another example of god's judgment in this case on the US, from which we have never repented whichn is why we continue to be under judgment, threat from our enemies, the overruning of our brorder, devastiating eweather conditions now violations of our Constituion that threaten to destroy the nation altogehter.
Instead of repenting and correcting our acts of disobedience we rely on our human strengths to try to defeat the judgments that are coming from God and can't be defeated. I don't kow what sins Israel may have committed besides rejecting their Messiah, but that may be enough, otherwise I have no idea why god keeps threatening the mwith the Islamist designs on annihilating them, but in the sacase of America I know a lot about how we deserve the judgmetnn we are under and I wish I could be optimistic about escapting it.
Assaiah nine says, instead of repenting and changing our ways, like Israel we resort to defying the judgmetn of God. He destroys buildings, we rebuild them better; he destroyes trees we plant hardier ones. Jonathan Cahn ointed to this passage in his first book to show that we are deinfg God's judgment against us that He brought through the attack on nine eleven.
Mor unborn babies are being aborted since Roe v Wade was overtuned and abortion law sent to the states, their blood is on the nation, now perhaps more on the individual states. We have defended pornography i terms of free speech which si a horrific travesty of our Constitution and I'm sure we aren't going back on that, we've perverted our laws to that extent. Good fo r evil and evil for good. We threw the Bible out of schools and prayer although that is initself a violation of our laws, also misconstrued in terms of the Constittuion. We've legalized gay marriage which is a horrible travesty of God's ordinance regarding the marriage of man and woman. Now we're legalizing the mutilation of children who think they got born into the wrong sex. And all this is going to ge twrose rather than better if the Democrts wiln this coming election.
There were a couple of bits of good news recently in the posting of the ten Commandments in schools in some state, I don't remember which, , and I forget what the otehr state is doing, soemthing lalong the lines of teaching our Christain history I think but I could be wronjg. That's hopeful stuff but it's very little compared to how much we've done in the opposite direction for the last half century or so.
the tide of evil is very strong right now, I dn't see any way out of it. Prayer of course but such persistent and rightly done prayer I doubt it could happen.
Looks to me like we've chosen death and even if we get ta temporary reprieve that's the trajectory we're on until Jesus coesmes back. that's the way it looks to me right hnow.
We reallyh should commemorate Nine Eleven with a day of fasting and pryaer.
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