Daily Encouragementنموونە

These words are of interest if only for the fact that they are frequently misinterpreted. The words, “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve” are taken as an exhortation to choose the Lord. In reality, they are addressed to those who reject him, calling on them to make a choice between “the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living.”

“Man,” says Martin Luther, “must have God or an idol.” Inevitably the man who rejects the true and living God must choose some other god to serve. This is a choice he cannot escape, because he was made to worship and in no way can he reject the true without bowing to the false.

The choice given in this passage is still relevant today. It is a choice between the old gods and the new. Many a modern African returns to ancestor worship, and his counterpart in the Western world becomes involved in the occult. Or both bow before the modern gods of sex, of wealth and worldly power. We are justified in suspecting that in reality the old and the new are the same, because the new gods are just Baal, Mammon and Molech in modern dress.