A Life and Death Choice

Perhaps one of the clearest ways to begin to understand what the Blessing means is to look at an amazing choice God once laid before his people—the same choice that I believe is put in front of each of us today, a choice that is literally a matter of life and death. God spoke to Joshua:

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants. (Deuteronomy 30:19 NASB)

The context in which these words were spoken can help us understand this idea of a choice. Joshua was the new leader of God’s people. They had traveled all the way from Egypt and were finally ready to take their first steps into the promised land. Almighty God laid before them a path that he wanted them to follow—one that began with a crucial choice or, actually, two choices.

The first choice set before his people: life or death.

The second: blessing or curse.

Think of a desert dweller in biblical times who walks for miles to find a life-giving stream, only to get there and find a muddy trickle because someone dammed up the brook. But now picture someone choosing to break down the dam—choosing to add what was missing, bringing life where there had been death.

A beautiful example of this is found in John 4, when Jesus sat down with the woman at the well. This woman was more or less an outcast in her town—married five times, now living out of wedlock with a sixth man. She came to draw water in the heat of the day, when no one else was around, probably avoiding the other women in the village. And she was a Samaritan, looked down on by all Jews. So many aspects of her life acted to dam up the flow of blessings in her life—by that definition, she was cursed.

But do you remember what Jesus offered this woman? He offered her “living water” (John 4:10–15). And that’s because God is the one who can break down all the things in our lives that curse us, slowing the flow of what we need to a trickle. It is he who blesses us with a flow of living water.

We are told in the book of Proverbs that “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). So it is with the blessing, and so it is in a terribly negative way when we choose the curse.

It’s our choice then—yours and mine.

Will we choose life and move toward others, or choose death and step away?

Will we choose to bless our loved ones and the Lord by bowing our knees and weighing our scales in their favor—opening our lives to God’s blessing in the process? Or will we choose to curse them by blocking the flow of good things in our own lives and others’ lives?

Respond

• Have you chosen the blessing of life or the curse of death? Explain your answer.

Pray

Precious Savior, thank You for dying on a cross so that I could have the choice of eternal life in heaven.