Choosing Death or Life - Deuteronomy 30:11-20
So,
would you choose death or life?
I
overheard some colleagues talking about it one day about a year ago and figured
I wanted to check it out. I couldn’t
really believe that there was a song out there, and if it was, it had to be one
of those tongue-in-cheek country-western songs, maybe something by Ray
Stevens. So I checked, and sure enough,
the song was out there, and it wasn’t by Ray Stevens, it was by an Australian
group known only as Tangerine Kitty. I
would show the video, but some of it can be a little graphic and some not very
appropriate, but here’s a sample of the lyrics:
Set fire to your hair/Poke a stick at
a grizzly bear
…
Get your toast out with a fork/Do your
own electrical work
Teach yourself how to fly/Eat a two
week old unrefrigerated pie
…
Keep a rattlesnake as a pet/Sell both kidneys
on the internet
Eat a tube of superglue/“I wonder
what’s this red button due?”
The
refrain throughout the song goes:
Dumb ways to die, so many dumb ways to
die
It
is not until you get to the final stanza that you figure out where this whole
thing is going:
Dress up like a moose during hunting
season/Disturb a nest of wasps for no good reason
Stand on the edge of a train station
platform/Drive around the boom gates at a level crossing
Run across the tracks between the
platforms/They may not rhyme but they’re quite possibly
Dumbest ways to die/Dumbest ways to
die
…
So many dumb ways to die
…
Turns
out it is a safety commercial from Metro in Melbourne Australia.[i] The commercial takes aim at choices that some people make,
whether it is getting your toast out of an electric toaster with a fork,
keeping a rattlesnake as a pet, or driving around the gate at a train crossing,
that simply don’t make sense, unless it is that the person is choosing death
over life.
Moses
was not talking about railway safety, yet he was setting before the people of
Israel, as they made their way from slavery to freedom, a choice to make…a
choice between death and life. Moses
puts it simple, if you want to live, if you want to choose life, then “[love]
the Lord your God, [walk] in his ways, and [observe] his commandments, decrees,
and ordinances.” On the other hand,
Moses says, “If your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray
and bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you
shall perish…I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have
set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life…”
Moses
is putting it plain and simple to the people.
You can choose to follow the ways of this world, fall in line with the
pagan gods and goddesses of those we encounter, live each day doing whatever
you want to, whenever you want to, however you want to…in other words you can
live for yourself and yourself only, and you will find death…however, if you
want to truly live, if you want to experience the abundant life that God would
offer you, then choose God, choose to love Him completely and give your life
over to His ways, obey His commands and find peace in the midst of it all. How would doing what you want to lead to
death and living by the law bring life?
First
of all, we have to remember that the theology for most of the Old Testament was
that if you obeyed God, you would prosper; if you disobeyed God, you would
perish. They lived with the
understanding that if you had tragedy come upon you or your family, whether it
was the loss of your crops, the death of
your child, or a sudden onset of an illness, then somewhere along the
line you had sinned and deserved to be punished. Consider the conversation between Job and his
wife and friends after Satan began assaulting him with the tragic loss of his
children, his livestock, and even his own health. Jobs friend Eliphaz says to him: “Think now, who that was innocent ever
perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow
iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.
By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are
consumed.”[ii] This is seen in the New Testament when the disciples
ask of the blind man, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was
born blind?”[iii] This line of thinking is proven faulty by
this question alone, how could a man blind from birth sinned in any way, less
it was in the womb, prior to his birth?
So
rather than think that God arbitrarily set down a bunch of rules that he
expected folks to follow because He is some tyrant of the sky and just wants to
bully folks around, could it be that many of the laws handed down to Moses and
given to the people were laws set for their wellbeing—to insure that they would
live and protect them from death. While
I will admit that we might be hard-pressed to do it for all 613 laws, and least
without a great bit of work, consider just a few to give us a start.
Construction
law: “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof…”[iv] This was a command to build a protective wall
or railing along the roof so that, in a day when folks would bathe or sleep on
the roof, no one would fall off.
Dietary
law: “Only be sure that you do not eat the blood; for the blood is the life,
and you shall not eat the life with the meat.”[v] All the blood had to be drained from or
cooked out of the meat. How often do we
get warnings today about the dangers of eating undercooked meat?
Sanitary
law: “You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your utensils you shall have a trowel;
when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover
up your excrement.”[vi] Many historians contribute how badly the
bubonic plague ravaged England during the 1300’s to the fact that sanitary
conditions were so poor there that it was not uncommon for households to dump
their bodily wastes into the streets, creating a breeding ground for disease.
Retributive
law: “if any harm follows, then you
shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for
foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”[vii] While often seen as a command for
compensation for a crime against us, this law was actually a restrictive law in
order to preserve life in a time where the blinding of a man could be taken as
an offense that would lead to the guilty party and his family being slaughtered
In retaliation.
With
these examples we can begin to see how disregarding the laws handed down by
Moses could have deadly consequences while keeping them would preserve and
protect life.
Where
does any of this leave us in a time where most of us do not sleep or bathe on
our rooftops, where we know how to prepare our food without blood, where we
have running water and ways to dispose of our waste, and where hopefully we
have moved beyond family massacres for retaliation? Well, we still have to choose between death
and life.
No
one would really choose death over life would they?
How
many us try to drive quickly under the train’s crossbar or zoom across the
tracks when the lights start flashing because we’re in a hurry?
How
many of us choose to risk STD’s by engaging in sex outside the framework of a
committed husband and wife?
How
many of us choose to smoke, do drugs, or abuse alcohol despite the damage it
does to our bodies? How many of us
choose to get behind the wheel of a car after consuming the drugs or alcohol?
How
many of us choose to vengeance or bitterness over forgiveness?
How
many of us choose to hate over love?
How
many of us choose ourselves over others?
How
many of us choose self-reliance over surrender?
How
many of us choose self over Jesus who offered His life to give and poured out
upon us His Spirit that we might be free to choose life?
Heaven
and earth are called to witness against us today…as we have set before us life
and death, blessings and curses. May we
choose life…
In
the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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