‘This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ Deuteronomy 30:19-20
It’s almost comical that God would make this statement. No, I’m not trying to be disrespectful, but today we benefit from many thousands of years worth of understanding that these Hebrews didn’t have at the time, and looking back it seems funny that at the creation of the Old Covenant God made with Moses and the people he would tell them to choose life by obeying the laws. Ultimately, what God knew, and what Paul later understood, was that the entire Old Covenant (as wonderful as it seemed) would engulf the people in wet blanket of death that they would not be able to escape. In 2 Corinthians 3:7-11, Paul says that this Old Covenant ‘brought death’. That’s right…the 10 Commandments (and many thousands more in Leviticus) did nothing to make the people perfect in God’s eyes. Romans 3:20 says that no one can be righteous by observing the law (Old Covenant), because the law was only created to make us conscious of sin. What a whopper! God is setting them up for a long hard road, but it was a necessary lesson for us to learn: righteousness doesn’t come by obeying the rules. Romans 3:21 goes on to say that there is a righteousness that comes APART from observing the law (10 Commandments, Old Covenant, etc) that is by faith in Jesus Christ alone. If you would choose life in this New Covenant that God has established with man, you will have to abandon the righteousness that you can accomplish through your own works, and begin trusting in the work of Jesus Christ when he died for our sins, and resurrected to new life.
