THE BIG DECISION

I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose life so that you and your descendants may live... (Deuteronomy 30:19)

Every day, and throughout each day, we make a myriad of decisions.  Some of these are of small importance and a few of great significance—decisions that are trivial, such as what will I eat for lunch and what color shirt will I wear; decisions that are monumental—what career path will I choose and whom shall I marry. 

Ultimately, there is a big decision.  It involves blessing or cursing.  The implications issue in life or death. What will our decision be?

That is the choice God presented to Israel.  They should have known He meant business; they had seen their parents die in the desert for their foolish disobedience.  God allows these spiritual shipwrecks to remain visible to us on our journey that we would not crash upon the reef of unbelief and sink in the sea of sin.  God doesn't fool around.  But, Israel did.

The people of God chose a curse instead of a blessing.  While there have been periods of obedience to God's principles that have brought down showers of blessing on the Jews, their history is filled with disobedience and the resulting horrors that have come to the nation.  We reap what we sow.

America's fate will be no different.  This good land God has given us—the privileges we have enjoyed—have been due to His grace and the choice of our founders to establish our country on the truths of Scripture.  No nation has known such Divine favor as the United States.  We became, in rather short order, the most powerful and prosperous people ever to walk this planet.  So God promised and we have experienced.

Now, that is changing.  There is a certain grim foreboding that we feel as we see what looms in the future.  A storm is about to break.  We have watched the dark clouds gathering.  We have seen intermittent flashes of lightning and heard occasional distant rumbles of thunder.  Faithful preachers of the Word of God have been sounding a warning for decades, like the prophets of old—and like those prophets, their warnings are mocked and their pleas ignored.

Blessing or cursing; life or death?  God—this God so patient, merciful and kind—longs for us to choose life!  He finds no pleasure in bringing down wrath.  It does not have to be.  We can repent and return to God!  If we do, then once more America will be crowned with good from sea to shining sea.  But, if we don't seek Him urgently, out of those seas, tsunamis of terror are going to flood the land.  It's our decision.