“If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:15).
Joshua was 110 years old. He had experienced the cost of others’ refusal to serve the Lord. Their disobedience resulted in his scars (Nu. 13f.). As Israel’s leader, he gathered his people to Shechem where he presented them to God. They stood coram Deo, before the face of God, at the same site where 700 years earlier their father Abraham heard God covenant with him saying, “To your descendants I will give this land” (Gen. 12:7).
In the hearing of the Hebrews, Joshua rehearsed the grace of their holy God. At the age of 75 Abraham was snatched as a brand from the fire of worshiping moon gods. The sons of Abraham knew of God’s work in his life and in their own lives. Their nation had been formed in the brickyards of Egypt, and it was now the season for them to serve their Deliverer.
Everyone serves his own lord(s). The issue is not whether you serve; rather it is who or what your serve. (The verb “to serve” appears four times in verse 15).
You are aided in making right choices and modeling your life upon the lives of others when you catalogue the Scriptural examples of those making the right choices and then conforming their lives to those right choices. Ruth was urged by her mother-in-law to return to her Moabite homeland and serve her people and her own gods. Nonetheless, Ruth refused saying, “Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God” (Ru. 1:16).
Whom are you choosing to serve?
Service does not so much establish your choice as it confirms your choice. Choosings are of the mind, whereas service is the effectuation of the mind’s choice. Though man’s eye cannot see the choosing, it is enabled to fully grasp the service. Who does the world see you serve? The one to whom your service bears witness is reckoned by all as the one you have chosen as your lord.
A proper perspective of eternity is the best breeding ground for righteous choices: “Though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (II Cor. 4:16-18).
Every time God has provided for you in this life, He was rehearsing His covenant love for you. Do not hesitate in your resolve to choose every day who will serve (I Ki. 18:21). Be counted with those Hebrews 12 titans of Christendom.
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