Scripture teaches that our own free choice of life or death, blessing or cursing, good or evil, determines which triad—life, good, blessing or death, evil, cursing—we will ultimately face.

Central to the covenant relationship between the Lord and Israel was worship. What made the Israelites different from all the world around them was that they alone as a nation were worshiping the true God, as opposed to the false gods and goddesses of the pagan world, which were really no gods at all.

Deuteronomy 30 opens with the Lord telling His people what would

Deuteronomy 30 begins with a promise that even if they fall into disobedience and are punished with exile, God will nevertheless restore them to the land. That is, if they repented and turned from their evil ways.

In the end, there is no middle ground for us human beings. Before the great controversy is completely over, sin, Satan, evil, disobedience, and rebellion will be eradicated. After that happens, each one of us, individually, will either have the life, the eternal life, that God originally had planned for us all to have before the Creation of the world, or face eternal death.

The “tree of life,” which Scripture says gives immortality, and that first appears in the first book of the Bible, reappears in the last book.

As we continue in Deuteronomy, we will look at the choice of life and the opportunity given us to choose life, to choose it on the terms that God, the Giver and Sustainer of life, has graciously offered.

It’s a principle of existence: whatever conceives of and creates something must be greater than and transcend what it conceived of and created.

If the promise was given us “before time began,” it certainly couldn’t be from our works because we didn’t even exist “before time began,” and thus had no works.