To Encourage You

Joshua 24:15 “And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

We’re all familiar with the “blame game.” It’s been a part of human nature since the beginning.  It was at the Fall that Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake.  But whose responsibility was the sin of the first two humans, and whose responsibility has been the sin of every living soul since? 

In the passage above we get an answer to this question. Here Joshua stands before the Israelites whom he led and speaks to them in very personal terms. He tells each and every one of them that they have a choice to make.  They can serve the gods that there fathers had served, such as the idols of the ancestors of Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees, the many gods of Egypt whom some of the Israelites served in their time of slavery there, or the golden calf god whom their fathers bowed down to at Mount Sinai. Similarly, they can serve the gods of the Amorites, the idolatrous people among whom they lived in the land of Canaan. Or they can serve the Lord. Joshua urges them to make up their minds. He tells them to decide right now, that they should “this day” get off the fence. Their indecision would be no excuse, for if they hadn’t yet decided to serve the true God, they had, in effect, decided not to.  But in whatever way they chose, Joshua lets them know that it is their choice, just as it was his.  And the responsibility for that choice would be theirs individually. They couldn’t blame their fathers.  They couldn’t blame their neighbors. They could only blame themselves for the choice they would make.

And so it is with each one of us.  When we face the Lord in the final judgment, it won’t matter what our parents did. We won’t be able to point to them and say the reason we made the choices we made was because we were just following their example. Nor will we be able to say that our parents made us this way.  We won’t be able to say we lived the way we lived and made the choices in life that we did because we are Americans, and that’s just what Americans did.  We won’t be able to point to our friends and blame them, even if they were “the wrong crowd,” so to speak. We won’t even be able to point to the devil. The excuse that “the devil made me do it” won’t hold any water when we stand before the God Who created us.  No, it will be each of us, individually, who will be responsible before God for the choices we have made and the life we have lived.  Further, even if we have served the Lord, the way we have served Him will be our responsibility as well.  It won’t matter that others in our church may not have shared the gospel, given to the Lord’s work, or lived a godly life.  It won’t help that the church was full of hypocrites, and because of that we chose not to be a part of it. That won’t serve as an excuse for how we have served God. 

So, if, as Joshua said to Israel, “it is evil in (our) eyes to serve the Lord,” and in so doing we are of those who would so foolishly call good evil and evil good, so be it.  It makes no sense of course, but we are free to make that choice.  Or will we be of those who, like Joshua, says, “I don’t care what my parents did. I don’t care what the majority of the society in which I live did. I don’t care what others in my church did.   I don’t care what anyone who has ever been a part of my life did.  As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!”?