After long life, what would a person say in last words to beloved family and friends? In his final words, Moses offered choice between life and death, between blessing and cursing. He did not leave his people in any discursive mood, but immediately commanded the preferred response: Choose life. An implication holds that choosing life one will gain God’s blessing. In choosing death, one would inherit cursing. The same choices hold in our era – life or death, blessing or cursing. It is astonishing, that so many choose/accept death and cursing. By choosing life, as God advises, we claim and gain ultimate victory over death. Human death is meant to be a door to life. These were the last words of Moses. What words could be better for final counsel? These are words for application, and they affect the future for generations yet to come. Our choices and feelings have much to do with the future. Our choices will not be trumpeted from high places, as the laws of Moses have been in history, but they are quite meaningful to those we care about. Eternal truths that lead to joy or regret may come to us gently, in private muted thoughtfulness. They are truths to life that will not die and truths to death that live only through human mortality.
I have sometimes wondered what past generations of my family felt for their own future issue. Except for my mother, I never felt that the matter was any guiding light for most of them. My father, until his last year of suffering unto death, thought primarily about self and the matters of each day. He fathered six children, but had little to do, in his preoccupations, with their lives and nurture. My descendants are in my mind. I choose life for myself, and doing so I choose a quality of life that makes a difference to my children and my children’s children – and ensuing generations as well. It includes prayer for those as yet unborn, that they choose life. That life identifies with a divine agenda and desire. Often, I have accented that Jonathan Edwards prayed fervently for his descendants. To give credence to his prayers, a careful study proved how remarkable those men and women became in the American society up to the twentieth century, generations after Edwards’ death. Not all his descendants made Edwards’ goal. Surely many more did than would otherwise have been the case without his prayers.
One of the first evidences of maturity in an individual is the awareness, helped along by open acknowledgment, that he or she is responsible for himself/herself. Each person, so we are informed by nearly all analysts of human behavior, becomes the product of his or her own decisions. We can’t weasel out. This is especially true in a free society where blame is not easily evaded. Counselors are aware, often with twinges of pain, that the persons they are talking to are unwilling to take on the awesome duty to decide for God’s life offer, or any other high context. The death knell rings with the sound of the quality of faith one builds in the passing of years. Choosing life in the right way is to choose the quality and implications of faith that makes life worth living. Life deserves to survive. Life in the human being has something of the image of God’s eternity in it. It must continue in Christ. Death could not hold him. Death loses its sting. Eternity, a supernatural factor, then becomes natural for the person of faith. Physical life was not my private choice, but spiritual life is. That’s serious stuff. One might settle on faith as Pascal did, that the intelligent person bets on God. I do not warm to the analogy, but I understand and agree with Pascal’s appeal to simple logic related to value orientation. When believed, over a period of time, life becomes so real that God is trusted to continue it. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020