Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people. – Deuteronomy 9:6

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 26, 2015): Deuteronomy 9

We have been led to believe that Marriage is all about love. It might be that one of the highest ideals of developed society is that we marry for love. We do not really understand cultures where this is not the case. Somehow they are considered to be inferior or backward. People who have not evolved in their relational understanding as we have – people who do not understand the power of love.

But we wrong. Love may lead us toward this idea of wanting to spend time together, to build a home and start a family. But my culture seems to have proven that while love may start the process, love is too weak to finish it. There has to be something else – something other than love.

I believe in the power of love, but I also know that the real power in every marriage is not the existence of love – but the existence of choice. When we stand in front of the minister, prepared to marry that one that we have fallen in love with, we are making a choice. Of everyone on this planet that we could be happy being with, on this day we choose each other. And that marriage will last as long as we are willing to make that choice for each other.

And this is exactly what God seems to be saying to Israel. It wasn’t that Israel had done anything to attract God. They were a stubborn people from the very beginning. They had barely been released from their slavery when we find them unrealistically remembering their days in Egypt. Moses goes up on a mountain to speak with God, and they built a golden calf. God gives them a land in which they can live and grow, and they refuse to believe that God will help them through the obstacles (it was like the miracle at the Red Sea never happened.) They wandered through the desert fed by God, but they wanted more. They were a whiney, stubborn and hard headed people. They did not deserve God, but God had chosen them. In this moment Israel realized that this God of love was also a God of choice.

All of this is good news for us. We don’t deserve God either, and yet he has chosen us. His love is a result of that choice. And all that is left for us is to do is to choose him. In the end, we will order our lives as a result of how we see his choice – and with what we decide to do with ours.       

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Deuteronomy 10