Sat.’s Devo - Choose This Day

Read: Joshua 24:1-33; Luke 21:1-28; Psalm 89:38-52; Proverbs 13:20-23
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods with your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” This was the question that Joshua gave the people that required a response.
I used to teach in a Christian school and this was the key verse of the whole curriculum. The first graders started with, “Serve the Lord” and as they got older, the verse got longer and longer. I always wondered why they chose this verse until I read it in context. God asks us all this question…are we going to be a product of our past and look just like everyone else on the earth or whether we are going to be a new creature fashioned after our heavenly Father. It is a question we all have to answer.
Israel stayed true to God until the last witnesses of their great deliverance from Egypt died. Then the story died and the people went after the tangible gods of their neighboring nations.
Before Joshua died, he told them their history one more time. He told them to throw away any false gods they might have and to yield their hearts to the Lord. Joshua renewed their covenant with the Lord on the people’s request. He set up a stone to be their witness against them of what they had promised the Lord. When he died at the age of 110 and was buried in Shechem which became a city of refuge.
In Luke, Jesus and his disciples had a conversation about the temple and its stones. These stones in the temple were each 10-12 feet long The ones on the wall were 25 feet long which meant they weighed 8-10 tons a piece. They had begun building the temple in 20 B.C. and didn’t complete it until 64 A.D. It was destroyed in 70 A.D. which meant they only used it finished for 6 years. The destruction of this temple was what Jesus was referring to in these verses. The disciples, except for John, were all persecuted and martyred for the name of Jesus.
In 64 A.D., Titus and his army attacked the city on orders not to destroy the temple. A soldier with a fire-tipped arrow shot it into the air. It went through a window of the temple catching a tapestry on fire. It spread throughout the temple quickly melting the golden pieces into the crevices between the bricks. The only way they could retrieve the gold was to tear the temple down. When Jesus prophesied that not one stone would be left on another surely the disciples had a hard time imagining it but it happened and everything prophesied about the end will happen just as God said it would.
Lord, you are faithful to your Word. We choose to follow you.