Chosen People
God chose us to be His people
- even though we had no intrinsic merits to commend ourselves, God chose us!
The rhetoric of the book of Deuteronomy is
divine - the words of Moses again and again explain why and how to put God
first in our lives, to "fear the LORD, your God, and follow His ways
exactly, to love and serve the LORD, your God, with all your heart and all your
soul, to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD.... He is your glory,
He, your God, who has done for you those great and terrible things which your
own eyes have seen!"
There are many reasons to put God first in our
lives - even if there weren't other reasons, just the mere fact that He is
Almighty God is, of course, a sufficiently compelling reason to love, worship
and obey Him. But Moses reminds the Israelites (and us) that an even more
compelling reason exists to love, worship and obey God, for although "the
heavens, even the highest heavens, belong to the LORD, your God, as well as the
earth and everything on it... yet in His love for your fathers the LORD was so
attached to them as to choose you, their descendants, in preference to all
other peoples, as indeed He has now done!"
In other words, God chose us to be His people -
even though we had no intrinsic merits to commend ourselves, God chose us! On
the other hand, God certainly does have every merit to commend Himself to us, so
how unthinkable it would be that we should not gratefully choose Him who has
graciously chosen us!