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!