Serving men across Canada for the past seventeen years has helped me increase my love for the book of Proverbs. This book is filled with the teaching of wisdom from a father directed to his son. I pray that fathers across Canada share wisdom like this with their children.

Television is filled with commercials featuring people who are smiling because of their latest purchase or experience.

The Lord has set out to call a people to himself. From the beginning, God has been seeking relationship with a people that would want relationship with him. Ultimately this invitation comes to us, to embrace this relationship, this privilege of becoming the people of God.

Through Moses, the Lord gives instructions for how his people will be distinguished from the nations.

Life is sacred. The Lord sets up an expectation that innocent blood should not be shed in the land that he was giving his people. Life is to be respected and provision made to protect the innocent. In this case that meant cities of refuge should be established where people could flee if they accidentally did something that caused the death of someone else. In this city they would find safety and refuge.

The Lord is the one and only God, and tolerates no rivals. He longs for his people to know life, and so he reveals the secret of life. If you want life, you will find it in God. If you choose to depart from God and your relationship to God, you will find yourselves and your land destroyed.

This passage re-affirms the covenant between God and his chosen people.

This is the human story. God offers life and we choose death. But God still holds out life and invites us to embrace a relationship with him as our Creator.

The Lord, in these blessings and cursings, establishes the two ways life will play out: with obedience will come blessing and with disobedience will come consequences.

Moses wraps up his speech and his ministry with a passionate call to the people of God to choose life. The answer to life is not removed from us or hidden away. The Word has been given to us and we hold it. God has made clear “life and good, death and evil.” What remains is for us to choose between the options.

If we walk with the Lord we will be nourished and find life.

Evil is real. A few minutes of CNN provide ample evidence that there are people on this planet who take pleasure in destruction.

While no one is without sin (1 John 1:8), Psalm 36 describes a special breed of sinner. The “wicked” surrender themselves to sin, dismissing any claim God has on their lives. For them, evil morphs from temptation to obsession – “sin is all they think about,” day and especially night.