Flipping through the new quarterly, there are a number of titles that have the word ‘love’ in them – Love, to Be Loved; To Love God; He First Loved Us; To Love the Lord Your God; to name just a few. Hence, I believe a wonderful hymn to devote to as a theme will be
Hymn 349 – God Is Love. Our first Memory Text says “for God is Love”, 1 John 4:8. As the book of Deuteronomy is the book of the covenant, it would also be good to add
Hymn 347 – Built On the Rock as verse four tells us of God ‘Making with us His covenant”.

Oh the joy of being able to have the Everlasting Covenant which we find in
Hymn 469 – Leaning On The Everlasting Arms of our Lord Jesus.

The tree of life is something to look forward to in Heaven. We sing of this in verse 3 of
Hymn 453 – We Have Heard. It is because of the life Jesus gave for us all that in return we are able to sing
Hymn 185 – Jesus Is All the World to Me with verse 4 finalising with “Eternal life, Eternal joy”.

Tuesday extols the wonder of repentance and that God would restore the Israelites to the land. We are able to repent today as in
Hymn 280 – Come, Ye Sinners. It is then that we will serve the Lord. We may ask
Savior, Teach Me – Hymn 193 in verse 2. Because Jesus lives, I serve a risen Savior –
Hymn 251 – He Lives. The story continues with the blessings and protection of our God as in
Hymn 529 – Under His Wings.

There were wonderful promises given in Deuteronomy 30 just as we have today in
Hymn 518 – Standing on the Promises. We are reminded in the middle of Wednesday’s study that there is no cheap grace offered. We have
Marvelous Grace – Hymn 109.

Worship is our covenant relationship with God:
Hymn 6 – O Worship the Lord and
Hymn 83 – O Worship the King.

We are bound for The Promised Land! Hallelujah!! Come, Lord Jesus come – very soon.

Blessings for a wonderful week ahead.

To learn unknown hymns, you will find the accompaniment music for each one at: https://sdahymnals.com/Hymnal/

Another great resource is for when there is a hymn you wish to sing, but can’t find it in your hymnal. Go to https://www.sdahymnal.org and in the search bar type a special word in that is in the hymn. I am sure you will be amazed at the help you will be given.

2 Timothy 2:15 KJV – “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

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Toward the end of the book of Deuteronomy, after a long discourse on what will happen to the people if they disobey the Lord and violate the covenant promises, Deuteronomy 30 begins with a promise that even if they fell into disobedience and were punished with exile, God would nevertheless restore them to the land.

That is, if they repented and turned from their evil ways.

Read Deuteronomy 30:15-20. What are the options presented to ancient Israel here, and how do these options reflect what we have seen all through the Bible?

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The Lord is very clear: He, Yahweh, has set before them one of two options, basically what He did with Adam and Eve in Eden. In fact, the Hebrew words for “good” (tov) and “evil” (ra‘) in Deuteronomy 30:15 are the same Hebrew words used in Genesis for the tree of the knowledge of “good” (tov) and “evil” (ra‘). Here, as in all through the Bible, there is no middle ground, no neutral place to be. They will either serve the Lord and have life, or they will choose death. It’s the same for us, as well.

Life, goodness, blessing, in contrast to what? Death, evil, and curses. In the end, though, one justly could argue that God really offers them only the good, only life, and only blessings. But if they turn away from Him, these bad things will be the natural result, because they no longer have His special protection.

However we understand it, the people are presented with these options. It’s very clear, too, the reality of their free will, their free choices. These verses, along with so much of the Bible, Old and New Testament, make no sense apart from the sacred gift of free will, free choice.

In a real sense, the Lord said to them: Therefore, with the free will that I have given you — choose life, choose blessing, choose goodness, not death, evil, and curses.

It seems so obvious what the correct choice would be, doesn’t it not? And yet, we know what happened. The great controversy was as real then as it is now, and we should learn from Israel’s example what can happen if we don’t give ourselves wholly to the Lord and choose life and all that this choice entails.

<–Monday Wednesday–>

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All through the Bible, we are presented with one of two choices. Two options are presented here for us.

Read the following texts. What two options, what two choices, are either openly stated or implied in these texts and how are these options presented?

John 3:16

Genesis 7.22-23

Romans 6:23

Romans 8:6

1 John 5:12

Matthew 7:24-27

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In the end, there is no middle ground for us human beings. Before the great controversy is completely over, sin, Satan, evil, disobedience, and rebellion will be eradicated. After that happens, each one of us, individually, will either have the life, the eternal life, that God originally had planned for us all to have before the creation of the world, or we will face eternal death, that is, ”everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). The Bible doesn’t appear to present any other options for us.

Which fate will be ours? That answer, ultimately, rests with ourselves. We have the choice before us, life or death.

<–Sunday Tuesday–>

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None of us asked to be here, did we? We didn’t choose to come into existence any more than we chose where and when we were born and who our parents were.

It was the same with Adam and Eve. They no more chose to be created by God than did a leaf, a rock, a mountain. As human beings, we have been given not just existence (a rock has existence), and not just life (an amoeba has life), but life as rational free beings made in the image of God.

Image © Kevin Carden at Goodsalt.com

But we didn’t choose to come into existence as rational free beings made in the image of God, either. What God does offer us, however, is the choice to remain in existence; that is, to choose to have life, eternal life, in Him, which is what we can have because of Jesus and His death on the cross.

Read  Genesis 2.8-9, Genesis 2:15-17 and  Genesis 3.22-23. What two options did God present to Adam in regard to his existence?

“In the midst of Eden grew the tree of life, whose fruit had the power of perpetuating life. Had Adam remained obedient to God, he would have continued to enjoy free access to this tree and would have lived forever. But when he sinned he was cut off from partaking of the tree of life, and he became subject to death. The divine sentence, ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,’ points to the utter extinction of life.” — Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, pages 532, 533.

Thus, right from the start, the Bible presents us with just one of two options: eternal life, which is what we were originally supposed to have, and eternal death, which in a sense is merely going back to the nothingness out of which we first came.

It’s interesting, too, how the “tree of life,” which Scripture says gives immortality, and that first appears in the first book of the Bible, reappears in the last book. Read Revelation 2:7 and Revelation 22:2, Revelation 22:14. Perhaps the message is that though we were supposed to have access to the tree of life, due to sin we lost that access; then, at the end, once the sin problem had been ultimately and completely finished, thanks to Jesus and the plan of salvation, the redeemed, those who chose life, will have access to the tree of life as we were supposed to from the start.

<–Sabbath Monday–>

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Sabbath Afternoon

Read for This Week’s Study:  Genesis 2.8-9; Romans 6:23; 1 John 5:12; Deuteronomy 30:1-20; Romans 10:6-10; Deuteronomy 4:19; Revelation 14:6-12.

Memory Text: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Always, it’s a sad story: a young person, in this case a 22-year-old woman, diagnosed with a deadly disease. Brain tumor. Even with all the marvels of modern medicine, nothing could be done until the inevitable. But this young woman, “Sandy,” didn’t want to die.

So, she had a plan. After she died, her head would be put in a deep freeze, into a vat of liquid nitrogen, in hopes of preserving her brain cells. And there it would wait, fifty years, one hundred years, a thousand years, until sometime in the future, when technology had advanced enough, her brain, composed of neural connections, could then be uploaded into a computer. And, yes, Sandy could “live” on, maybe even forever.

Sad story, not just because a young person was going to die, but because of where she put her hope of life. Like most people, Sandy wanted life, wanted to live. But she chose a path that, in the end, surely won’t work.

This week, as we continue in Deuteronomy, we will look at the choice of life, and the opportunity given us to choose life, but to choose it on the terms that God, the Giver and Sustainer of life, has graciously offered.

Study this week’s lesson to prepare for Sabbath, November 20.

Sunday–>

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