“ … Choose you this day whom ye will serve!”

(Joshua 24:15)

In the mountains of North Carolina this summer, we heard a lot of talk about the Asheville watershed. Some folks were driving over to watch the big earth moving operations for the construction of a mammoth lake in the valley between majestic mountain ranges. Here, we were told was to be a tremendous reservoir for supplying water to the city of Asheville and a large section of western North Carolina.

“But what is a watershed?” somebody asked. And somebody answered: “Why, a watershed is a ridge dividing one drainage area from another. It is a divide. You’ve heard of the Great Divide out west — that thin line along the very top of the Rockies, where one drop of water falling just to the east of that line will make its way down the side of the mountain through brooks and rivers finally into the Atlantic Ocean, while another companion drop of water in the same shower, falling at the same moment, but just a little to the west of the Great Divide, will follow an entirely different course and come ultimately to mix with the waters of the great Pacific Ocean. That’s a watershed.”

Well, we all have been hearing a lot of talk nowadays about another watershed — the great watershed of contemporary history, to which we have come in our time. All sorts of folks: historians, politicians, generals, editors, theologians, scientists, economists, are telling us that we stand today at one of the great divides in the journey of the human race. The decisions made and the course of action followed now will determine, we are told the flow of events for centuries to come. The choice before us which we must make in our day will decide whether the course of human history will flow into greener valleys and more fertile fields than men have ever known before, or whether the race will slip back into the fetid bogs whence primitive man dragged himself thousands of years ago.

Ours is a day of decision. There is a choice before us. That choice is crucial, all agree, but there is wide disagreement as to the nature of the choice. And it is to the essential nature of that choice which all thinking men and women must address themselves.

For one thing, some say, that the choice before us is the choice between the open and the planned life — between freedom and totalitarianism — between private enterprise and the socialist welfare state. We, in our time, must make that choice and every day’s decisions and activities of each one of us are fatefully influencing humanity’s course into the planned or open life.

Certainly, the whole world is slowly but surely moving into two opposing camps. We are witnessing it day by day; have watched it for years, the marshaling of the hosts of men about these two standards of the open life of freedom or the closed life of totalitarianism.

1. A. Overstreet, writing last month on Alternative to Disaster, says that “this is the deepest cleft that has ever been driven between conflicting segments of the human race” — this world contest over whether or not men shall be permitted to exist outside the pattern of the master planners.

This author of the famous book, The Mature Mind, says: “Totalitarianism of any sort, religious, political, economic, educational — is a plan for fixating the many in immaturity. It is a plan for preventing the majority of men and women from growing up. In short, it is the philosophy and practice of parent-child relationship transferred to the adult world. The masses, according to this view, must be constantly and meticulously guarded against any deviations from the plan. For their own protection they must be kept in leading strings. Their condition must be one of perpetual dependence, never out of sight of their leaders, carefully directed as to what they should and should not do, what they should and should not think.”

As the Cold War continues, and the hunt goes on for American citizens of communist persuasion secreted in government positions, and the political battle is joined between the major parties in this year of the presidential election, the cries increase that the choice before us is fundamentally and irreducibly a choice between the open and the planned life. But, as crucial as is this choice before us, there are others who tell us that there is a choice of even more concern to harassed modern man.

It is the choice between the simplified and the complex life. When King Hezekiah was warned by the prophet of the terrible doom awaiting his kingdom and his people in the awesome years after his death, the king sighed and said: “Is it not good if peace and truth be in my days?” So there are today multitudes of people not so concerned about whether the future holds the open or the planned life for man, as they are concerned to find peace, personal peace in our time. What, if after us comes the deluge?

Modern man has crowded himself into a corner by his own ingenious productivity of gadgets and his proclivity to organize. His very busyness about so many things is about to smother his real life. As Thomas Kelly so finely said “our frantic fidelity” to too many good causes, our “too many irons in the fire”, has brought us to the point of “bewailing the poverty of life induced by the overabundance of our opportunities.”

In what was perhaps her last interview, General Evangeline Booth was asked how she had accomplished so much good on so wide a scale through her direction of the Salvation Army across the years, and she in substance replied: “I have made it a rule to avoid as much as possible attendance at committee meetings.”

Surely in our time, we can read from the ghastly number of nervous breakdowns and personality crack-ups — the skyrocketing popularity of books and sermons and radio programs on how to relax, and relieve tension and find inner peace — this eloquent and insistent message proclaiming modern man’s desperate concern with finding a workable way out of his complex, gadget-filled, harassed existence and into a more simplified and satisfying life.

But the choice before us today on this watershed of the centuries is even more radical than that. Yes, more crucial for posterity than the choice between the open and the planned life, more compelling in concern for today’s harassed generation of over-stimulated people than the choice between the complex and the simplified life, is the choice between the dedicated and the drifting life. Here is the real choice before us.

Joshua demanded long ago: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve,” and then quietly announced his own decision — “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua’s people had entered their Promised Land. They had subdued their enemies. The rigors and dangers of the desert wanderings were behind them. Utopia was just ahead. Yet their leader confronts them with a demanding choice: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve.”

What a wonderful union of two strong words: “choose” and “serve.” “Here is a beautiful instance of voluntary slavery.” (Joseph Parker) A larger freedom offered through a complete dedication of life.

That poses the real choice before us nationally and individually. Shall we drift along guided only by the capricious whims of mere mortals, trying to keep an open life for some measure of freedom: frantically attempting to simplify our hurried crowded days — or shall we be anchored to the Eternal Mover of human affairs by a faithful obedience? Drifting on the tide of time, or dedicated to God?

“Prepare to meet thy God,” thundered the prophet Amos to a sinful Israel as the nation reached a watershed in her turbulent history. “Famine has wasted you and you have known cleanness of teeth and emptiness of belly, but ye have not returned unto me, saith the Lord. Drought has come and no rain has fallen from the heavens and your wells are dried up, yet ye have not returned unto me, saith the Lord. Your crops have failed and your gardens have mildewed and the worms have eaten your vegetables, but ye have not returned unto me, saith the Lord. Your young men have been killed in battle and the stench of your dead upon the battlefields has come up into your nostrils, yet ye have not returned unto me, saith the Lord.”

The prophet paints the clear picture of a people buffeted by the harsh exigencies of history. They have suffered loss; they passed through travail of body and spirit; they have come through by the skin of their teeth and are plucked as a coal from the burning — but they will not learn from their own experience the divine lessons of history — “they have not returned unto the Lord.” They have not dedicated themselves in moral obedience to God. Therefore, comes the final prophetic warning: “Prepare to meet thy God” in awful judgment.

The crucial question for man and nation in Amos’ day has not changed even unto this day. Will you drift on in life or will you turn unto the Lord in faithful obedience?

Jestingly, last Sunday I said to our mutual friend, George Docherty of Washington: “Give me a text for next Sunday.” “Oh,” said he, right off, “The man among the tombs, whom Jesus found cutting himself and crying — there, Paul, is unregenerate man.” Yes — there is modern man without Christ, without the sanctity of the gospel, disintegrated, undedicated. Jesus goes to the poor wild creature and says: “What is your name.” The fellow does not know his name. He doesn’t know who he is or what the meaning of his life now is, and certainly he has not the faintest glimmer of his future destiny. “What is your name?” and the poor fellow blubbers: “My name is Legion.” Just a conglomeration of disorganized and unconnected desires, without peace and composure. He is destroying himself. But when the grace of God in Christ comes down upon him and clothes him in newness and singleness in life, he is cleansed of his demon possession, clothed and in his right mind. From the bedlam of a whole legion of conflicting masters, life is redeemed for sanity and peace. He becomes dedicated to Christ.

And why is this so — that the real choice before us is: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve,” a decision between drifting on in our own incompetent way or dedicating ourselves to God in Christ? Oh, because salvation for individuals in their every need, and for nations in every crisis of history is from God’s grace alone.

Lift up your eyes — above the human scene — in hopeful expectancy to God. Our salvation is from above, not from below us by mere fortuitous chance, nor from about us by mere human instrumentality, but from above by the Almighty Ruler of the Universe who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“Robert Louis Stevenson, looking back over his life, declared it seemed to him that all that mattered in it had been done by someone else. ‘I came about like a well-handled ship. There stood at the helm that unknown steersman we call God.’” (A. J. Gossip)

But — we must choose this day whom we will serve — who is to steer the ship of self or state — and our choice must be God, or there will be no deliverance for us and our time.