He has been doing it his entire life and has never once decided to.
There is no moment. He has looked for one. He has been to the events where a moment is offered and has responded to two of them, at fourteen and at nineteen, and both times what he felt afterward was mostly the relief of having complied.
He is not describing rebellion or drift. His practice is exemplary. If you tracked his week you would find more of it than most people manage, and none of it is grudging.
What he cannot find, anywhere in thirty years, is a point at which he chose this rather than continued it, and he has begun to wonder whether continuing counts.
Joshua puts a whole nation in front of that question and the setup is the strange part, because the outcome was not remotely in doubt.
He asks a nation who have no realistic alternative
Set it up properly, because it is easy to read this as a genuine open question and it is not.
Joshua is old. The land is taken. The generation in front of him has seen the whole thing happen, has been fed by it, has won by it, and has no functioning memory of anything else.
Now therefore fear the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the LORD. And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve. (Joshua 24:14-15, King James Version)
Choose you this day whom ye will serve.
Nobody in that field was going to choose otherwise, and Joshua knew it. He is not conducting a survey. He is doing something to a practice that had never been decided.
You are being handed a choice about something you are already doing. Joshua 24:15 puts the decision to people who have no realistic alternative, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:14, that a person is led rather than carried along.
The alternatives he offers are deliberately unattractive
Look at the two options he lists, because he is not being neutral.
The gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, which is to say, the ones from before Abraham, four hundred years and a river away.
Or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell, which is to say, the ones belonging to the people they had just defeated.
Those are the alternatives: something so old nobody living remembered it, or something so recently beaten that choosing it would be absurd.
He is not offering a real menu. He is making the point that there is no serious alternative, and doing it in a way that requires them to say so out loud, which is the whole exercise.
You are able to say out loud that there is no serious alternative. Joshua 24:15 lists two options that nobody could take seriously, and it is by the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:3, that anybody says Jesus is Lord at all.
And then he does something odd with their answer
They answer, at length, and well. And Joshua does not accept it.
He tells them they cannot serve the LORD, that He is a jealous God, that this will not go the way they think. They insist. And then this.
And Joshua said unto the people, Ye are witnesses against yourselves that ye have chosen you the LORD, to serve him. And they said, We are witnesses. (Joshua 24:22)
Ye are witnesses against yourselves.
He makes them state, out loud, that they have chosen. He is not adding information; they already believed all of it. He is converting a practice into a testimony by making them say it in their own mouths with witnesses named, and the witnesses are themselves.
That is precisely what has never happened to the man at the top of this article. Everything about his faith is real and none of it has ever been said as a choice by him about himself.
You are able to become a witness to your own choosing. Joshua 24:22 has them saying it out loud and being told they are the witnesses, and it is the Spirit itself, Romans 8:16, who bears witness with a person's spirit.
The choice is set out as life and it is not a threat
The other place this is put as a decision is in Deuteronomy, and the phrasing is worth having exactly.
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19)
Therefore choose life.
Notice that God tells them which one to pick. It is not a neutral presentation with the outcome left to their judgment; the instruction includes the answer, which means the decision being asked for is not a weighing.
That is a relief for anybody who has assumed a real choice requires them to genuinely entertain the alternative. Nothing in Deuteronomy 30 asks anybody to seriously consider death. It asks them to say the thing they already know, deliberately, on a day, with heaven and earth listening.
You are asked to say it rather than to weigh it. Deuteronomy 30:19 includes the answer inside the instruction, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:15, that the crying out is done in a person's own voice.
The New Testament puts the mouth first
And Paul, describing how any of this becomes a person's own, puts speech in the sentence before belief.
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. (Romans 10:9)
Confess with thy mouth. First, in the sentence.
I am not making a doctrine out of word order and Paul reverses it himself a verse later. But the mouth is in there, and it is not decorative, and the reason it matters here is that a person whose faith has never been said in their own words has been operating with one half of that verse.
That is the whole reason the physical action on this site is what it is. Not because saying something makes it true. Because a man who has never once heard himself say it is missing an item that Scripture includes.
You are able to supply the half that has never been said. Romans 10:9 puts confession with the mouth in the sentence alongside belief, and it is by the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:3, that no man says Jesus is Lord but by Him.
Nothing here is an exit
I want to be plain, because this is the article on this site most easily misread.
Choosing something a person has been doing all along does not require them to stop doing it, to leave anywhere, to hold anything at a distance, or to construct a period of doubt in order to make the choice authentic.
The nation in Joshua 24 changed nothing about their practice that day. They were serving the LORD on the morning of the assembly and they were serving Him afterward. The only thing that happened is that a thing which had been continued became a thing that had been chosen, and there is no visible difference between those two from outside.
That is the whole exercise, and it is available on a Tuesday, and it will not be noticed by anybody.
You are able to choose it without changing a single thing you do. Joshua 24:22 records a decision and no alteration of practice whatsoever, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, that the witness is borne rather than demonstrated to anybody.
So say out loud, alone, in your own words, what you actually believe about Jesus.
Life of continuing without choosing, you are not the only choice in front of me. Joshua 24:15 hands a decision to people who had no serious alternative and made them say it anyway, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:14, that a person is led rather than carried along.
You are able to become a witness to your own choosing. Joshua 24:22 has them told they are witnesses against themselves, and it is the Spirit itself, Romans 8:16, who bears witness with a person's own spirit.
I am not going to tell you it feels like anything. The man in the lay-by says nothing whatsoever happened, and he would tell you that before he told you anything else about it.
What is settled is that He said therefore choose life, and put the answer inside the instruction (Deuteronomy 30:19), and it is by His Spirit rather than by a moment you can feel.
Declare this over yourself
Say it out loud. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak over this is genuinely yours, given to you and never invented. Joshua put a whole nation in front of a choice about something they were already doing and made them say it out loud with themselves as the witnesses, so speak to the thirty years of continuing: you have standing to address it because Scripture asked the same thing of people with no alternative. An ambassador carries the King's word and never his own opinion, so say what God has said and leave the outcome to Him. Every line below is Joshua 24:15 and Romans 10:9 handed back in your own voice, and it is His Spirit, not whether the day feels like anything, that makes saying it a receiving.
- Life of continuing without choosing, you are not the only choice in front of me. The Word of God says, choose you this day whom ye will serve, and He said it to people who had no serious alternative.
- Search for a moment I cannot find, you are finished in the name of Jesus. I have chosen this rather than only continued it, because Joshua 24:22 makes them say the choosing out loud, and the Spirit itself beareth witness with my spirit.
- Abba, You said choose life, and Deuteronomy 30:19 puts the answer inside the instruction rather than leaving me to weigh it. I receive that today, and I am saying out loud, alone, in my own words, what I actually believe about Jesus.
Joshua 24:14-15
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