Main news for 1 March 2025

These words of Deuteronomy, written down no later than 620 BC but spoken much earlier, are one of the clearest revelations about human freedom. Here the Word of God tells us that freedom consists in the reality of the choice God offers us. We have been given the right to choose and to bear responsibility for our choice. This is a frightening revelation, because the choice offered to us is difficult and at times beyond our strength. After all, when we choose life, we also choose a way of life; when we choose death, we think we are choosing what at that moment looks good to us. But it is also a very joyful revelation, because none of us can live without this freedom.

But these words also contain a most important revelation about the Creator's love. In this difficult and responsible choice that accompanies us every minute, God does not leave us alone. "Choose life!" - through the centuries God's voice sounds, calling us to salvation. God's will is that we choose life; "I take no pleasure in the death of the sinner," the Lord will say through the prophet Ezekiel.

And we read one more exceptional revelation in these two verses. The stereotypes of our culture make us think that life is a certain physiological concept. "The mode of existence of protein bodies" and "metabolism" are the key phrases we all heard about life in school. But in reality life is not that at all. Human life, says the God who created us, consists in abiding, living in the physiological sense, loving God, obeying Him, and, most importantly, clinging to Him. The desire for unity with God is the basic meaning of both life and faith. It is hard not to notice that the verb "to cling" is used rarely in the Bible; a person is called to cling to God and to his wife. Clearly, these are different things; but it is important to realize that in both cases this is about the highest degree of unity with another that a person can attain.