Joshua 24:15 And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Joshua is asking for a commitment of service. These gods of the forefathers and the Amorites, what were they? Idols of some sort perhaps. I know enough about pagan and idol worship to understand that those gods ask nothing to be done in service to themselves. Men have created gods to serve out of self-interest.

Head on down to the god buffet and serve yourself. Take what you like and leave the rest for others. Laugh and mock at other people’s selections. It is all about what makes you feel good in self-service.

Perhaps you don’t want to serve at all. Joshua referred to that in his opening remarks. You can pass up the god buffet all together. Where are you headed next? The issue of self-service is still the agenda, so where is your focus? You pass up the god complex for life without God or gods, so what do you serve?

The issues of serving anything other than the Lord God comes with a complex set of demands upon which you may or may not be aware of the requirements. Are you a user or are you being used? I won’t get into the specifics of each individual category but the essence of life without God is self-service, self-interest and being either a user or being used.

If you don’t believe in God then you probably don’t believe in Satan either. That is the way Satan wants it. There is a God and there is the angel Satan who hates you. His main focus is to keep you ignorant of his presence and distract you from finding God.

Hidden enemies are the worst. You don’t know their agenda until it is too late. What time is it?

Exodus 17:14a And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book…

When we read this verse we take the instruction for granted and it seems to us no big deal. We don’t look at the underlying issue of education in this matter. Israel was enslaved by Pharaohs for four hundred years. The only source of understanding about the God they prayed to was oral tradition. The Pharaohs would not have allowed these slaves to be educated.

We often overlook the plight of a people with whom we have no common history. We fail to understand the depths of their ordeals. Luckily God did not overlook this small matter. He chose Moses to be their deliverer.

Moses was a Levite raised in the house of Pharaoh’s sister. He would have been educated as one of the privileged few. It was no little thing for his mother to set his new life in a basket and put it upon the waters. It was no small thing for his sister to follow the basket to find out his fate. It was no small thing for the woman to pluck the baby from the water and love him.

All this happened at a time when Pharaoh ordered all newborn males of the slaves killed.

It was no small thing for Moses to lead Israel free.

It was no small thing that Herod the Great would, like Pharaoh, order the death of our deliverer in Bethlehem, and that He too should escape that execution.

But we accept without much thought for the peoples of those times and how difficult life must have been for them to believe God.

Now our time has come with easy of life, freedom and perfect peace but do we give thought at all to those enslaved and what they need to be set free?

Are they educated about Jesus?