"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." So spoke Joshua to the people of Israel, after enumerating to them the good they had received when they had put their faith in God's guidance. Actually he was asking them to make their decision between relying on the testimony of material sense, with its so-called pleasures and inevitable suffering, and trusting their whole well-being to God, Spirit.
"And the people answered and said, God forbid that we should forsake the Lord, to serve other gods." They recognized and acknowledged the help and the blessings they had received from trusting in God. They had suffered and murmured during their forty years' wandering through the wilderness, and now. in the promised land, they were willing to choose to serve God and rely on the leading of Truth.
Almost fifteen hundred years later, Christ Jesus brought his healing and regenerating message to the people of Israel. He told them that obedience to the Commandments was the one harmonious way to attain and retain health, freedom, and joy. Through his perfect understanding of spiritual being and his knowledge that suffering had no part in it, Christ Jesus healed instantaneously the most inveterate, malignant, and dreaded diseases, and cast out resentment, hate, intolerance, insincerity, selfishness, and many other forms of sin.
