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A special note: next week, during the March Break week, we will have special guest Renita Reed-Thompson lead us in devotions Monday through Friday.\xa0 Pastor Michael and I will be back into the Ten Commandments the week after.\xa0

Hear, Israel, the decrees and laws I declare in your hearing today. Learn them and be sure to follow them.\xa0The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. It was not with our ancestors that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today. (Deuteronomy 5:1-3)

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These verses are Moses\u2019 introduction to the Ten Commandments (or Ten Words) of the Covenant.\xa0 As one of you pointed out to me in an email, the Ten Commandments themselves are perhaps best understood not as a set of commandments, but as the terms of the Covenant that God the King has made with this people.\xa0 This is why two tablets are made and placed in the Ark: one copy of the covenantal contract for God, and one for the people.\xa0 \xa0

What interests me most today though is how emphatic Moses is about who God made this covenant with.\xa0 It was the previous generation of 38 years ago who stood at Mt. Horeb to receive these words of covenant from God.\xa0 Everyone knew this.\xa0 That was the generation who had died in the desert.\xa0 But Moses re-writes history.\xa0 After recounting the sins of that generation and their death in the previous chapters, Moses now declares that no: it wasn\u2019t them\u2014it was with us, with you, the living that God made his covenant.

Commentator Patrick Miller points out that, \u201cthe emphasis on the covenant as a present claim rather than a past event is laid out especially in the second half of verse 3, the force of which is best conveyed by reproducing the Hebrew rather literally [like this]: The covenant was made not with our ancestors but \u2018with us, we, these ones, here, today, all of us, living.\u2019 The text uses seven words heaped one upon another to stress the contemporary claim of the covenant.\u201d

This echoes back to yesterday\u2019s devotion.\xa0 The covenant, like the law, is always lived out in a particular time and place among a particular people.\xa0 And that time, place, and people is not those of the past, but of the present.\xa0 Always of the present.\xa0 If this covenantal word of God is to have life: it cannot have it in the past, which is gone, or in the future, which isn\u2019t yet here.\xa0 Life is lived today.\xa0 And so, the day of God\u2019s covenant is always today.\xa0 No matter how many days have passed since Horeb.\xa0 Today is the only day in which the covenant can be lived.

This rhymes with the New Testament.\xa0 Jesus answers the objection of the Sadducees to the idea of Resurrection in Matthew 22, saying: \u201chave you not read what God said to you, \u2018I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob\u2019? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.\u201d\xa0 Likewise in 2 Corinthians 6, Paul declares that \u201cnow is the day of salvation.\u201d\xa0

There\u2019s a beauty in this.\xa0 It means that God\u2019s mercies really are new every morning.\xa0 It means that our past sins, shames, and heartaches do not have to determine our present or future.\xa0 Forgiveness, love, and grace in Christ are offered afresh for our response in each new moment\u2014in every new today.\xa0 Because God is not the God of our ancestors or of the good ol\u2019 days\u2014he is fiercely and firmly the God of today: of the present moment, in the present culture of our present world, among us, the living people who bear his name and covenant.\xa0