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. Pastor Michael and I will be back into the Ten Commandments the week after.

Hear, Israel, the decrees and laws I declare in your hearing today. Learn them and be sure to follow them. The 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)

These verses are Moses’ introduction to the Ten Commandments (or Ten Words) of the Covenant. 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. 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.

What interests me most today though is how emphatic Moses is about who God made this covenant with. It was the previous generation of 38 years ago who stood at Mt. Horeb to receive these words of covenant from God. Everyone knew this. That was the generation who had died in the desert. But Moses re-writes history. After recounting the sins of that generation and their death in the previous chapters, Moses now declares that no: it wasn’t them—it was with us, with you, the living that God made his covenant.

Commentator Patrick Miller points out that, “the 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 ‘with us, we, these ones, here, today, all of us, living.’ The text uses seven words heaped one upon another to stress the contemporary claim of the covenant.”

This echoes back to yesterday’s devotion. The covenant, like the law, is always lived out in a particular time and place among a particular people. And that time, place, and people is not those of the past, but of the present. Always of the present. 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’t yet here. Life is lived today. And so, the day of God’s covenant is always today. No matter how many days have passed since Horeb. Today is the only day in which the covenant can be lived.

This rhymes with the New Testament. Jesus answers the objection of the Sadducees to the idea of Resurrection in Matthew 22, saying: “have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” Likewise in 2 Corinthians 6, Paul declares that “now is the day of salvation.”

There’s a beauty in this. It means that God’s mercies really are new every morning. It means that our past sins, shames, and heartaches do not have to determine our present or future. Forgiveness, love, and grace in Christ are offered afresh for our response in each new moment—in every new today. Because God is not the God of our ancestors or of the good ol’ days—he 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.