"This Time"
But this time he says, “The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant but with us, who are all of us here alive today.”
Deuteronomy 5:6-21
October 18, 2026
Todd R. Wright
The first time the Ten Commandments appear in the Pentateuch, Moses has led Israel out of Egypt and into the wilderness. God has split the waters so they could escape on dry ground, fed them with bread from heaven and water from a rock, and defended them from attack.
When they arrive at Mount Sinai/Horeb, God’s presence is made manifest by fierce thunder and lightning and a blast from a trumpet so loud that all the people trembled. Smoke went up from the mountain like it was a kiln, and the ground shook violently. The people were terrified!
God spoke all these words to Moses, beginning with, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, you shall have no other gods besides me!”
By the time we hear these words again, in Deuteronomy, 40 years have passed.
Forty years of wandering in the wilderness, as a whole generation of rebellious, ungrateful people, who saw the mighty deeds of God but still built and worshipped a golden calf, died off.
Forty years paying the price for that act of idolatry.
Forty years of learning to trust YHWH alone.
Now Israel is on the edge of the Promised Land, and Moses is repeating himself.
But this time he says, “The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant but with us, who are all of us here alive today.”
He’s wrong, clearly. Mixed up. Confused, perhaps.
What are we to make of it?
Maybe Moses is acting like a grandfather who has dementia, who welcomes his granddaughter for a visit, but talks to her like she is his daughter.
That would be the easy explanation, but I don’t think that is what is going on here.
Kathryn Schifferdecker writes, “Moses’ concern is not history; it’s transformation. [So] he seeks to persuade this new generation to re-commit to the covenant God made with their parents.”
I think she means that Moses has not lost his marbles.
He is not confused about which generation he is talking to.
Rather, he is trying to manipulate the nature of time, as if he could wipe out the forty years with a snap of his fingers and place this new generation at Sinai …
so they might experience the thrill of the thunder and lightning and smoke;
so that they might feel that mixture of terror and awe of being too close to God Almighty;
so that they might receive the words of God as if there were hearing them for the first time!
He is doing all this so that they might embrace these words as spoken directly to them!
Why?
Because they are the ones who will actually be crossing over into the Promised Land!
They will be the ones who will build a community based on these words.
They are the ones who will have the chance to live out their intended blessing!
And they will receive them, Moses hopes, not as raggedy hand-me-downs, but as new and fresh, with their wrapping paper still on, and uniquely theirs!
It’s not possible, of course.
They know that they weren’t there when Moses first brought the tablets down the mountain.
This new generation knows that they were a gift spurned by their parents and grandparents.
They know that these words from God have been re-gifted.
But somehow that doesn’t matter, because they are a new generation, different from the one who went before.
They have learned some valuable lessons about God:
that God will provide for all their needs –
they were the ones sent out to gather the manna, and they saw that it was always enough!
that God can be trusted to refine us –
sometimes that is painful and long, but it promises to make us a faithful and grateful people.
that God acts out of love –
and that love can sometimes make God jealous or angry or sad – but it is always love.
They have learned from their parents’ mistakes, too:
their grumbling, their rebellion, and their perverse nostalgia for Egypt.
One sign that they are a new generation and are receiving God’s words fresh, is that there are some changes between the Exodus version and the one in Deuteronomy. I’ll mention one.
This time, when Moses talks about keeping the sabbath, he gives a different rationale:
In Exodus, they were told to keep the sabbath in imitation of their Creator, who made heaven and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. But in Deuteronomy, the people are encouraged to keep the sabbath because they had been slaves in Egypt.
No one has forgotten the Creation story, but another story is more formative for this generation – that of being slaves.
That history has marked them in ways that they cannot exactly explain or even untangle.
Some of you are children or grandchildren of people who went through the Depression. That event molded people. Roger Nishioka laughs that his grandmother saved and washed and
reused aluminum foil that was as thick as the skin on a B-17. He laughs, but he is marked.
It took forty years in the wilderness for this new generation to see themselves as not-slaves; forty years to get fully free; forty years to embrace the idea that they could be loved instead of valued only for the labor they could provide.
In Egypt they had worked every day, with no rest, to build Pharoh’s empire. Now they are God’s people and God is no Pharoah. Their God-won freedom means they can rest; their freedom means they can give others a chance to rest, too. That is their gift! That is their witness to others!
Part of this project is to spend time with these formative texts and ask how they have formed, informed, and reformed our worship practices. The Ten Commandments are a great example!
Did you know that ever since the sixteenth century, churches in the Reformed tradition have included the Ten Commandments in the liturgy?
One scholar reports, “The 1545 liturgy of the Reformed church in Strasbourg included singing the first table of the Ten Commandments right after the minister declared the assurance of pardon. The minister would then lead the congregation in praying that God would guide and direct the people to follow God’s law before the congregation sang the second table.”
I’ve never served a church that still did that, but our Book of Common Worship, which came out in 2018, suggests that a summary of the law may be included right after the Confession and Pardon. It offers Matthew’s recording of Jesus talking about the greatest commandment, or a streamlined version of the Ten Commandments from Exodus, or two sung versions as possibilities.
I wonder what saying or singing these words every week might have on our faith.
Elizabeth Webb has ideas. She writes,
The whole journey, from creation forward, has been leading to this. God shows the Israelites the harmonious world in which they’re meant to live, and calls them to live in it. It’s as if God is saying, “This is what you were made for. You were not made to wander, to be afraid, to hunger and thirst, to be lost. You were made to live in this community of justice, in right relationship with your God. Stay true to these commandments, and this is where you will remain.”
May you receive these words from God. May they form you. And may they guide the communities you are forming! Amen
From her reflections on the text for workingpreacher.org, 10/6/19
From her reflections on Exodus 20:1-17 for workingpreacher.org, 3/11/12
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