March 22

Today's reading: Deuteronomy 5:1-33

As the people of Israel get ready to enter the Promised Land, they gather and Moses reminds them of the commands that God had given them 40 years earlier.

You will note some differences between the wording here and that in Exodus 20. However, none of those differences change in any way the main idea of any of the commandments. Where Exodus 20 seems to be the exact wording that God inscribed on the tablets, today's passage seems to be Moses reciting those commands once again along with a bit of his own commentary.

I want to call your attention to the closing words of this chapter. There God reminds the people that if they obey these commands that their lives in the Promised Land will be blessed. That principle is still true today. When we live according to God's ways, there is blessing in that. Notice I didn't say that we should obey God in order to receive a blessing. We ought to do that out of gratitude for what God has done for us and because He gets glory when we live that way.