Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible! The whole thing is a great meditation on the importance and beauty of God’s word in nurturing our faith. Fun fact: in the original Hebrew, this psalm has 22 sections, each starting with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Repetition is common for their culture because it would have been memorized and shared orally. God’s powerful word is that important!
We are given all sorts of ways we can interact with God’s word. We can obey, memorize, recite, study, reflect, delight, and not forget!
The Ten Commandments with bibles on a black background
There are many gems in today’s reading. Of course, we recognize right off the 10 Commandments. We’ll look at that here in just a bit. First of all, I want to make sure you don’t miss something I almost missed. Verses 2-4 say, “The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Mount Sinai. The Lord did not make this covenant with our ancestors, but with all of us who are alive today. At the mountain the Lord spoke to you face to face from the heart of the fire.” What’s our take-away?
That Moses wanted to make it clear to the people he was talking to (and that includes us today) that God gave this covenant to “us.” Understand that the people he was addressing were, for the most part, not the ones who stood at the base of the mountain witnessing God first hand. Those people have already died, and it is their offspring listening to Moses now. It would be easy for them to say, those laws were given to “them,” not us. The law from God was given to them, and to us, and we are then given the responsibility to keep the commandments and pass them on to the next generation as if given directly to us. Cool huh?
