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A Covenant of Care

Exodus 19.2-8a

In the Bible God is revealed as a ‘covenant’ God. A covenant can come across as transactional, ‘If you do this for me, I’ll do that for you’: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant…” If!

I don’t think it's really intended in that sense here in Exodus. I think the covenant is envisaged as being more like an ‘undertaking’ or ‘pledge’ or ‘promise’. ‘If you do this, I won’t let you down!’

But obedience isn’t necessarily the real emphasis of this passage. Nicholas King points out that ‘if you obey my voice’ is only one way of understanding the Hebrew text in verse 5. Another way of translating the same expression is, ‘If you are really going to hear my voice’. In other words it could be about listening. “If you really listen to me I will be able to make you special.”

In the context of discipleship the covenant promise is both a wonderful gift and a huge responsibility, an invitation and a challenge. If we really listen to God we have the potential to become special people, God’s treasured possession. 

God will bear us up on eagle’s wings, a beautiful image of tenderness and care. (It was believed at the time that eagles taught their fledglings to fly by carrying them on their wings high up into the sky where they could learn to glide down on thermal currents of air.) But this loving care and support in turn confers upon us the responsibility of becoming priestly and holy - representing God’s love and grace to other people and being special to God by asking him to help us live and behave in his special way.

The people said to Moses, ‘Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do.’ The Greek version of the Old Testament adds, ‘And we shall listen’.

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