Moses is still on the plains of Moab, still preaching the long sermon that is Deuteronomy. By chapter 10 he has rehearsed the golden calf, the second tablets, and the Levites' setting apart. Then he stops and asks the question every covenant people eventually has to answer: what is actually being asked of us? The audience is a second generation, born in the wilderness, about to inherit a land their parents forfeited. Moses is not loading them down. He is telling them the size and shape of the yoke before they pick it up — and that the yoke is for their good.

From the writers we read together

Carmen Joy Imes

Old Testament scholar, author of Bearing God's Name

Imes has spent her career arguing that Sinai is not a legal contract Israel had to pass to stay in God's good graces. Sinai is the wedding. The commandments are how a freed people learn to live like the bride of the God who freed them — how they bear his name in the world without dragging it through the mud. Deuteronomy 10:12 is the verse where Moses pulls the camera back and shows what he has been describing all along. Fear, walk, love, serve, keep. Five verbs that fit on one breath. They are not five hurdles. They are one life.

What guards us from legalism here is the last clause: for your good. Imes insists that the Torah is gift before it is demand, and that reading it any other way distorts both God and us. The commands describe the kind of creature a human being was made to be in covenant with the living God. To fear him is to stand in the right size. To walk in his ways is to stop wandering. To love and serve him with all the heart is to finally be undivided. The yoke is real. It is also the only yoke that fits.