Daily Devotion, August 3, 2022

 

Devotion:

Read Exodus 23:14-19a.

Exodus tells the story of God’s leading the Hebrew people into the Promised Land and of God’s building a covenant relationship with the people. God builds this covenant relationship by establishing the laws which will help the people live fully, in peace, thriving in God’s care. Through the commandments we know as the Ten Commandments, God establishes first that they are to remember, to love and to worship God and to have no other gods.

"From Exodus 24:7’s referral to the Book of Covenant, chapters 21-23 have come to be referred to as the Covenant Code or the Book of Covenant.” (The New Interpreter’s Bible, 1994)

Within this covenant relationship, the people are called to celebrate three festivals unto God: The Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year.

These festivals call the people to remember who God is. It is God who has provided for them. It is God who is present with them. It is God who gives them the promise of hope. And it is God and God only whom they are to worship.

Within these festivals the people are called to bring offerings and verse 19 says, “Bring the best of the first fruits of your soil to the house of the Lord your God.” This verse will be a theme throughout scripture and throughout all time for our covenant relationship with God.

God gives God’s own best, and God calls us to give our best. In our technological and industrial times, it might be difficult for us to understand the request of “first fruits” for offerings. But in their agricultural times, it was easily understood. There was even a greater good for the community if the first fruits were brought as offerings. The seeds of the first fruits were best for planting for the next crop.

God’s covenant relationship seeks the good for all of God’s creation. In Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Bishop Robert Schnase writes, “Giving is central to Jewish and Christian practices because people perceive God as extravagantly generous, the giver of every good gift, the source of life and love. People give because they serve a giving God.”

Personal Worship Option:

“Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not regretfully or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” 2 Corinthians 9:7