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The message of salvation is not lost in what Moses is telling the Israelites. While God’s grace provides us freedom from sin, out of our love for God, we must work to keep His commandments and show honor to Him. Deuteronomy 6:17-18 says, 17 Be sure to keep the commands of the Lord your God and the stipulations and decrees he has given you. 18 Do what is right and good in the Lord ’s sight, so that it may go well with you and you may go in and take over the good land the Lord promised on oath to your forefathers. The key phrase in verse 18 is “so that it may go well with you”. It’s not about salvation, it’s about perseveration of who God wants us to be so we may be blessed in this life by Him.
Daily Devotion 
But I think it is important to not forget that we can’t keep these commandments. That it is only through a relationship or “companionship with Jesus” (Father Greg Boyle illustrates this amazingly) that we even have an ability to live out these commandments. The point is that the more we hang out with Jesus the more we automatically act like him.
And I am always struck by the fact that God made an agreement with his people in the form of the 10 commandments. No other ‘god’ had ever done that. It was his first major step towards coming down to us on our level. We must remember that we are reading the Old Testament with the understanding of a God who physically came to our planet to rescue us. This was completely foreign to the Hebrews. They’d just spent 400 years (that’s longer than we’ve been an official country) in slavery in one of the most polytheistic cultures in history. That’s what they knew. The thought of only serving one God and having that God make a covenant with them, get involved with them on a personal level, show up in a burning bush, and a cloud and fire…that was almost too much for them. But God never stopped trying to woo his people. He went at a pace that, yes, challenged them, but also did not bowl them completely over. And if he is a God who doesn’t change, that means he is still doing that today, and we need to keep our eyes open to see it.
Yes, that is an excellent point. Without a relationship with Christ that transforms us, we can not keep God’s commandments. I think we are saying the same thing. I just wanted to make the point that His commands are still there for a purpose and not to be forgotten or discarded because of our freedom through grace.
Ah ha! Yes. You are right on, my friend.