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a ketubah , a contract for the loving, and your God gives these Ten Commandments for the living out of love.
    The Ten Commandments are more than God saying, “Here is My Law for you” —they are God saying, “Here is My love for you.”
    Here, I take you to be Mine, to be My treasured possession —have no other gods, no other lovers that woo you, that take your attention or affection, but Me.
    Here, I give you My name, my very name to make you mine —do not use it in vain.
    Here, I long to spend time with you, holy time for you and Me —set apart the Sabbath day as holy time for you and Me.
    Here, I love you, bride —be united, not coveting or lying or stealing or murdering or cheating one another, but honoring and loving and living out of our love.
    And three times the Israelites say yes, this we will do —we do, we do, we do.
    God gives His people this gift, these two tablets of stone with His handwritten commitment to love, and He aches. “Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands.” Oh, that their hearts . . . Oh, that  —this expression of unfulfilled longing in the Hebrew. God longs: “Oh, that your heart would obey me not because of Law, but because of love.” God knows how we say I do —but don’t. God longs that our hearts would be inclined to be in wonder and in awe of Me, enraptured by Me —that is what fear means in the original Hebrew. God knows how we say we wonder and we worship —but we don’t.
    God knows we wander, and He woos again and again, all through the commandments: “I am the Lord Your God, the Lord Your God, the Lord Your God.” You are mine. Make me Yours.
    Am I Yours?
    God gives the Ten Commandments as more than Law —He gives them as a true commitment to love. God gives the Law —because He wants there to be love.
    He gives his plea: “Oh, that you would obey Me —that’s you giving Me love, and that’s Me giving you love because this commandment to relationship fulfills your longings and your love and your being.”
    The Ten Commandments are a command to relationship.
    To love vertically, to love horizontally, to love relationship —and it’s not a suggestion.
    Oh, that.
    God’s unfulfilled longing spills through time.
    Till a voice echoes over Jerusalem: “O that at this time thou hadst known —yes even thou —what makes peace possible!” (Luke 19:42, WEY).
    Jesus.
    Jesus, the Love who seven days later went to the Cross to fulfill the unfulfilled, to pay the price for our broken love like we never could, to love God for His unbroken love like we never have.
    Jesus, the Love who hangs on a Tree, who cries out our yes to the covenant: “My God, my God.” Yes, You aremine. I am Yours. Yes, You are the Lord my God, the Lord my God, the Lord my God. Jesus, the Love who doesn’t just die the death we deserved to die; He lives the love we’ve desired to live.
    God gives the commandments to us —and God gives God to keep the commandments for us. God gives us the commitment of love at the top of Sinai, and He staggeringly keeps our commitment to love at the top of Calvary.
    Who needs more than being loved to death?
    “Love is the greatest thing God can give us, for himself is love,” writes seventeenth-century theologian Jeremy Taylor. “And [love] is the greatest thing we can give to God, for it will also give ourselves. . . . The apostle calls [love] the bond of perfection. It is the old, and it is the new, and it is the great commandment, and it is all the commandments, for it is the fulfilling of the law.” [12]
    God gives God —and Jesus fulfills all the Law, all our love.
    Stars will come in the night sky, shimmer somewhere. Advent will keep coming, this love story that never stops coming. Love like this could make us wonder. Somewhere, carols play.
    They say that to this day Jews dance when the Ten Commandments are recited. Wooing love that makes the feet and the lights dance and the beloved