LOVE GOD ONLY COMMANDMENT IS A BURDEN
The New Testament is clear that Heaven is about a relationship with God so you
can only go there if you love God not for anybody not for you but for him.
Your love for him is about him and your gift to him. God is said to be the
maker of all we have and are so God by definition is really alone what matters.
Paul in the letter to the Philippians chapter 3 tells us what that means. It
means that nothing can happen that can match or outweigh a relationship with
Jesus who is worth the loss of everything for compared to him everything is
rubbish.
If you worship God because of what you think he should do for you that is not really worship. It is one-sided and all about you. You won't evangelise for God and when life goes bad you turn against him. It is not the same as you loving God for he loves you. You can love him for how he views you but that is different from wanting bikes, career and holidays from him. Loving God for he loves you and not for any benefit is an imperfect relationship with God.
For Christians, Jesus Christ is the infallible voice of
God and the Son of God. If his major doctrine is untrue then we must dismiss him
as yet another religious fraud.
Jesus when he was asked what the greatest commandment of morality was replied as
follows.
“The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one
Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and will all thy
soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first
commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31,
King James Bible).
There is no room in this for thinking, "Okay they are the same commandment.
Loving God above all is a metaphor for loving your neighbour as yourself. If you
obey the command to love neighbour you automatically keep the first
commandment." If that were correct we would be reading, "“The first of all the
commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and will all thy soul, and with all
thy mind, and with all thy strength which is to say, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than this” (Mark
12:29-31, King James Bible). Or in the light of the fact that there would be no
need to mention God, we would be told, “The first of all the commandments is,
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment
greater than this” (Mark 12:29-31, King James Bible).
Jesus said, "There is none other commandment greater than these”. They are
inseparable but they are not one commandment. And we must remember that the
command to love God in the law is given the status of a core teaching. It is
emphasised. The command to love one's neighbour however is not. It appears as if
by accident where it could be easily missed.
What the Church means by saying that the two commandments go together is that
God wants you to do good for your neighbour so if you really love God you will
put it into practice by serving others. Loving your neighbour is essential in
the sense that it means demonstrating and proving and practicing the love of
God. The logic is that actions speak more than words. Serving your neighbour is
practically speaking all about God and doing his will. If you do good for your
mother-in-law not for her but for your wife, it is all about your wife no matter
how much the mother-in-law benefits. Love of neighbour refers to how you treat
your neighbour not how you value her or him.
The two commandments though inseparable cannot be equal in value because one
commands that God be loved more than anybody including yourself as in love him
totally and the other says love your neighbour as yourself. You cannot love
yourself wholly or another wholly and love God wholly. Remember Jesus was asked
what the greatest commandment was and he said it was to love God. He was not
asked for the next greatest but gave it anyway. If you cannot keep both, you
have to keep the commandment to love God alone. If it hurts others then tough!
If you love God totally, then you are only to work for the wellbeing of your
neighbour (love) in so far as he commands it and solely because he commands it.
Jesus is saying we must love God not with some of our energy, most of our energy
but ALL our energy. In other words, everything we do must be solely motivated by
what pleases God. It is all about pleasing him. When you help the sick, it is not
done to help the sick but to honour God. It is done for God.
To say you must love God with all your powers is to automatically make this the
main rule and the greatest commandment for you are being told to sacrifice all
to God. Accordingly, that is very serious and heavy stuff. A rule concerning the
love due to such a supremely good being would have to be the greatest rule for
that being is the greatest. Since loving God alone is the greatest commandment
according to Jesus, the Son of God (Mark 12:29,30) to undermine and fail to
teach this commandment is the greatest sin.
The Jews were right to make sure that reminders containing the text of the
commandment were stuck up everywhere so the Christians not following suit shows
that nearly all of them are under divine wrath for the commandment is so serious
and so difficult that one cannot be allowed to forget it even for an hour. The
commandment is part of what Jews call the Shema. The failure of the apostles to
make sure the Shema was exalted to a prime place in the symbolism and literature
and worship of the Church indicates that they were heretics. If the apparitions
of Jesus and Mary were real they would recite the Shema first thing every time
they appear so they are either empty spaces or demons. The Shema implies you
must have an appropriate view of God - a God who is worthy of that devotion. The
god of the Mormons then would have to be out for being only an exalted man he
would not be entitled to all that devotion. So the Shema requires you to be an
expert on the nature of God both intellectually and spiritually.
Those who are not experts will not be saved. Deathbed conversions are no good
unless the dying person is an expert. Believers with little faith and Atheists
and Agnostics are committing the greatest evil possible, not preaching and
living out the Shema. It would be madness to execute murderers and not kill them
or at least dump them in dungeons and persecute them. The Law of the Land needs
credibility to have authority and if we undermine that we should be destroyed or
persecuted for we are opposing the Law and bringing trouble on it. Every sin is
against the greatest commandment. It is declaring yourself independent of this
commandment despite its greatness. Therefore every sin is grievously wrong.
Every sin no matter how slight we think it is, has only the eternal punishment
of Hell as it’s due.
If we love God with all our hearts, we will be unable to love the person who
hates or works to harm God. You cannot love the person who is about to murder
your wife. If you do then you do not love her. You do not care much for her
wellbeing. We will hate God's enemy if we love God a lot. We will hate the enemy
completely if we love God. To love God totally means, "I am completely for God's
well-being and nobody else's".
Some seem to equate loving God with merely obeying what he asks. But this is not
loving him. Love is a relationship and not just mere obedience. A wife can
disobey her husband and love him and may disobey because she loves.
If God is pure love and you are in a relationship with him, you will serve him
because you want what he wants and not because he commanded it.
One thing is for sure, the sort of God that commands you to love him is
certainly saying all that matters is obedience.
Yet we are told that Christianity is not at its core about ethics or morals or
values. It is about loving God and what he has revealed. Thus loving God does
not mean merely keeping his commandments. Loving God is shown by doing his will
but that does not mean that is what it is all about. To say that our morals
which are so important to us are not as important as God is to admit that God
alone is to be loved. How? Because our morals help us form a community in which
people support each other and engage with one another. Even that does not matter
in comparison to God.
FINALLY
To love is to give a person what they need but God has no
needs. Thus to love God is an oxymoron. Those who say they love God are
lying and fooling each other. God religion asks people to love God and few
even try. The religion is to blame for any evil that happens for it asks
something basic and not only basic but stupid or impossible. It is as good
is thriving on NOT loving God though you are led to believe that you SHOULD.
That is no foundation for morality.
The doctrine that we are to love God alone gives you a way of being a sociopath
without seeming to be. The believer has the kind of faith that will demean
others even if it does not seem to do much harm.
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