BIBLE SAYS LOVE GOD ALONE
 
JESUS SAID WE MUST LOVE GOD ALONE
 
If God comes first, he comes last if he doesn’t exist.
 
Jesus said that we must love nothing for its own sake but for God's and love God 100%.
 
Small wonder that Jesus' apostle, Paul, said the same thing but in a different way. Read Philippians 3 and observe how Paul detached his heart from all things but Christ despite doing good for people and living in the world.
 
8 I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in[a] Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. 10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.
 
For Christians, Jesus Christ is the infallible voice of God and the Son of God. If his doctrine is untrue then we must dismiss him as yet another religious fraud. And he should be dismissed on the spot if it's a major doctrine that is false.
 
Jesus when he was asked by a Jewish scholar, a scribe, 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 with 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).

[Jesus would have known of how King Josiah butchered any faith that taught different from him.  He murdered the priests of the false gods.  2 Kings 23:25 praises him for this saying he was incredible in how he loved God with all his heart and strength in concord with the demands of the Law of Moses.  Do you see now what Jesus means?  This king would have been brainwashed by the law and particularly the blood-drinking book of Leviticus.]

[Jesus would have known of another occurrence of the greatest commandment at Deuteronomy 13:3,5.  There God says that God sends prophets and dreamers who are fakes to test if you believe and love God with all your heart and soul and so on.  This text shows that part of loving God is refusing any doctrine that God has not spoken.  And as human nature prefers its own religion and doctrine to God's the fake must be destroyed by capital punishment.  This verifies how love of God comes first and love of neighbour comes second for the false prophet has to be slain instead of being rendered incapable of influencing anyone.  This text seems to be the reason why Jesus ranked the love of God first and love of neighbour second and even then love of neighbour is all about doing it for God.]
 
Notice that the command urges that only one God is to be adored. This is to emphasise that only one Lord God is to be served. God alone is to be served. The command to love God is the most important one meaning that, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself", should be all about persuading your neighbour to love God alone. Read Chapter 22 of On Christian Doctrine by St Augustine. Wily Christianity largely ignores this for it's not good for the popularity or the coffers.
 
Some say the reason the commandments above are the greatest is because they are the basic ones - every other commandment is just a different way of obeying them. The two commandments then in a sense contain or imply all the other commandments. But if there is a pile of commandments and you are asked the greatest you will pick out the most important ones - not necessarily the ones that contain all the other commandments. The first greatest is definitely the one that contains all the others including love your neighbour. Love your neighbour is just the best out of the rest, the first commandment aside.
 
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. This is not hyperbole because you can't talk that way in giving commandments and laws. Plus there are people in religion who try to love God and nobody else and not even themselves! Would Jesus want to confuse? Also, if God is perfectly good and the source of all that we have it follows that all our love should be given to him. To give any love to another, even a little, is taking from him. He is entitled to all the love and honour in us. Simple!
To love God totally is the most important commandment. Therefore to break it is the greatest sin.
Jesus indicated that we cannot love God and money equally but must hate one and love the other. For him, to love anything other than God was an act of malice. It shows that love of money for him really meant service of money. So love your neighbour as yourself does not imply we are allowed to feel love for him.
 
Christianity doesn’t see suffering as totally bad like the sane do. It says God lets people suffer for a purpose so it’s not all bad and sometimes people should wish for it. This is the notorious Jesus doctrine that God alone is to be cared about ultimately and in helping others the only real motive is to please God. That is a call to suffer for you have to battle against your wish to put yourself and your loved ones first.
 
Jesus advocated laying down your life for others. He was not talking about the motive. The motive is that you do it for God alone. In the practical sense, you lay your life down for others. That shows that love your neighbour as yourself is not an unconditional commandment. The unconditional commandment then is to love God alone. And suppose others do come first. Then surely God is to be loved far beyond them? The apostle Paul decreed in 1 Corinthians 10 that people must copy his example and be anxious for the advantage of everybody else and not themselves so that the people they help may be saved. If you are to care about others to that impossible degree then imagine how much love you must give God by way of obligation!
 
Jesus embraced little children saying, "Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me" (Mark 9:37). He is showing that he means welcoming a person in the loose sense. Strictly speaking it is only God that is to be welcomed. That is how the seeming contradiction between loving God alone and loving neighbour is reconciled. He is clear that he does not mean, "Whoever receives a child does not just receive the child but receives me too". "Receiveth not me", makes that plain.
 
Two become one!
 
Pope Benedict XVI said in 2012 that the two great commandments are actually just the one commandment. Jesus himself said that they were TWO commandments. He even said that the first, which was to love God as Lord with the fullness of your being was the greatest commandment and declared that the other one was secondary in importance. He described them as "these" meaning two separate commandments. You can love your mother without loving the rest of her children. It is not true that love God alone means love your neighbour as yourself. Love for God is about serving and valuing God and love for neighbour is not about serving or valuing your neighbour but about doing good to them to please God. Pleasing God may coincide with pleasing them but your goal is to please God by pleasing them. It is all about God. You look after your neighbour as yourself but only for the sake of God and out of obedience to him.
 
The two commandments go together. The apostle John said that if you do not love your brother who you can see you do not love the God you cannot see. 

Paul in Romans 13 says that love is the one thing that cannot hurt another person and that is why it is the answer to every one of the commandments.  So this is saying that even the commandment to love God most of all or totally cannot hurt your neighbour.  This reminds us of John’s doctrine that if you hate your neighbour you do not love God period.

Here are some verses from 1 John 4.
 
We love because he first loved us.
 
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
 
And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
 
Reason says you can love one person and not another. But reason also says that if God makes people out of pure love, it is an insult to him to hate anybody or do harm to them. What this means is that valuing God is impossible unless you value what he does. It is all back to God. The brother has to be valued not for himself but as God's creation.
 
1 John 5
New International Version (NIV)

5 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. Means Jesus. It does not say that you must love people for they are God’s children. 2 This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. This is careful to say that valuing others is really only about valuing God and treating them as God would treat them. 3 In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, One command is that we must love God with all our hearts so it is not mere obedience that is meant. 4 for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. 5 Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

FF Bruce understood John to be saying that whoever does not love is not a bad Christian but is not a Christian at all. If the love of God comes first or alone matters then there are no Christians! FF Bruce did not mean that you must not love at all if you are to be classed as outside the Christian fold. It is enough if you fail to love God who matters or if you fail to love a single person.
 
 
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT OF THE DECALOGUE
 
The Bible is claimed by the Church to have been authored by God through men. They have to accept its teaching as true to be Christians.
 
Christianity claims to agree with the Bible, God and Jesus that we have to love God with all our power and love others as ourselves just for his sake (Matthew 22:37) and that these commandments are the root of Christian morality and they sum it up. Strictly speaking, we are to love him alone.
 
The first commandment of the famous 10 Commandments forbade anybody to adore anything in Heaven or earth apart from God himself. When you can’t put anything in front of God it follows you can’t even partly put anything in front of him either. If you love God and love another person for themselves and not for God it follows that you are blocking God out as far as you do that. You only love for God’s sake which means in the final analysis you don’t love the person but just God. The commandment excludes adoring something in God’s place. It excludes adoring a god as a lesser god than God which would imply that any god is a servant of God who uses his influence with God for you. It excludes any rationalisation that to honour the god is to honour God through him. Even if that god is an angel who really exists it is a sin. This tells us that God wants to be loved ALONE for he will not even tolerate our loving an angel but wants all the love and wants the love for the angel to be an expression of love for himself so it is not love for the angel. So its all about God.
 
Love is worship so it follows that if we love God and others then we worship many gods.
 
 
finally
 
Jesus said that we must love God with all our heart - the heart being the symbol of the affections and emotions. We must be passionately and insanely in love with God. He means that if God wants us to suffer to the extreme for love we must do it. We would just reason, "He has a purpose for it" and get on with it. And if we find an opportunity to make it possible we must take it. We must be more concerned about finding the opportunity than about anything else. This tells us that such a sacrifice is to be praised and not only praised but encouraged! Loving God the way the God belief suggests you should implies that you are suffering from some addiction. You turn away from loving others and yourself to love a concept. What you don’t see is put before the people you do see. To serve others while valuing God and not them is to manipulate and fool and trick them.
 
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