Sin to Love a Fellow Person with all your heart

 
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 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 said that we are to love God as a person with all our hearts. That means we do everything for God alone. We love God with all our hearts. Our neighbour is not to be loved with all our hearts. Neither are we to love ourselves that way.
 
So we are to love God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength and all our minds. And the God that is to be loved this much is the God of Israel. Jesus makes that plain. He said first that there was only one God and Lord and that was the God Israel knew. This was God as revealed in the Old Testament. By implication, you cannot honour this God without being a Jewish believer. At that time, there was no Christianity yet and Jesus had not separated from Judaism. Christians believe in Judaism and regard their own religion as the continuation of Judaism. They think the Jews rejected the changes to the religion authorised by Christ.
 
When the greatest commandment of morality is to love God, it follows that no rule at any time is ever more important than it. It is more important to love God than to save lives. Saving lives would not be holy unless you do it with love for God. (It’s loving God that matters and if you feel God is inspiring you to let the people die for some mysterious purpose of his then that is what you have to do.) From this we see that it is being claimed that there is no morality unless you believe in God and the stronger your faith is the more you can describe yourself as righteous for then the more you can intend to do good and promote morality. If you have a weak faith and help a person out of love for God it follows that this act is not that good because your faith in the authority that commands it and makes it right is not strong. Anybody who does not believe in God and who claims to be a good person is really the most dangerous viper you could meet. To love God we must first believe so to love him more and more we must work to increase our faith. The more you believe the more you will love. These are the dangerous implications.
 
There can be no room for the idea that Jesus' command that we must engage in loving God above all things and loving him alone simply means that you do the right thing even if your mother/father or husband/wife or son/daughter want you to do wrong. It does mean that but does not mean simply that. If it did, Jesus would simply say, "Do the right thing regardless of who opposes you." That he brought God into it shows he did not simply mean that. If Jesus simply meant that we put doing right first then what did he bother confusing us with the God talk then for? Jesus meant that we are to adore and cherish God not just obey him. You are commanded to be devastated at blasphemy against God more than the murder of your own child. If the child is murdered, the disobedience to God rather than the death of the child or his suffering is what should bother you. This was Jesus' twisted thinking.
 
If you want to do right, and you give into the evil wishes of your loved one, you are not really loving that person at all. And you must make it clear to them that it is not about doing right only, but also about doing the will of God.
 
To say that you are to love doing right more than a person makes no sense.
 
Christians may delude themselves that Jesus only means put doing right above the wishes of your nearest and dearest. He means that yes but more than that. It would be strange to bring God into it. You must defy loved ones to do the right thing whether there is a God or not. Bringing God into it implies that there is no chance of intending to do the right thing unless you do it in obedience to him.
 
So loving God alone demands doing what God says is right whether you understand it or not.
 
Aquinas taught that faith is a gift from God. Its motive is God, its source is God, its goal is God (page 36, CATHOLICISM, Richard P McBrien, HarperSanFrancisco, New York, 1994). Faith then acknowledges that God alone matters. Naturally if there is a God he will help you to believe in him by being in your heart elevating your intellect above its natural inclinations and abilities to realise that he probably exists. Belief in God implies that God alone is to be loved. It is a sin then to love any person with all your heart unless that person is God.
 
 
 
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