LOVING GOD - A surprising command

Deuteronomy 6:4
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God [is] one LORD: 5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Mark 12:29
And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments [is], Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: 30 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.

Loving God is the central issue of our faith.

Before any religious duty, before any work for God can be done in earnest, we must Love God.

The extent of our expected love for Him is clear. We are to love Him in the totality of our being. Every aspect of our being is to love Him - with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might - we are to love Him with everything in us that can love.

It is interesting that the request to love is expressed in a command. In our culture we tend to say, “You cannot demand to be loved.” That is true in the sense that we cannot force a person to love us.

In fact, in the mystery of God’s desire to have love from creatures who could freely love Him, it seems He allowed them to also freely hate Him. I believe this is the mystery of where sin and as a result of sin all of the suffering in the world comes from.

Still God does not ask His children to love Him, he commands them to love Him.

Love is to be the foundation of all righteous actions. Without love, I Corinthians 13 tells us, all of our acts mean little or nothing. God wants to underline this as foundational.

John 15:9-13 
"Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 "If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide in His love. 11 "These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. 12 "This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. 13 "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.


In John 15 Jesus repeats the command to love from another perspective he says that if we love him we will do what he commands.

The Old Testament culture was so conditioned to believe that their actions made them righteous that they had to be commanded concerning their internal motivations to love God.

The New Testament culture was so conditioned to separate their motives from actions that they had to have the opposite message - you say you love God in your heart, it will show in your actions. In the late part of the first century this tendency had so grown that John had to say that if you say you love God but hate your brother you lie!

1 John 4:20 If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.  

The point of my thoughts today is first I need to constantly be checking how my culture impacts my thinking. That is not just the secular culture but the religious one. The idea of God commanding me to love Him is strongly outside what most of my religious culture teaches but it is clearly biblical.

Why would God command us to love Him? In the context of Mosaic Judaism it was to counter the force of idolatry. The constant theme of the Old Testament was the competition in the hearts of Israel between God and idols. We hardly can understand this.

The tendency to forsake God for images of wood and stone was the central reason for so much of what God spoke to Israel. They had seen the God of Wonders do miracles that defy imagination. Even while they were in front of a mountain that was ablaze with the Glory of God they were making a golden calf and worshipping it.

God commanded them to love Him for their own good. He knew the tenacity of their hearts to want a God made in their own heart's image of Him. A God of stone is so much easier to deal with than the living God.

We are pretty sure we are above all this because we do not often worship images. But by the time Jesus was giving his command to love a new point of departure from God was in place. It was as tenatious as any prior. The doing of God's bidding grew to be more important than knowing Him. And the knowing of Him, while supposedly connected to every act of life was disconnected from loving others. 

They had moved from worshipping stone to having hearts of it. 

God was no longer an image to be manipulated He was a means to escape the responsibility of loving your neighbor as yourself.

Fast forward to today. We no longer worry about the command to love..... in fact we embrace it whole heartedly. But as children of post modernism we take the power out of God's radical claim on our lives by simply changing the meaning of the words He uses. 

That is why I believe He has had to command each generation to love Him. That is why He has had to say it differently to each generation as well. 

The human heart has not really changed so much but its way of continuing to have its own way in the face of the Almighty has. 

Today God wants me to know that when I say I love Him it does not mean I have a nice feeling inside towards Him and it ends there. His call to love is a radical call to full surrender of myself in every aspect of my life, thought, will, emotions and spirit to Him. He shows me by the call to follow Jesus to the cross to die to myself and live to Him that I am no longer my own.

He challenges me with His claim of ownership - that I am bought with a price - His own possession purchased by the blood of His Son - to let me know that I no longer have any rights to my own life. 

This directly confronts the essence of all the idolatrous movements of the human heart since time began. An Idol is a God we own. The living God is the one who owns us. 

When He commands me to love Him he is not giving me the option to remain in charge of my own life. He is making clear that it is not "if I feel like it", or "if I would like to" I might consider the benefits of loving Him. He is saying that He has the right of ownership of me. I am really not my own.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.