We are all familiar with the reply of Jesus to the lawyer who tempted him by asking, "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus replied (Matt. 22:37-40), "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
As those who wish to be considered the children of God we have to realize and to remember that God does not command aimlessly. Whatever he has commanded he expects to be obeyed by those who seek to approach unto him. It is written (Lev. 10:3), "I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all people I will be glorified". God does not ask the impossible, but he asks a great deal, and he furthermore expects the very best of our efforts in rising to that which is required. In commanding his people to love him with all the heart and soul and mind God has challenged the very best that we can bring forth.
If the command to love God so completely seems
extreme, let us remember that the basis for such a command is extreme. This
basis is the uniqueness of our relationship to God. We are his creatures, and
we belong to him. God has said (Ezek. 18:4), "Behold, all souls are mine;
as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine; the soul that
sinneth, it shall die". To whom else but God are we indebted for the possession
of life, of health, for the protection from harm? To whom else but God are we
indebted for the promise of eternal life and rulership with Christ in the age
to come? Who else but the Almighty is the perfection of goodness, holiness,
power, and love? In a word, there is no one who has loved us or could have
loved us in the way our Father in heaven has done. The command to love God with all the heart and soul and mind is
nothing more than the command to be decent enough to be grateful for the love
which he has bestowed upon us. As our Father and as our benefactor God has the
right to claim our gratitude, our praise, and our love. Of all the sins that men commit, none is
more reprehensible than the sin of ingratitude. A merciful God can and does forgive sins arising out of weakness,
but the ungrateful despiser of his goodness can never receive forgiveness.
Knowing, as we do, the goodness and the love of God
toward us, we should delight to say with David (Psa. 103:1-14), "Bless the
Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the
Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases;
who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness
and tender mercies; who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy
youth is renewed like the eagle's. The
Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed. He made
known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel. The Lord is
merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He will not
always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins;
nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the
earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east is
from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, so
the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth
that we are dust."
We cannot over-emphasize the importance of this
gratitude we owe to God. It must be the primary motivating force in our
religion. If God, the perfect, the pure, and the almighty can condescend to
look unto us the imperfect, the impure, the powerless and to give us such
generous blessings and glorious promises, why can we not return in our best but
feeble way a practical expression of love and thanks to him? It is such a sad
commentary upon the people of God, both past and present, that in spite of
their enlightenment they have taken for granted all his blessings and have not
rendered unto him the honor and the thanks which are sincere and acceptable in
the eyes of the Lord. The Scriptures abound with the miserable failures of the
children of Israel. They received God's very special care and blessings and
then proceeded to forget him. Moses testified of them (Deut. 32:15), "But
Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked . . . then he forsook God which made him, and
lightly esteemed the rock of his salvation". But Israelites are not unique
in this respect. It is ever the
tendency of the whole human family and a tendency which we must be ever alert
to detect in ourselves and to overcome.
God
has given us exceeding great and precious promises that by these we might be
partakers of the divine nature. In
these we should rejoice and give diligence to make our calling and election
sure. They should serve as a stimulus to serve God acceptably that we may not
fail. But, as we mentioned above, gratitude must be the primary motivating
element in our religion. To desire God's promised reward is necessary and
legitimate, but if the search for a reward is our only motivation in our
religion, we do not really love God and hence break the first and greatest
commandment. When God finds a man who will serve him, not primarily for the
hand-out he wants from God, but because he loves God for what God is and would
not be a selfish and thankless wretch in the eyes of Him who has blessed him;
there God finds a man after his own heart.
Before a man will work hard at something; before he
will put his heart into it; and above all, before he will sacrifice heavily for
it, he must be thoroughly convinced that the cause is worthy and serves a noble
purpose. You cannot call forth the best that is in men, merely by the lure of
pay. For example, your ten-dollar fees
are not purchasing for you any more faithful medical service than one dollar or
even only a promise to pay does from the faithful old country physician. Men will fight and even die for a principle
in which they believe passionately. It takes something more than a promise of a
reward to call forth the best that is in us.
It demands the elements of profound respect and devotion to a noble
purpose to make us sacrifice for the cause.
For
this reason we believe that we over-emphasize the element of reward in our
service to God. We repeat that the desire for the promised reward is necessary
and legitimate, but we have, to use a current expression, "brought people into
the truth" without teaching them the very first principle of truth which
is, "Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind". Furthermore, we fear that we have not always
set them a very good practical example to aid them in learning this most
essential doctrine. Some of us may
realize, even though we may not wish to confess it, that we have lived, perhaps
many years, in supposed fellowship with the Father and with his Son, Jesus
Christ, without walking in the true light of the love of God.
Though God has rich rewards to bestow. He is not
looking far bargain hunters. He can find plenty of them. Furthermore, he is not
looking for those merely seeking shelter from the terrors to come. John the
Baptist told the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matt. 3:7), "O generation of
vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth
therefore fruits meet for repentance: and think not to say within yourselves.
We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these
stones to raise up children unto Abraham." Neither the desire for a reward
nor the desire to escape from wrath to come is enough to bring forth true
repentance. True repentance is not a matter of making a shrewd calculation as
to just how much we are willing to give up in the way of worldly advantages in
order to avoid missing out on the rewards to be distributed later. A man is not truly repentant until he firmly
believes that God's way is the only right way, while his own way is wrong. He
is not truly repentant until he admires and loves God's way and desires to
order his life thereby.
It is our considered judgment that from the very
beginning we must teach those whom we can interest in the gospel that God is
looking only for those who desire to walk in God’s way. They should be taught
that God has a just claim on their services and affections; that it is an honor
and a great privilege to serve the living God and his beloved Son; that God is
not offering them a soft deal and a free pass to his kingdom and glory; but
rather an opportunity to prove through trial and suffering that they are
capable of loving in some measure as they have been loved; to prove that they
can rise above the things temporal and petty to the things eternal and
perfect. They must be taught that human
nature is unclean in God's sight and that we must strive to purify ourselves
even as our Master perfected himself, but that by expending our best efforts to
overcome our uncleanness. God will be pleased to make us truly clean after
resurrection and judgment.
There is more to the love of God than gratitude for
his temporal blessings and for his promise of reward in the age to come. God is
perfect in all his ways. His goodness
is not only something to be thankful for; it is something to be adored. Merely
to give intellectual assent to his goodness is not enough. We must worship the
Lord in the spirit of holiness. We should compare our own moral weakness with
his moral perfection and through meditation on this learn how to give him
reverence.
Love
is not as strange a thing to our natures as it may at first seem. In fact, we
humans, if we have normal intelligence and health, are a peculiar mixture of
love and hatred. The important question
is: What do we love and what do we hate?
This makes all the difference in the world. It is written (I Tim. 6:10),
"... the love of money is the root of all evil", yet we will all
agree that we are all capable of this love.
It is likewise written that in these last times (II Tim. 3:2,4), ".
. . men shall be lovers of their own selves . . . lovers of pleasure more than
lovers of God". We read also that "Solomon loved many strange
women". All of these loves come as naturally to us as loving to eat. These
loves can be cultivated and strengthened by their indulgence. But the fact that
these loves come naturally to us does not make them virtues, as the world would
have us to believe. Our loves are largely a matter of education, whether it be
an education upward to godliness or an education downward to slavery to the
flesh.
The fulfilling of this first and greatest commandment
is very much a matter of education; an education not obtainable in colleges and
universities but only through the diligent study of the only source of instruction
in God's way, the Holy Scriptures. It
requires an upward education of our affections; a learning to desire and to
love the things which are good; a learning to eschew and to hate those things
which are evil; an education in godliness and the things which pertain unto
God. Nothing substitutes for it, and
nothing else will perform this transformation of our affections. As the Apostle Paul wrote (Rom. 12:2),
". . . be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the
renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and
perfect, will of God".
This
transformation of our attitude, this education of our affections can only be
based upon knowledge, as is true with all forms of education. It cannot be
achieved through ignorance. There are some who think that all this insistence
on correct doctrine is wrong; that we really do not have to be too careful on
details; that if only we have love in our hearts, the doctrines will take care
of themselves. Such a view is sheer sentimentality and teeters precariously on
the brink of unbelief. Right actions
including right love are based upon right doctrine. Our actions can never be better than our doctrine, though it is
easily possible for our doctrine to be far better than our actions. There are, on the other side, some who
regard doctrine as the only thing of importance and who fail utterly to show by
their actions that they were ever acquainted with the command to love. Either
extreme is a gross error and provocative of confusion, amounting in either case
to a denial of the Lord and Master whom we serve. We must, therefore, be guided by knowledge in the education of
our affections.
The acquisition of knowledge is always a slow and
laborious process, particularly if it is the acquisition of the knowledge of
higher things. There is no royal road to learning. While education downward to lower things comes easily, like
drifting with the stream, education to higher things requires that we row
against the current, and that is exhausting.
Learning to love God comes to us neither under the stress of fear
inspired into our minds by others nor by the dread of the punishments God might
inflict upon us. God is not acceptably
served by cringing cowards. The love of God cannot come to us through dictation
or human legislation. No one can force
us to love God, and God himself will not force us to do so either. What would he want of our praise, of our
services, or of our offerings, if they did not come from our hearts?
It
follows from this that our refraining from committing sin and our doing of good
deeds are a sham and a mockery in God's sight unless our affections are
educated away from that which is evil and towards that which is good. If we do
not commit a sin merely because it may decrease our reward, we are no more
righteous than the person who decides not to buy the new car he wants, because
it would cost him too much money. Such a person is not a loving servant of God.
He is a hireling. He is thinking only in terms of what it may cost him,
and the possible loss of his reward is the deciding factor—not Joseph's
attitude (Gen. 39:9), "... how then can I do this great wickedness and sin
against God?" He who does admirable deeds and refrains from outward evil
in order to retain the respect of the community is not a righteous servant of
God. He may deceive men, but God is not
mocked. His actions spring from the love of the praise of men and not from a
love of God. The righteous in the sight of God are those who do good, not
through fear of punishment or of loss of a reward or of public opinion, but
because they abhor that which is evil and love that which is good. It was said
of Jesus (Heb. 1:9), "Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated
iniquity", and his Father therefore testified at his baptism, "This
is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased".
As
Christadelphians we are inclined to look with great favor upon ourselves
because we understand more of the plan and purpose of God than do our neighbors
about us. This is a dangerous thing to do, for when we measure ourselves by
ourselves and compare ourselves with ourselves, we are likely to come up with
some very warped conclusions. We have a standard to which all comparisons
should be related, and that standard shines forth unmistakably from the gospel
record. When he who set that standard said to the Pharisees and Sadducees (John
5:42), ". . . I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you" he
was not talking to men who had not searched the Scriptures. Jesus accused them of concluding from the
Scriptures that they had eternal life, the very Scriptures which testified of
him. Why did they not have the love of God in them? It was because they
lavished all their love upon themselves and their own traditions and had none
left for God. Their knowledge was a formal knowledge of written law embellished
with human tradition, but it had not educated their affections upward to the
love of God. Jesus quoted against them
the words of Isaiah (Matt. 15:8), "This people draweth nigh unto me with
their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me,
and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men". Our knowledge of the Scriptures is a
wonderful possession and a thing to be used as the carpenter does his
tools. But tools alone will not build a
house, and knowledge, if it be merely information, does not commend us to
God. If the law of God is not written
in our hearts, our acquaintance with it will profit us little. It is written
(Rom. 10:10), "For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and
with the mouth confession is made unto salvation". Note what the apostle says further on this
point (I Cor. 13:2,R.V.) "And
though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all
knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and
have not love, I am nothing".
Nothing, absolutely nothing! We are not here dealing in sentiment. We
are soberly and scripturally affirming first principles, the first and
greatest commandment.
The
Master said also to the lawyer that there is a second commandment like unto the
first which is, "Thou halt love thy neighbor as thyself". To the
world this commandment appeals far more strongly than the first, because it is
easier to do and appears to glorify man. They would be quite happy to dispense
with the first and to apply their own interpretation to the second.
Actually, the second commandment follows logically
from the first, for he who loves God will not hate those who belong to God. Is
it not written (John 3:16), "For God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have
everlasting life"? Likewise it is written (II Pet. 3:9) that God is
"not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to
repentance". They are his creatures, the works of his hands, and he would
have all of them to be saved, if only they would turn unto him. If the perfect
and pure Heavenly Father can love them and desire their salvation, can we who
are imperfect justly hate them? If we hate them, how shall we be able to teach
them to love and the way to eternal life? We may hate their works, as we must
hate all iniquity, but the creature belongs to God to deal with as he sees fit.
To love our neighbors as ourselves we understand to
mean to do unto them as we would that men should do unto us. This is nothing
more than to be consistent with our love of God and our efforts to live godly
lives. It gives us a chance to practice on a small scale, as it were, the love
we have toward God and to develop the godly virtues. How can we appreciate how
much God has forgiven us, if we do not practice forgiving those who wrong us or
fail to live up to what we expect of them? How can we appreciate God's
forbearance with our shortcomings if we do not bear patiently with the slights
and annoyances our brethren cause us? How can we know and appreciate the mercy
of God toward us, if we are unkind toward our brethren and fail to help them
when they are in need? How can we be pure in heart, if we suspect our brother
of all manner of error and evil intentions?
How can we be said to hunger and thirst after righteousness if we do not
set a good example for our brethren (and the world, too, for that matter) that
they may see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven? In short, to love our brother is but to
practice on what we can perceive through the senses of sight and hearing that
which we must become in an age which we can only perceive through the eye of
faith. As John so aptly stated (John 4:20), "If a man say, I love God, and
hateth his brother, he is a liar: for
he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he
hath not seen?" "On these two commandments", said Jesus,
"hang all the law and the prophets", or in the words of Paul (Rom.
13:10), "Love is the fulfilling of the law".
John S. Peake
The Christadelphian Advocate,
December 1954, pgs 265-270