Commandments and Motive

Love one another.  Jesus commanded a bunch of stuff, but this one was to have top priority.  Don't believe me?  Listen to what He said:

Matt 22:36 " Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" 37 Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. ' 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it:'You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ' 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

Wow.  Jesus just summed up the entire basis of Judaism.  You may want to disagree but I think what Jesus said is pretty clear.  Let's take a look at the word translated here as "hang":  kremannymi.  It translates as "to suspend from" or "to sum up".  So Jesus was saying that loving God with all of you and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the entire Mosaic tradition?  The 10 Commandments were not about do's and don'ts but were about love?

OK, but how do we get from being fallen and wicked to being able to love God and our neighbor?  It still seems like I have to strive for something or work hard at something in order to "love" God.  I mean, how do you love something you can't see?  This is where John comes in pretty handy.  The apostle John clears it all up quite nicely, I believe:

1 John 5:19 We love Him because He first loved us.

God is not some harsh taskmaster who is deeply disgruntled at how naughty His wayward children are.  He is merciful and kind.  The irony of Jesus' commandment to love one another was that He was the very model of that love.  He made it abundantly clear that He was the express image of The Father.  He even said,

John 13:34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.

He provided the model of love.  His entire life and ministry had a single purpose:  to reveal the love of The Father.  His death and resurrection had a purpose of rescue and reconciliation but His life and ministry served only to show us that God loves us and just how we ought to love.

Now, back to the 10 Commandments.  While I realize that The Law and Prophets goes far beyond the 10 Commandments, they are a good place to see the Love Is Everything commandment in action.  If God never changes (He said so) then LOVE must have been His motive in everything He commanded before Christ.  Let's take a look at that.

1.  Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.
This one is obvious.  If we see how He loves us, loving Him will be a natural response.

2.  Thou shalt not worship idols.
This one is less obvious.  He knows that only He can fill the need we all have deep within us.  Only His love can sustain us.

3.  Thou shalt not take the LORD's Name in vain.
When you love someone, you never use their name or speak of them in any manner other than love.

4.  Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Spend time with Him.  When you love someone, you set aside time just to spend with them.

5.  Honor thy father and thy mother.
If you love your parents, honor will be a natural part of how you interact with them.

6.  Thou shalt not kill.
God made each of us in His image.  If you love God, you can't help but love His children.  Murder isn't even on your radar if you love God.

7.  Thou shalt not commit adultery.
The love and intimacy you can get from another human being pales in comparison to what you get from love and intimacy with God.  Adultery is an expression of the lack of God in your heart.  When we love God, we no longer seek fulfillment from people.

8.  Thou shalt not steal.
The love of God fills us.  When we know that love, we lack nothing.  There is no desire to steal when you lack nothing.

9.  Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Lies are one of the purest expressions of selfishness.  Selfishness is driven by lack.  When we love God, we lack nothing because having His love is everything.  There is no reason to lie when you have love.

10.  Thou shalt not covet.
The love of God leaves no empty spaces in us.  Our eyes can go across our neighbor and all his stuff and see only joy for what our neighbor has.  When love from a filled heart is our primary perspective, we have need of nothing and therefore covet nothing.

The Israelites had a chance for direct relationship with God when He invited them up on the mountain to commune with Him.  They were too afraid and said (this is a bit of a cheeky paraphrase), "Uh, no thanks, LORD.  Can we just have you talk to Moses and then Moses can give us laws or something?"  After Moses talked God out of some serious smiting, God said (another bad paraphrase incoming): "You want laws?  You asked for it!"  Yet the Israelites, even after 2,000 years with the laws didn't get their true meaning and purpose:  love.

Jesus makes this point plain when correcting those who mocked Him for choosing Matthew as a disciple:

Matt 9:13 But go and learn what this means:'I desire mercy and not sacrifice. ' For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."

The quote in bold is from Hosea 6:6 where God is telling Israel that He would rather they know Him than sacrifice animals to Him.

Over and over again in scripture, both  new and old testament, we see God, a Father, who longs to "gather His people to Him likes a mother hen would her chicks".  His motive was love from the very first millisecond of creation and has never changed.  What if we were to be bold enough to set aside everything but love?  What would that look like?  What if we saw so keenly the way He loves us that we were suddenly so driven by love that we found ourselves without sinning?  What if lack of sin was never the goal?  What if love was always the goal?  What if...