Greatest Commandments
False worldviews demonstrate God’s sovereignty
Jesus said the great and foremost commandment was “…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…” (Matt. 22:37). It’s a restatement of the sense of the first four of the Ten Commandments, which deal with man’s obligation to God. Those who love God won’t honor false gods or idols or take God’s name in vain. Rather, they will love him, worship him, and glorify him as the One and only true God.
To love God above all else is man’s greatest obligation and the means to the fulfilled life. Jesus’ calling the commandment foremost also reflects the centrality of God to all that exists. Unless you’re rightly connected to God, the center, nothing else will be right.
Like us, the lost are bound by God’s immutable moral law to love him. They can’t create a true new moral law that takes him out of the picture. How then are they to express their hatred for him and at least by pretense claim the high moral ground of righteousness?
They simply reverse God’s moral law, creating a false moral law that says, “You shall hate the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Though the law is unwritten, it is shouted in everything they do.
It’s the basis for all false worldviews. In particular, it’s what leads some in our postmodern and secular humanist culture to hatefully attack God and Christians, all the while claiming to be loving, tolerant people, doing right. When they call Christians ignorant, intolerant bigots and God a monster they are honoring their greatest commandment.
Their lie that they don’t believe God exists is a way to show ultimate distain for him and his people. Don’t be deceived by their rhetoric. Only the insane could so hate something or someone they didn’t believe existed. They know he exists and they hate him. They reverse the greatest commandment in order to express their hatred of God to his face. All else is a ruse.
Jesus said the second greatest commandment was “like” the greatest commandment. It was, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). This is a restatement of the sense of the last six of the ten commandments, which deal with man’s obligation to others.
It’s like the greatest commandment not only because it involves love, but also because it’s part of the outworking of obeying the greatest commandment and the fact of the universal centrality of God. Since there’s no true love apart from God’s love, we must first love God before we can rightly love others. If we truly love God we will love others–we can’t help it.
Taken in the most restrictive sense, the command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” means you should love others at least as much as yourself. The full counsel of the Bible teaches us to go further, to put others interests ahead of our own (Phil. 2:3-5). The world changes the command to “You shall love yourself.” It teaches us to put ourselves first in everything, looking out for our own bests interests, not allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of, and demanding our full rights in all cases.
The two greatest commandments, to love God and others, flow from the principled of love. The same principle is behind all other laws. We’ll see that with our next example of moral laws, those involving the sanctity of life.