The First Commandment and the Beauty of God
In the gospels, Jesus sums up the entirety of the Law of Moses in one command. In doing so, He gives us the essence of Christianity and the ultimate statement of what it is that our heavenly Father wants to produce in our lives. In one command, all of humanity is given the “measuring rod” that redefines what truly matters. Life, success and significance must now be defined by our ability to love God.
In the Law of Moses, the command to Israel was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus declares, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). In the gospels of Mark and Luke, Jesus states that we shall love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (see Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27). In each gospel, Jesus follows His initial declaration with the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” He both summarizes Yahweh’s command, given through Moses, to love God by keeping His charge, statutes, judgments and commandments (see Deuteronomy 11:1), and He makes a critically important point—one that defines our lives and shapes our destinies. The point is this: Apart from obeying His commands, it is impossible to fulfill the commandment to love God. His commands serve the express purpose of directing our lives toward loving the people around us. It is therefore impossible to succeed at loving God wholeheartedly without loving the people around us who populate our lives.
Jesus added another key point to this commandment when He established it as “the first and great commandment” (Matthew 22:38, emphasis added). This commandment is to be understood as the one that takes highest priority as the Holy Spirit works in our lives, since love for God is the primary thing the Spirit wants to bring forth in us by grace and the work of His power. This new, highest of priorities now goes beyond redefining success; it establishes our life purpose and essential meaning. If work, family life, material goods and even ministry itself (and ministries themselves) do not contribute to, promote and in some way help produce a life flowing with love for Jesus in every measure of our heart, our soul, our thoughts and our time, energy and money, then those pursuits are essentially meaningless. We are answerable at the Judgment Seat of Christ related to this one measurement of our lives: Did we truly love God, and did our love for God involve loving others?
This is the “great” commandment in that it is the one most beneficial for our lives and future. It is first in priority and importance, and great in scope and impact. It encompasses everything pertaining to life and godliness, defining, but also permeating and fundamentally reshaping, our very quality of life and how we experience and enjoy it. To be reoriented and recalibrated to Jesus’ value system and definition of success is to begin to touch the deepest places of desire and satisfaction, of fulfillment and reward. To engage in “the first and great commandment” is to answer the issues and compulsions of the heart, making our spirituality practical and achievable daily.
Jesus’ command brings meaning to the mundane, small and unexciting areas of our lives. It brings dignity and beauty through dynamic purpose and fulfillment found in hidden places, unnoticed and overlooked by most people, and unappreciated by those who seek to reward us according to a very empty, meaningless societal system. Now it is possible for every stay-at-home parent, every accountant, teacher, insurance specialist and beyond to excel in the Kingdom and be great in the sight of the Lord, regardless of who notices, rewards or affirms it. A great reward awaits a very different kind of hidden life, small and unimportant in the eyes of others. We can live beautiful lives filled with genuine, sincere love for Jesus. We can overcome pain, rejection and offense to love as He loves. We can know that it means something related to our future to make these kinds of difficult choices. We can now live before an audience of One, laboring by grace to offer Him our thought life, our personality, our passions and emotions, and our personal resources as a daily offering of love to Him that satisfies all our longings.
What else could so beautifully define our lives? What else could give us dignity, strength and purpose in a manner that enables us to make every minute count for something eternal that is outside the societal pressure to produce and achieve?
Excerpt from Chapter One of “The Triumph of Beauty: God’s Radiant Answer to the World’s Growing Darkness”