Reexamining the First Commandment

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
(Matthew 22:35-40)

I have heard it said by many sources that what the Lord is doing in this hour and what He desires for the church is that the First Commandment be made first place and that the Great Commandment should come before the Great Commission. This statement is revolutionary and amazing. I am excited to see God bring His people, myself especially, to find my fullness and identity in love. I believe that in the end he people of God will hold the identity as those who are loved by God and love God, fully being one through His Spirit.
I have heard and seen many different interpretations of what the first commandment looks like both in theory and in praxis. One of the biggest calls and reversals the First Commandment does is that it takes the gaze off of religious duty and ritual as means of identity and function and it also calls people away from the sways of humanistic conquest all in the name of Christ. With some expressions old time legalism arduously chasing the fulfillment of religious accomplishment and ministry trying to prove themselves to God and in others is a social justice movement whose focus is on ideals and precepts that humans are to rally together across social classes and religions to accomplish a sense of justice, the call to return to the First Commandment is vital.
However, with this call I have seen the pendulum swing the opposite way. In pursuing the First Commandment; loving God with all of our heart, soul, and mind; I have seen the pursuit of outward love and expression to others seen as irrelevant. I have seen a dangerous dichotomy arise where the First Commandment gets relegated to reading theological works, reading the Bible, and spending time in worship and prayer with external and outward expression of the faith being seen as a completely separate and at times inferior. Fasting, prayer, and study can easily be taken as a place of superiority above the person walking out holiness with fear and trembling at his office or the housewife being diligent with her finances.
I by no means am trying to look down on prayer, study, and fasting but I feel that when the First Commandment is stripped down to things of that nature we miss the invitation and the point. If the First Commandment becomes solely about how much time we spend hid away in a hole with a book or how deep our contemplation is or what kind of breakthrough we get in the place of prayer we miss the point. These are all important, but though they are central to it they are not the fullness. And if we leave it at that I believe that we come a far cry from fulfilling or even making the First Commandment first place.
When looking at the command to “Love the Lord our God with all our heart with all our soul and with all our mind” we need to ask the question, “What does it mean to love God?” I have seen people take it and equate it to amount of time spent in prayer, worship, reading, and how much fasting that is done. I am a firm believer in all of these things, but the Bible has more to say in regards to this. Jesus says in John 14:15 says, ‎”If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Loving Jesus with all of our heart, soul, and mind connect deeply with this verse. Our goal as Christians in pursuing the First Commandment is first and foremost obedience. This includes being connected to the vine, picking up our cross and following Jesus, being a lamp on a hill, and pursuing the secret place of fellowship.
In looking at what it means to love God with everything there are many things we need to add to shape our lens of how we as believers seek to make the First Commandment first place in our lives. I think one place we need to look is the first epistle of John. First John 4:20-21 says, “If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” We love because He first loved us and we have received it, but its reflection is not in how much Scripture we can quote or how much power we have when we preach or pray but it is in the way we love our brothers and sisters. Along these lines James wrote concerning our worship and religion that it is not expressed in hours spent in worship services but rather: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” James 1:27.

Much is to be commented on Isaiah 58 and what true fasting looks like or the way God despised Judah’s solemn assemblies because of their lack of justice in Isaiah 1. I by no means am discounting the place of prayer, the prayer movement, or anything along those lines. What I am saying is that in pursuing putting the First Commandment that on top of pursuing communion and a Spirit of wisdom and revelation that we also see it as pursuing and loving the one who commands us to look after the “least of these.”

Advertisement