Meditation on the Text of the Week

Signs of the Times

Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might.
Deuteronomy 6: 4, 5

What ought to be the outstanding characteristic of the Christian and the Christian community? The answer depends to an extent on who is asking. If it is the Unbelievers in Athens who are asking, they will have all sorts of weird notions and expectations of what Christians and their communities ought to be like. Most of these notions reflect their own self-love and idolatry. "Christians," they would solemnly tell us, "ought not to be judgmental. They should defend a woman's right to abort."

If it is the Word of God which is interrogating us, the answer is plainly presented in our text. It is the last answer that Athens would ever have given. The chief characteristic of our communal and familial and individual existence must be our all-consuming love of God. It is to be the love of our whole heart, our entire soul, and all our strength.

This text became the Shema in Israel—the great and central confession of faith. In this wonderful and sacred tradition we stand. Nothing has changed with the coming of the New Covenant. Our Lord glossed this text to declare that this command was the greatest commandment of all. (Matthew 22: 37)

The all-consuming love of God. It includes our fear of God; our deep respect of God; our awe, our reverence, our service of God; our joy, boasting, faith, and hope in God; it includes our worship, praise, and adoration of our God and Father. It leads us to obey God and keep His commandments.

Our love of God is framed by two historical realities. The first is creation. The Almighty spoke and out of nothing, the heavens, earth, and man were made. The entirety of our being and existence is due to Him; therefore, it is only right that we love, honour, serve and obey Him with all our being.

The second historical reality is redemption. The grotesque sin of human kind in not loving God as we ought, and loving the creature more than the Creator, was not the end of the matter. To this wretched mistake, the Lord added His wonderful redemption. He took us out of slavery, and brought us to a wide open place where the glory of the original creation will not just be restored, but consummated.

Thus, the command to love the Lord our God with all our beings is given to Israel as a loved, redeemed, and restored people. Israel is given these commandments so that they may keep them in the land which God was about to give them—even as He had promised their fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Deuteronomy 6: 1—4) Their sin was to be, and ours has been, atoned and covered in the life and death of our Lord.

Now, our fathers could, and we can, love God freely without condemnation. Without the removal of the condemnation of our sins, we could never even begin to keep God's commandments again. Our love would ever have been a servile and crass attempt to manipulate God Himself.

Because our love of God is to be all consuming, worship is as important as service. Setting apart the Sabbath is as important as the six days of labour. Prayer is as important as good works. Joy is as important as mourning. Fear and reverence is as important as laughter and exuberance. Feasting is as important as self-denial.

About these things Athens knows nothing. It can only look from afar. But it can only look askance, with a niggardly glance. Nevertheless our joyous and reverent love of God is to he the hall mark of our lives and Christian community.

Of course it lead inextricably to the second great commandment: that we should love our neighbour as ourselves. This second great commandment (which sums up the fifth to the tenth commandments) is an outworking of the first and greatest commandment to love God with all our being. By this we testify before the watching world that we belong to God and are disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Regardless of what spurious notions and expectations Unbelievers might have of Christians and the covenant community, we, the redeemed of the Lord know what we are about. In a word--we are about Him.