Love God

The man who is in his right mind, upon acquiring a certain knowledge of God, will immediately come to love God. “To know God,” as the saying goes, “is to love God.” The goodness of God is so obvious to the person who knows him that love for God inexorably flows from knowledge of him. God is good. He is the source of all the goodness in the universe. Everything he does is good. Every word he speaks is true. He is light and life. There is no darkness or death within him. He is love – the sort of love that sacrifices oneself for one’s friends, or even for one’s enemies. God is never indifferent.

I see hands raising in the back, objecting that knowing God necessarily leads to loving God. Objecting that God is good. After all, isn’t God responsible for all the horrible things in the Bible? If God is love, why did he hate Esau? And what about those poor Canaanites, just minding their own business, trying to live their lives in Palestine before Joshua and the Israelites waged holy war against them? Didn’t that command for genocide come directly from the mouth of God? No, a God like this can never be loved. Feared, yes. But not loved.

That’s a mighty big can of worms to open at the beginning of an essay. Those questions will not be answered here. All that can be said for now is that, if the conquest of Canaan were all that we knew about God, then the skeptic would be right – intellectually and morally – to say that such a God can only be feared and never loved. But that is not all, not even close to all, that God has revealed about himself. The majority of divine revelation demonstrates that God is longsuffering, self-sacrificing, humble, merciful, and gracious. God punishes evildoers, yes, even amongst his own chosen people. But punishment in itself isn’t evil. How many of today’s self-centered, self-righteous adult brats are the way they are because their parents were too weak-willed, too insecure, too soft to discipline them? God disciplines those he loves, and his discipline is always just, always an act of love. Even if we don’t have eyes to see it, or are too ignorant to understand it, the Scriptures are filled with the testimony of God’s goodness. We ought to let the greater part interpret the lesser part. What would it mean to view the conquest of Canaan through the crucifixion of Christ?

Perhaps that is a question worthy of some reflection. The God we charge with the crime of genocide is the same God who gave himself up to a torturous death on a Roman cross. How do you square that circle? After decades of reflection on the Scriptures (which for him consisted solely of the Old Testament) and the work of God in Jesus Christ, the apostle John concluded: “God is love.” Whatever Canaan meant, John understood that Calvary meant that God is he who sacrifices himself for the good of the world. And John should know. He was there. He watched God writhe in agony, nailed to that tree. All for what? To take away the sins of the world. To love the world with a fullness of love that could only come from its Creator. Those who see and understand this love can’t help but respond with love. God is loved because God is love.

“We love because he first loved us,” John said toward the end of his life. This relationship that we have with God is not merely between a creature and his Creator, or between a servant and his master. This is a relationship of love – of friendship, of family, and even of marriage. Instead of threats there are promises. There is more wooing than warning. Vows in place of violence. Covenants, not contracts. You are not more human material to be thrown into the machinery of the world. You are a valued child of God. Each of us is as important as the first born son, the heir of the estate who receives a double portion of the inheritance. There are no second-born sons in God’s family.

The Greatest Commandment

When asked to identify the greatest commandment in all of Hebrew Scripture and tradition, Jesus responded by quoting from the Shema: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The greatest commandment – the most important thing that we can do in our lives – is to love God maximally and integrally. That second word is worth considering. To love God in the way demanded by the greatest commandment is to have all the parts of yourself integrated and oriented toward him. This means being single-minded in our allegiance to him. It means being single-hearted in our desire for him, single-souled in our affection for him, and single-bodied in our obedience to him.

The greatest commandment is a meditation on the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.” God does not share his glory with other gods, much less take a back seat to any of them. For our love of God to be maximally integrated means that he has first place in our heart, mind, soul, and body. Most of us live far below that ideal. We are dis-integrated. We are fractured. We chase after many things, giving them the attention, affection, devotion, and effort that we ought to be giving to God. In our flurry of frenetic idolatry, we do not count the cost: To have other gods is to lose the one true God.

Monotheism and monogamy share the same fundamental belief: There is only one to whom you can fully devote yourself. Idolatry and adultery are linked, not just in the literature of the Hebrew prophets, but in actual practice. Breaking faith with God is just like breaking faith with your spouse. The adulterer says to his spouse, “You mean something to me, but not much.” In the same way, the idolater says to God, “I like you, and I think I need you sometimes, but I don’t love you with my whole heart, mind, soul, and body. That’s just asking too much.” But God won’t play the role of cuckold easily.

God is patient, but we ought not to test his patience. He is gracious, but we dare not presume upon his grace. Though all of us are bound to be idolaters, we should still resist this temptation with everything we’ve got. And when we do fail, we should always come back to God, humbled and repentant. Most of us commit idolatry because we forget. We forget the beauty and goodness of God, the unsearchable depths of his love, and the brilliance of his glory. We forget what he has done for us, both the generalities and the specifics. We are forgetful creatures, but God loves us enough to remind us again and again. Yes, he tells us to love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, but in all of these places we are fallen, broken, insufficient within ourselves to love God as he ought to be loved.

Totalitarian Love

Your relationship with God encompasses your entire being: heart, soul, mind, and body. It is total. In this sense, God is a totalitarian. He wants to bring his loving and healing presence into every part of your life. But this does not mean that he is a dictator. Instead, God is the totalitarian who has first given the totality of himself to you. God’s totalitarian love is demonstrated at the cross. There is no part of you left unaffected, unforgiven, unredeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because God’s love is total, it is only right that we should strive to love him totally in return. His totalitarian love calls forth a total love from his children. Let us briefly reflect on how we can love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

The heart is the storehouse of desire and will. From our hearts we love God with all our desire. We yearn for him, longing to see his kingdom fully realized here on earth. We can’t hide our desires forever, but we can educate them. That’s the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount: Educate your desires in the ways of God and your life will take the shape that pleases him. Don’t listen to your heart; teach your heart to listen to God. The heart is also the engine of action, the seat of the will and the cauldron of its motivation. Jesus said, “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” In other words, we always make manifest the invisible things of the heart. Sooner or later, what is hidden in our hearts will be revealed in our words and actions. Don’t follow your heart; will it onto the true way.

The soul is the seat of our feeling and passion. It is the fire that burns within a man, the renewable source of energy that fuels the heart. The soul is the most volatile aspect of a human being; the first part of you to come alive, and the first part to die. The person who has lost his soul has lost all feeling. He has become numb to the world. But the man who has his soul is awake and open to the world. He sees the presence of God everywhere. He is energized by life. Only the man whose soul fuels his heart is truly alive. We love God when we are awake and alive, when our feelings and passions are properly calibrated to his presence in the world. We love God, in other words, when we can be moved by him.

The mind is the locus of our contemplation, meditation, creativity, and understanding. With our minds we love God with all our creative and intellectual power. The modern world is keen to draw an analogy between our minds and computers, as if the purpose of the mind were merely to process data. While we can certainly do that, our minds are far more than computers; they are the playgrounds of wonder, the open fields upon which we encounter the ineffable. Our minds are the vessels by which we attend to that which is before us. To love God is to attend to him, to see him with more than our eyes, to contemplate him even if we cannot compute him. God is invisible, and yet he has made himself perceptible to us in our minds, if only we will love him there.

It is with the strength of our bodies that we do all our activity and work. How can we love God with our bodies? By serving him and others. By giving ourselves in our bodies for the good of our neighbor and the glory of God. “No greater love has any man than this,” Jesus told his disciples, “than to lay down his life for his friends.” Sacrificing ourselves in the service of others is the highest form of love. Self-sacrifice is, in fact, the love that God is. He has shown us how to love with all our strength by fully exhausting himself on the cross. Christ has died that we might live, giving himself up for us so that we can become as he is, sons of God.

Loving God first rightly orders all our other loves

Augustine conceived of all virtue as rightly-ordered love. The good life – the life that glorifies God and brings man the most pleasure – is grounded in the love of God. Love God first, and all other loves will flow naturally and amply. Our secondary loves – of family, neighbor, or nation – will run in their proper channels. When our love of God is proper to his nature, all our other loves will be proper to the natures of their objects. Our loves are ordered.

Do not let your love for other things or people, even your own spouse or children, overflow its banks. A flood of love is not more love, it is disordered love. Love ungoverned by the love of God is chaos, and it threatens to destroy both lover and beloved. Disordered love is the primary characteristic of our culture. Over here is flood. Over there is drought. We love out of balance. It is no wonder. We have forgotten our first love. Where has God gone? There is no room left in our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies for him. We have turned our hearts to social media, our souls to smart phones, our minds to the news, and our strength to endless activity. We have found a new first love: ourselves. Our loves are disordered because we love ourselves more than God. It is worse than that. We love ourselves as if we were God.

Marx wanted to recreate human nature. No more religion. No more family. No more God. He yearned for a humanity in which every man revolved around himself as the earth revolves around the Sun. The metaphor is absurd, of course. A man cannot be his own Sun because the earth and the Sun are two distinct objects. A man cannot revolve around himself because he is, himself, the man. But beyond the metaphorical absurdity, Marx’s vision is also morally absurd. Everyone who lives this way fractures himself, disassociating from Being, embracing chaos and darkness, just as if the earth were to unchain itself from the Sun. Man cannot be the center of his own universe. The earth cannot light itself. A man who revolves around himself, who loves himself first and highest, will eventually devolve into darkness, despair, and death.

But this does not mean that we should not love ourselves. The second greatest commandment, which Jesus is quick to add when asked which is the first, is to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Self-love is a moral assumption. But we have made it far more than an assumption; we have turned self-love into the first and highest love. This is a grave error. Love God first. Then love your neighbor. Then love yourself. To invert the order is to throw our whole world into misalignment, into the chaos of self-centeredness.

When we love God first, all our other loves – of spouse, of children, of nature, of literature, of nation – fall into their proper place. Not only is each love rightly ordered, but each love is amplified. Our other loves are greater when our love of God is highest. Love of God fills our reservoir of love beyond where we could fill it on our own. All our other loves become richer, deeper, truer, greater. It is the love of God, first his love for us and then our love for him, that makes man come alive.