1 John 4:8
God is LOVE
8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
Mark 12:28-34
Love God and Love Neighbor
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
To always do the right thing, seems like an easy thing to do...LOVE helps us do the right thing...If we love God and love all our neighbors then the world would be a better place...Then we would love our enemies and everyone else, and we could easier do the right thing and treat everyone fairly...
Since life began man has tried to do what is right and we have searched for justice and righteousness...People know that there is a standard of moral living and human rights that are just and right for each one of us...C. S. Lewis discussed this in his book Mere Christianity and said this, “I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things about the human race...First, that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of behaviour they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature...Second, that they did not in fact do so...Now some of you may wonder why I called this odd...It may seem to you the most natural thing in the world...In particular, you may have thought I was rather hard on the human race...After all, you may say, what I call breaking the Law of Right and Wrong or of Nature, only means that people are not perfect...And why on earth should I expect them to be?..That would be a good answer if what I was trying to do was to fix the exact amount of blame which is due to us for not behaving as we expect others to behave...But that is not my job at all...I am not concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out truth...And from that point of view the very idea of something being imperfect, of its not being what it ought to be, has certain consequences...If you take a thing like a stone or a tree, it is what it is and there seems no sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise...Of course you may say a stone is "the wrong shape" if you want to use it for a rockery, or that a tree is a bad tree because it does not give you as much shade as you expected...But all you mean is that the stone or tree does not happen to be convenient for some purpose of your own...You are not, except as a joke, blaming them for that...You really know, that, given the weather and the soil, the tree could not have been any different...What we, from our point of view, call a "bad" tree is obeying the laws of its nature just as much as a "good" one...Now have you noticed what follows?...It follows that what we usually call the laws of nature-the way weather works on a tree for example-may not really be laws in the strict sense, but only in a manner of speaking..When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only means "what stones always do"?...You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground...You only mean that, in fact, it does fall...In other words, you cannot be sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves, any law about what ought to happen, as distinct from what does happen...The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean "what Nature, in fact, does."... But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter...That law certainly does not mean "what human beings, in fact, do"; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely...The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not...In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts...You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave)...In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts...Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story."...
Lewis thought we could learn much about God from these Natural Laws and how humans behave and try to behave...Man does try to do good, but finds it difficult to always do good...So we learn more from observing man and how he tries to be good and just, than what we learn just from the universe itself (and how it works)...This Natural Law suggests that there is One who is watching us and seeing that we do treat others fairly and He is most interested in our fair play toward others...And as we think about this fair play and how we treat others, to me it is all about LOVE...God is LOVE...And Jesus tells us that love surrounds and permeates the Two Greatest Commandments...With the world as it is, it seems that LOVE guides the world down the right and rightest of paths...So doing the right thing is all about love, as one reads about these two great commandments...And the One that is intensely watching us and seeing if we are being fair in our play and interactions with others -is known as LOVE...