Matthew 22:36-40
Love God and Love Neighbor
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Man has been around for quite some time and we still have wars...We have small wars and we have big wars, and we have had world wars...The world, after all these years, still has a hard time getting along with each other...You can read the headlines each day and see the troubles are both local and around the world...Man, for whatever reasons and seemingly sad for many reasons, finds it hard to live together, over time...
When I read the Bible and Jesus was asked about the Greatest Commandment in the Bible...He tells us about the Two Greatest Commandments...I sum them up these commandments as Love God and Love neighbor...And as I said, as one reads the headlines the love neighbor part is still a very difficult thing for us to do after thousands of years...We find reasons and it seems we can always find a reason for not loving someone, whether it is a problem we have with the pigmentation of their skin, or a problem with their ethnicity, or a problem with their religious belief, or a problem where they live (on the wrong side of the tracks), or whatever it might be...
But Jesus in giving us the Two Greatest Commandments has forever tied together our need to Love God and to Love neighbor...If we are to live in harmony we must love both God and love our neighbor...Can we ever live by the principles to love God and to love our neighbor?...Saying it and writing it seems so simple...But things can and often do get very complex...And you might ask (since we have had such a problem of loving God and loving neighbor), are the words in the Bible old words, and are the Ten Commandments outdated?...
Filmmaker Cecile B. DeMille said this about whether or not the Ten Commandments were modern or not modern in today's world... “Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED...Then, through the laughter came the shattering thunder of the World War...And now a blood-drenched, bitter world — no longer laughing — cries for a way out...There is but one way out...It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone...It will exist when stone has crumbled...The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God...They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together...They are not laws — they are The Law.”...