| DECEMBER 3, 2024 -- Deuteronomy 6:5 “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
This commandment, both as it appears in Deuteronomy and as it appears in various forms in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, has always bothered me in that I wondered HOW it was possible to “love” because you were commanded to “love”. Doesn’t true love come from the heart? So I went back to how the commandment was interpreted by Rabbinic tradition. And while I am Christian, not Jewish, I perceived that the interpretation seemed to be that one cannot separate the one commandment from the related commandment to love one’s neighbor. We show our love of God by the act of loving others.
Another factor is that we cannot learn to truly love God until we learn to understand God. When we try with all our heart to understand God and God’s commandments, we will slowly find ourselves closer to loving God. To use the words of a song from 1958 “To know him is to love him”. So the command to love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and all your might is a direction to strive with everything you have to truly get to know the Lord and what the Lord expects us to do in following His commandments. And if we try so to do then we will eventually learn to love the Lord.
There is a maxim we use in the art of teaching. “I hear; I forget. I see; I remember. I do; I understand”. If we only hear the command to “love the Lord” we are probably going to forget it within a short period of time after hearing it. If we observe other people showing their love for the Lord by their actions towards their fellow human beings, we are apt to remember those actions. But when we ourselves show love and caring for all of humanity we will finally begin to understand loving God by loving others.
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