After Moses recounted to the children of Israel their history, he began giving them instructions on what they were to do in order to take the land and to thrive on it. Indeed, one could argue that the bulk of Deuteronomy was simply that: the Lord telling the people what they needed to do in order to keep up their end of the covenant, which He graciously made with them in fulfilling His promise to their fathers.
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Deuteronomy 6 begins like this: “Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the LORD your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged” ( Deuteronomy 6.1-2, NKJV).
Read Deuteronomy 6.4-5. What command does the LORD God give to the children of Israel in verse 5? What does that mean?
Love the Lord your God with all your heart … ? How interesting that here, in the midst of the law, in the midst of all the warnings, rules, and provisions, the people are called to love God. And not just to love Him but to do so “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength,” which points to the absolute nature of this love.
Loving God with all the heart and soul and strength means that our love for Him should be supreme over our love for everything and everyone else, because He is the foundation and ground of all our being and existence and everything else. Love for Him should put our love for everything else in proper perspective.
In the Hebrew, the word “your” for your God, your heart, your might, is in the singular. Yes, God was speaking to the people as a whole, but the whole is only as strong as the parts. The Lord wants each one of us, though part of a larger body, to be faithful to Him individually, and the foundation of that faithfulness should be our love for Him, for who He is, and for what He has done for us.
| What does it mean to you to love God with all your heart and soul and might? |
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