Closer To Heaven
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This video is produced by the South Pacific Division Discipleship team.
Week 4_To Love the Lord Your God_ study this lesson for Oct 23 from SPD Discipleship on Vimeo.
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Israel — the nation as a whole — was called to love God. But this was something that could happen only individually. As a single human being given free will, each Israelite had to make the choice to love God — and they were to show that love through obedience.
What do the following texts have in common? That is, what is the common theme among them?
Image © Steve Creitz from GoodSalt.com
How much clearer could the Word of God be? Just as God doesn’t merely say He loves us but has revealed that love for us by what He has done and still does, God’s people, too, are to show their love to God by their actions. And in these texts we see that love to God is inseparably linked to obedience to Him.
This is why, when John says things like, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments” (1 John 5:3), or when Jesus says, “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15), these verses are merely expressing this basic teaching. Love to God must always be expressed by obedience to God. That has always been the case, and it always will be. And this obedience to God means obedience to His law, the Ten Commandments, which includes the fourth commandment as well, the Sabbath. Keeping the fourth commandment is no more legalism than is keeping any of the other nine.
Though obedience to any of the commandments can be legalism, that kind of obedience isn’t really done out of love for God. When we truly love God, especially because of what He has done for us in Christ Jesus, we want to obey Him, because that’s what He asks us to do.
When Moses over and over told Israel to love and obey God, he did it after they had been redeemed from Egypt. That is, their love and obedience was a response to the redemption that God had given them. They had been redeemed by the Lord. Now they would respond by faithfully obeying His commandments. Is it any different today?
| What is your own experience in seeking to obey God? That is, what are your own motives in obeying God? Why should it be done out of love for Him? What role, if any, should fear, the biblical understanding of fear, play, as well? |
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You can view an in-depth discussion of To Love the Lord Your God in the Hope Sabbath School class led by Pastor Derek Morris. Click on the image to view:
With thanks to Hope Channel – Television that will change your life.
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Even amid rules and regulations in Deuteronomy and all the admonitions warning the Jewish nation that the people must obey “His commandments, His judgments, and His statutes,” they were first and foremost to love God with all their heart and soul and might. Of course, they had good reasons to do just that.
Image © Kevin Carden at Goodsalt.com
Over and over in Deuteronomy, Moses told the people about God’s love for their fathers and for them. But more than just words, the Lord revealed this love by His actions. That is, even despite their shortcomings, their failures, their sins, God’s love for them remained steadfast — a love that was powerfully manifested in His dealing with them.
God’s love for us predated our existence, in that the plan of salvation was in place way before “the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4).
As Ellen G. White said it: “The plan for our redemption was not an afterthought, a plan formulated after the fall of Adam. It was a revelation of ‘the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal.’ Romans 16:25, R.V. It was an unfolding of the principles that from eternal ages have been the foundation of God’s throne.” — The Desire of Ages, p. 22.
How fortunate we all are that God is, indeed, a God of love, a love so great that He went to the cross for us, a self-sacrificing love in which “He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). Thus, we today have a revelation of God’s love for us that the children of Israel probably couldn’t even have imagined.
| Instead of being love, what if God were hate or if God were indifferent? What kind of world would this be? Why is the revelation of God’s love for us something that we, indeed, should rejoice about? |
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Moses told the children of Israel to love God with all that they had. That was a command. However, a few verses earlier Moses gave them another command: “That you may fear the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 6:2).
Image © Kevin Carden at Goodsalt.com
In one verse they are told to fear God, in another to love Him, and in this verse they are told to both fear and love Him at the same time. In the common understanding of the word “fear” this might seem like a contradiction, but it’s not. Instead, the fear of God — in the sense of awe and respect for who He is, His authority and power and justice and righteousness, especially in contrast to our sinfulness, weakness, and complete dependence on Him — should be a natural reaction. We are fallen beings, beings who have violated God’s law and who, but for His grace, deserve condemnation and eternal death.
Despite the fact that we were “children of wrath” (which is why we should fear Him), Christ died for us and thus gave us a new life in Him, which includes freedom from the sin and condemnation of the past (which is why we should love Him).
And just as this is true for us today, this same principle applied to ancient Israel: they were captives in Egypt, condemned to slavery and oppression, and it was only God’s love for them and graciousness toward them that led to their great redemption. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there” (Deuteronomy 5:15). No wonder, then, that they both love and fear God at the same time. And if they were to do that, how much more should we, having the great truth of Jesus’ dying on the cross for us?
| Read Revelation 14.6-7. How are we to understand why the command to “fear God” should be the first command of the Lord’s last-day message to the world? Given what we know about what is coming on the world, why does that command make so much sense? |
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