Matthew 22 :37-38
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.” (Matthew 22 :37-38)
Holiness is important because without it no one will see God (Hebrews 12 :14). But it’s a limited goal. We often use holiness to describe growing away from sinful attitudes and actions. That is hardly the ultimate goal of life. Making holiness the primary goal creates another problem. Striving for holiness can become self-oriented and legalistic. Our ultimate purpose must be God-oriented, not self-oriented.
Focusing on God is certainly biblical and surely all we do should bring Him glory (1 Cor. 10 :31). The problem with making the glory of God our ultimate goal is that, like Christlikeness, it isn’t very specific. We’re left with the task of spelling out in detail how we can best glorify Him. Some people seek to give a more specific focus to our purpose of glorifying God. Worship is a particular form of giving glory to God. Therefore, they make worship the goal of life. Worship as a life purpose is another exclusively God-oriented choice. Indeed our whole lives should be worship, demonstrating His worth, but making worshiping Him the ultimate goal presents another problem: Why would a God of love be so self-centered as to demand worship as the whole purpose of making and saving His people? Is God selfish?
Five-year-old Kent was trying hard to get our guests to notice him and his talents. “Oh, Kent, quit showing off,” I said. He apparently devoted some deep thought to the subject, because early the next morning he had developed his response, “Daddy, why does God want us to brag on Him?”
Many Bible students believe God desires that we conform to the reality of who He is for our own good. To get out of alignment with reality is self-destructive, allowing self to usurp the honor that belongs to God alone. God expects us to recognize who He is and behave accordingly because such recognition and behavior will result in our good.
The term “jealous” applied to God may jar us, but the Bible repeatedly tells us He’s a jealous God. Perhaps we get a clue of what God is teaching us by considering the fundamental command of both Old and New Testaments: to love God. When God came in person to reveal His heart purpose, He said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment” (Matthew 22 :37-38). “First and greatest” makes clear what God is concerned about. Jesus quoted this commandment from the foundational revelation of God’s will in the Old Testament, what the Jews call the Shema (Deuteronomy 6 :5). He then explained its importance. Everything else He said-everything taught in the Bible, “the law and prophets”-hangs on this command, along with the command to love one’s neighbor (Matthew 22 :40). Perhaps we’d be safe to make loving God our chief end, except for one thing. Genuine love must be mutual. It’s not so much that we love Him, but that He loves us! (I John 4 :10). So we must search for a more complete statement of God’s purpose for us.
God is love in His nature (1 John 4 :8,16). From all eternity the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are bound together in bonds of eternal love. From the overflow of that love, He designed a creature to love Him back. God’s purpose all along has been to have a loving, mutual relationship with us. That’s why He calls His relationship to us a marriage! When a man “knew” a woman in Bible times it meant they became one in intimate identity. That’s why we say the goal of life is knowing God – an identity so close it could be likened to marriage. Closer than that – it could be likened to the unity the Father and Son have with one another. Now we see how being like Christ fits into the ultimate goal! We are intended to be like Him not only in character but in relationship. A prayer of Jesus speaks of our unity with one another (part of being like Jesus) intertwined with our unity with God. This also, we now see clearly, is part of our being like Jesus. Here’s the whole passage, including both kinds of oneness – with God as a basis for unity with one another. Why not take a few minutes to read John 17:20-26?
Astounding! The love relationship He planned for us is intimate, exclusive, and permanent. The only way to exhaust its meaning is to say it’s like the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father! That’s why the two of them made that greatest of all sacrifices – He died for us so that we, alive or dead, might live in union with Him (1 Thessalonians 5 :10). Jesus’ prayer in John 17 speaks of two unities-among believers and with God. The unity among believers shows outsiders whose disciples we are. Such unity has often proved difficult to achieve. Unity with one another is indeed the mark of true discipleship. The basis for unity between believers is our oneness with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This second unity is beyond comprehension. It’s like trying to explain to a five-year-old the glories of married love. A child doesn’t have a clue. It’s the same with us. The unbeliever can’t understand the glories of present unity with Christ, any more can we understand the ecstasies of our future union with Christ in heaven. We just don’t have the capacity to grasp a whole new dimension of the human-divine relationship. We haven’t matured yet. We’ve not undergone the final transformation into God-compatible beings. One day we will experience God in all His fullness. What joy!