It is amazing how we humans like to rank and rate things. If you’re not first your last… We want to have the best products if possible. If not the best, we certainly don’t want the worst.
The Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ day were not strangers to the ranking and rating game. They had greater and lesser prophets. They were also interested in ranking the commandments. One day as others were trying to trip Jesus up in something he might say, an expert in the law joined in.
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “ ‘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. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew22:36–40NIV
According to Jesus, the greatest commandment is to love God. Quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, Jesus points us to something very important. God is not interested in us simply keeping rules or the law. God wants us to love him with all our heart, soul, and mind… essentially all that we are.
Next Jesus ranks loving our neighbor the way we would love ourselves as the second greatest commandment. Not just the neighbor that lives next door, but anyone that we may encounter in life as was pointed out in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We are to love those who God loves (that’s everybody) the way we love ourselves.
These two commandments are so important that Jesus said everything else in scripture hangs on them. That seems to put them far and ahead of the big ten and the hundreds of other commandments in scripture.
If we want to please God, we must love him with all that we are, and love others as much as we love ourselves. Nothing else is more important.
Prayer: Dear loving God, help me to love you and those you love. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
If you ever wondered what the essence of our faith is you should read 1 John 4. In it we understand that we are, as God’s children to be loving. We are to love one another. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” 1 John4:7NASB1995 John even goes so far as to say if we don’t love others, we don’t even know God because, God is love.
It is a given that we should love our brothers and sisters in Christ. We have that familial language… we are children of God, thereby brothers and sisters to others who have been born again. Knowing how families work, it is an unspoken norm that we should love one another no matter what.
John shows us how God loves and that is how we should love. “By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” 1 John4:9–11NASB1995
What John is saying is God loves first and so should we. God didn’t wait until we found him and pursued him to love us, he loved us first and so much so that he sent Jesus to pay the price for our sins. It is what we affirm when we celebrate Holy Communion. “Hear the good news: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; that proves God’s love toward us. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!”1
We are to love God because God is love and God first loved us. We are to love those in the family of God, those who are born again to be children of God, not because we always agree with them or even like them, but because they are our family. We are to love others and not just as a reciprocation of their love, we are to love them even if they don’t love us, because God, our Father, loves first.
Brothers and sisters, our faith is about love because God is love. Let us be like our Father and love others as God has loved us!
Prayer:
God thank you for your love! Help me to love others, even the unlovable. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
There are some prominent people who believe the number of humans on the planet is getting dangerously out of control. Bill Gates is a proponent of controlling the population and has explained how better health care and vaccinations (his foundation’s main thrust) can actually reduce the population and save the planet. Another person who was vocal about overpopulation was Sir David Attenborough. In 2013, he said in an interview with the Radio Times: “All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.” There are others who take the opposite view. Elon Musk, for instance, believes the world could support a much larger population than we have now.
What does God think about overpopulation? In Genesis chapter 8, when God calls Noah and all of the animals out of the ark, he says, “Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.” In chapter 9, today’s reading if you are keeping up, he tells Noah and his family, “As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”
It is not be fruitful and multiply until you reach a world population of 500 million or 9 billion people. It’s just be fruitful and multiply. You can read through the whole Bible and not find one place where God, the Creator of the world, is concerned that either animals or people are going to overtax the earth’s resources. We are supposed to appreciate and be responsible for creation, but it doesn’t seem that God is worried about the earth’s population reaching critical mass.
Be fruitful and multiply indicates to us that God operates out of an abundance mentality. The cry of overpopulation comes from a scarcity mentality. It is interesting that the people who seem most concerned about overpopulation come from the wealthiest parts of the world and have the most. The poorer folks of the world seem less concerned about the number of people and more concerned about putting food on the table and making ends meet. Would they have more if there were less of us?
There was a time when America, because of advancements in agricultural tools and techniques, fashioned itself as “the breadbasket of the world.” Agricultural techniques and tools have only continued to improve, and yet we still have people in the world who die each day literally because they have no food. Is this proof of overpopulation, or a lack of concern for our fellow man?
We, and other industrialized countries, pay farmers to grow certain crops. We also pay farmers not to grow certain crops. When we consider the national budget, what we spend the most on, and what we pay farmers to grow or not grow, is it possible that we could pay farmers to grow foods that could be sent to feed people in other parts of the world?
Some may say, look at the animals. When they get overpopulated, they starve and are diseased. True enough, but we are not animals. We are people created in the image of God. We have been given the responsibility of caring for “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine…” in a world where God has sent us out to be fruitful and multiply.
We are to appreciate and care for creation. We are also to care for our brothers and sisters here and around the world. If we imitate God and begin to operate out of an abundance mentality, we will care for creation, and we will be more concerned about getting the bounty of the earth to those who need it most and less concerned about limiting population.
Prayer:
Heavenly Father, thank you for the beauty, wonder, and abundance of your creation. Help me to care for your world and care for others as together we are fruitful and multiplying. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Thinking About and Being a Child of God 