Focus: Jesus calls for whole-hearted love for God.
Function: To move the people to respond to God’s love in Christ, and to serve him whole-heartedly.
Text: Matthew 22:34-40
L.D. 34 (1st Commandment)
When you visit the center of the City of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, you will see a startling statue made by the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine.
The statue depicts a person with a contorted face, and arms raised backwards. The statue communicates agony. Why is this person in agony? The statue shows the answer: That person’s heart has a hole in it. In fact, that person has no heart left. It’s gone.
The City of Rotterdam commissioned Zadkine to make this statue to commemorate the city’s agony and plight when the Germans bombed Rotterdam in May of 1940. They bombed the heart of the city.
Today the City of Rotterdam is thriving. Its heart is fully restored. But the old-timers, the ones who remember the outbreak of the war, still recall with horror the ravages and ruinous consequences of living in a city whose heart was shot out on that dark May day in 1940. They remember: A city without a heart is a dying city.
Zadkine’s statue is for me a kind of metaphor, an image of any person who has no heart for God. The image typifies the restlessness and emptiness a person must feel when he has lost his heart to the idols in the world, rather than to the living God. This morning the Scriptures speak to our hearts, and it is the Lord Jesus who calls us toward wholehearted love for God.
Today we begin a series of messages on the Ten Commandments. In the first commandment we hear the voice of God say: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.” Now God spoke these words to his people Israel. God had rescued them from slavery and from the cruelty of Egypt’s ruler. God led his people Israel through the Red Sea. Their exodus from Egypt resulted into their inheritance of the Promised land 40 years later.
Now many of us may ask the question, What does the Exodus event and God’s Law for his people Israel have anything to do with us today? We have never been slave laborers. We never crossed the Red Sea with Pharaoh in pursuit of us. We never ended up in the land of Canaan. So, why should we respond to God’s Word and claims in these Ten Commandments?
Here’s the answer and the key for us to respond to God’s Law: The story of the Exodus and God’s rescue mission of the Israelites in the days of Moses is our story. It connects with us today in that the Exodus story finds its fulfillment in the Christ event. That is, God’s rescue mission led by Moses is a shadow of God’s rescue mission led by, and fulfilled by, his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus’ rescue mission on the cross and in the tomb has led to freedom. No longer are we in bondage to sin. There is now power and freedom in Christ Jesus to serve the Lord wholeheartedly. Just as the Exodus event led to the inheritance of the Promised Land, so Jesus’ rescue work (the Christ event) has led to the prospect of inheriting the new heavens and earth. Right now, we are pilgrims on our way to the restored creation. Right now, we live by faith, as did the O.T. people in the days of Moses and the prophets.
Thus, when we hear God’s voice speak to us in the first commandment, we hear that voice through the prism, through the ears and eyes of Jesus’ wondrous rescue mission on the cross and in the tomb. In fact, it is Jesus who connects us with the story of God and with the claim of God on all his people: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
THE PASSAGE
We find the Lord Jesus in confrontation with the Pharisees. The Pharisees, as part of the religious establishment in Jesus’ days, opposed the Lord Jesus in that he seemed to break the mold of their religious interpretations. They can’t figure him out. They want to discredit him, and thus they test his knowledge of the Law and the Prophets.
So, like others such as the Sadducees, the Pharisees come to Jesus to test him. They send an expert of the writings of Moses, that is, of the Law. And he asks “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Now Moses’ writings, (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) are filled with divine commandments, civic rules and regulations, as well as decrees and stipulations about worship and sacrifices. It seems that the Pharisees are hoping that Jesus will pick a commandment that is “minor” in their eyes. If Jesus would do that, he would discredit himself as a Rabbi or Teacher of the Scriptures.
Jesus, however, does not oblige. He gets to the core of the Scriptures by leading us back to God’s Ten Words or Commandments to his people. That core is a summary of God’s Law: “’Love the Lord you 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.”
In his answer the Lord Jesus points out that the greatest commandment consists of two parts: wholehearted love for God, and love for our neighbor as we love ourselves. Jesus’ answer to the expert of the Law brings us back to the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments teach us “what our relation to God should be” And the remaining six commandments teach us what we “owe our neighbor.”
So as we consider God’s first commandment, we are looking specifically at our relationship with God himself. That relationship comes to the foreground when we listen to God’s voice: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”
SOME APPLICATIONS
First of all, as we consider the power and implications of this commandment, let me ask you: Can you love someone you don’t know? Someone you have never met? Someone you have never encountered whether close by or from a distance? It seems to me that our love for someone is always a love in response to someone. For example, my love for my wife, Rosanne, is in response to who she is, to what she means to me. If I had never met her or known her, I could not have loved her as my wife.
Here’s my point: as God calls us to love him wholeheartedly—with all our heart, soul, mind and strength—God defines his relationship with us. And by doing so, we can respond to him with wholehearted love. God defines his relationship with us as “the Lord your God.” God reveals himself to us as the God who “brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” In other words, our love for God is always in the context of who God is for us, what God has done for us, and what God intents for us.
Through his Son, the Lord Jesus, God has rescued us from the “dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col. 1:14). Through Jesus’ work on the cross, paying the wages of our sins, we were bought with a price. We belong to God as his adopted children through Christ. God has a claim on us, not only as our Creator, but also as our Redeemer in Jesus Christ. This is why I say that Jesus calls us to love God wholeheartedly. God is our Savior and Lord; he has rescued us and he claims us as his children, subjects or citizens. He rules; we serve. Do so wholeheartedly.
Secondly, the first commandment gives us a taste of God’s love for us. God’s love is demanding and it is protective of us. Demanding in that God does not tolerate half-heartedness, or wayward love. God demands fidelity—fidelity or loyalty that is fitting in marriage. God hates a divided heart. In his relationship with Israel, we learn time and time again that God thinks of his relationship with his people as the relationship of a marriage. The O.T. people of Israel are “married” to God in that God defines his relationship as a ‘covenantal’ relationship with his people. God calls for wholehearted love and fidelity to him
Jesus, the Son of God, sees our relationship with God through the same lens of covenant. He calls you and me, the church, his bride. Remember the apostle John’s vision in Revelation 21. He “…saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband….”
So let me ask you: have you lost your heart to God in Christ Jesus? Does your heart, your loyalty nestle in the bosom and care of God? Do you seek his presence? Do seek to please him in doing his will? Do you “honor and fear him, love and trust him, and look to him for every good thing humbly and patiently?” God’s love is demanding. But that’s precisely the case because he loves us so deeply.
God’s love is also protective of us. When God says: “You shall have no other gods before me,” God wishes to keep us from having a leaking or bleeding heart. God wishes to protect us from getting holes. God offers life. Idols cannot offer anything else but disappointment and death. All who run after idols end up with a hole in their hearts. Agony, misery, restlessness, and spiritual death is their lot.
So ask yourself, how do you honor God’s first commandment? How do you protect your heart from losing its anchor, its rest in God?
Think about it! How many of us dabble in witchcraft? How many of us tell ourselves that reading horoscopes is an innocent “fun thing” to do? How many here go to palm readers (“just for fun of course”) to learn their future? Do not play with fire. Hear the protective love and voice of God: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
My point is simple: protect your relationship with God in Christ by avoiding and shunning “all idolatry, magic, superstitious rites and prayers to saints or to other creatures.” Take God’s call seriously: love him wholeheartedly, in and through Jesus Christ.
Both now, and always. Amen!