Love the Lord your God

 To love the Lord your God is probably the highest and most important commandment. Why?

I remember back in the days when I was an unbeliever, I questioned why God would command us to love Him and worship Him. If a mere human commanded this, we would say he was a very egocentric person. And there have been times in history when mere humans have commanded this, to their damnation.

There are a very few Commandments that are not purely intended for our own good, mostly dating back to the times when the Tabernacle or Temple existed. God is holy and majestic, and if He is going to live among humans in a special place, that special place has to have rules to respect His holiness. He's God, of course we have to respect His spaces. The original sin in Eden was not respecting God's things. Those holy spaces don't exist anymore in the previous material physical sense, though they do exist in the persons of His adopted children.

Otherwise, the Commandment to love God, like the rest, is intended for our good. There are of course very deep discussions possible on why God made humans to begin with, discussions for another time, but God does not need humans or their love in the sense that we need things. You can say God wants them, not needs them, which is probably an oversimplification too, but lets not get bogged down.

Why then is it for our good that we should love God?

Humans are both material and spiritual beings. And your spiritual being can either be aligned with heaven or hell, those are the only two choices. You can say, "I don't want either, I do whatever I want," which is actually hell alignment. The devil wants to do whatever he wants, too. That is rebellion. And if you are rebelling against truth and love and goodness, what are you rebelling TO? Falsity and hate and evil. You are a spiritual being, and in spiritual matters there are only two alignments: obedience and devotion, or rebellion and individualism.

I become more and more convinced that the nature of heaven - if the Lord will mercifully forgive the oversimplification of one flawed human, - that the nature of heaven is unity in love. What did Jesus say? He is in the Father, and we are in him. We become the adopted children of heaven through him. And what does a good parent do? Love his children. What does a good child do? Love his parents. We are united to God in love through Jesus. Jesus says he is in us and we are in him.

See, the default mode of existence for humans in a fallen world is that we are each isolated islands onto ourselves. We can never truly see into another person, nor can they ever truly see into us. They can never truly be in us or we in them, no matter how much you love them. Hence all the selfishness of this world, because the self is all we know in our fallen state. This was my realization when I first started on the path to being a believer: the realization that I was not only an island alone, but also a lost island and all my skill and intellect was not going to result in that lost island being found. I was never going to be saved on my own strength or merits. He who would save his life will lose it.

These solipsistic rules are not the rules of heaven. When Jesus said "All I have is yours, and all you have is mine," he was not talking about his sandals or his hat. We belong to God, and God's kingdom is also our kingdom, if we are God's.

Loving God is drawing near to heaven in practice. It is the act of drawing near to heaven.

Since the nature of heaven is unity in love, God interacts with humans through relationship. The old "works versus grace" disputes (which, that's a confused and deluded debate anyway) have to be resolved in one sense in favor of grace. Merely being good in a human way doesn't get you any closer to heaven by itself. Connection to God does. You don't actually even know how to be good, truly, without that connection. So the humblest wretch who throws himself on God's mercy in absolute sincerity and devotion is way ahead of someone who, while a more worthy person in the eyes of the world, does not.

Why should God be good to you, whatever you have done good or bad? There is only one answer: God is good to you because you are His child.

If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
~Matthew 7:11

A good child loves his Father, as his Father loves His child. Heaven is unity in love. We are united to the Father through Jesus, and Jesus is in Him, and we are in Jesus.

Heaven is united in love.