Matthew 22.39 records God answering the question about which command is most important. His answer is unbelievable: A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.

Most of us envision God as a bit of an egotist. He wants to be worshiped by everyone, all the time. That’s what we would want if we were God.

While the One True God seeks worshipers, His first desire is to be loved.

However, the One True God defines love practically as loving our fellow human as we love our self. This is absolutely mind blowing and is absolutely unique to the One True God recorded in the Christian Bible.

The muslims do not record their god as having the same ultimate desire. Their god too often condones killing, raping, lying and stealing. The hindus with their myriad of gods all have competing demands and petty arguments over which is the greatest. The buddhists seeks to ignore God all together but promise a way to heaven without Him (really?).

God measures our love for Him by our love for our fellow man. God does not separate love for Him from our love for each other. So that we wont be confused on what that love is to look like, He tells us to love others as we love our self.

We know what that means. At least we know how we feel when we are loved. We know how we feel when we are unloved. We know what love looks like to us. God commands us to demonstrate that love by loving others and in this way we are loving Him.

This is not complicated. This is not God being an egotist. This is not God asking too much of us or from us.

However, our obedience to this command determines how well we live with one another. The reason God doesn’t ‘fix’ the planet is because He doesn’t cause us to robotically obey Him which if we did, that would fix the planet.

We have a voice. We have a choice. We have to choose God and thus choose love if we will see the planet fixed. God doesn’t ‘make’ us do anything. Most of us like it that way.

God’s commands feel like suggestions since there appears to be no consequence from Him for failure to obey. But we are reaping our sown behavior of disobedience to God. We are reaping our ignoring to love God. We are having so much trouble with our fellow man because we have not loved him as we love our self.

We shouldn’t think there will be no consequence for our disobedience. God will call every person to account on that day we pass from this life to the next. Only those who loved Him in this life will enter into His presence to live forever. Everyone else will receive their wish, life without God forever. God describes this life as hell.

The world God promises in the future is filled with love. Those who live there already know what that will look like because they have begun practicing it now.

There is only one God and His ways are good. There is only one humanity and we are not so good because we are failing to love God and consequently love one another.