Cindy and I were reading a book from our new member class and came across an interesting analysis I hadn't encountered before.
It's starts off with the greatest commandments (as declared by Jesus):
- Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, strength and mind
- Love thy neighbor as thyself
I don't think I would offend too many people by claiming that these two principles are by far the most important lessons in the entire Bible, and that if you're striving after these two, the rest of what God asks of us will more or less fall into place. That may be an oversimplification, but this is a blog, not a theological discourse.
The interesting part of the analysis was the juxtaposition of these commandments with the first two sins. In the Genesis account of creation, Adam and Eve are tempted to question God's prohibition on eating from the tree of life. They are told God was not being truthful with them when he said they would die from eating it. Adam and Eve trust the serpent rather than God. They failed the first commandment in that one act.
The second sin recorded in the Bible (side-stepping the question of whether Cain's less than pleasing offering to God was a sin) is that of Cain murdering his brother Abel. This is clearly a violation of the second commandment, and both sides of it at that. For in order to have loving thy neighbor as thyself be a good thing, one must presumably actually love thyself. Cain doesn't love his brother nor does he love himself. In my experience, in fact, very few of us love and accept ourselves, which makes it all the more difficult to love one another.
I liked this bit of parallelism as presented in the book our new member class was reading not because it's all that profound or terribly enlightening, but because it points to how the two greatest commandments are the very tools to combat the two greatest sins:
- failing to put our full faith and trust in what God is telling us is best for us, and
- failing to be comfortable with ourselves, and being able to love our neighbor, even when he shows us up
I bet if I took the time to think about it, the whole of the 10 commandments would be rendered moot if only we could truly live by the two most important.
I guess I shouldn't have been at all surprised to see that the greatest commandments simultaneously show us the right way to live, and shield us from the wrong way. God's good (and highly efficient) like that.
