Loving your neighbors Leviticus 19:34

In Jesus’ ministry, the issue of what are the most important things to do in life came up at least twice: Mark 12:28-31, Luke 20:25-28

The most important thing to do in life is to love God with all our being, and the second is to love our neighbors as ourselves.

These commands are from the Old Testament, and this command to love our neighbors is noteworthy for how it is introduced.

Leviticus 19:1,2 (NASB95)  ¹ Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ² “Speak to all the congregation of the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

After He says this, He tells them 15 times in this chapter: I am the Lord your God.  So each time you can consider it an affirmation of His holiness.  A reminder.

But what does that mean? 

It means that God has a special place in life.   He is not like anything else you know.  Yes, all of life points to God, but God is apart from and exceedingly higher than everything we know. 

He deserves and demands our utmost devotion and respect.  Is that because He a narcissist, always looking for people to praise him, like a talk show host once suggested?  No, it is simply a fact of life that God created everything, everything holds together by His power.  Our very existence and life depend on God.  Just like we need food and air and water, we need God.  It’s just that most people don’t know the extent of it.

But all this means that our lives need to resemble His.  Holy lives.  Lives separated unto Him.  That’s what it means to live a holy life: living a life conscious of His presence on it and conscious of your desire to live for Him.

So Leviticus 19 covers a number of things that that entails.

And twice it mentions loving other people like yourself.

First it mentions all kinds of things related to our relationships with other people.  And then in verse 18, it’s like a summary of all these things: Leviticus 19:18 (NASB95) ¹⁸ ‘You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord.

But then later, He mentions it again but slightly differently: Leviticus 19:34 (NASB95) ³⁴ ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.

This is a verse about immigration, one of the most contentious issues facing our country today.

We need to divide this issue into two separate distinct issues.

The first issue is government policy.  Briefly I would just say that a government, or a country, has the responsibility and the right to know who is coming into the country, and anyone coming into our country should have a medical and background check first.  Governments exist to take care of the people of their countries first, like you take care of your own kids before all the other kids on the block

The second issue is the personal one.  You are to love this person as yourself.  They are human beings created in the image of God for whom Jesus died. 

After loving God, this is the most important thing you can do: love other people.

It is easy to focus on things we do that we consider important.  Every person we meet is created in God’s image, and we need to respect them and be open to any way we might show God’s love to them and minister His grace to them.

 

 

 

Children of God

John 1:12,13 (NASB95) ¹² But as many as received Him [Jesus], to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

I read an article yesterday on the decline of the American family. 

People just weren’t having any.

They weren’t getting married, and they weren’t having kids.

I found the article informative and interesting.

But what really got me were the comments that people made to the article.

Person after person told about how having kids changed their lives, gave their lives meaning and a joy they didn’t know before. 

Having kids is built into our very systems.  One of the strongest if not the strongest human desire is that for sex, and that act itself is responsible for the creation of new human beings.

Woman are told that they need a career to be happy and fulfilled, yet a career of something she does, while having children is something her body was designed to do.  It is built in her very body structure.

Throughout all of human history, people had little control over how many kids they were to have.  God did not make creating new life our decision.

We can speculate all we want about why that was, but our text here tells that we can become children of God.  Born of God.  We can become part of God’s family.

I have found that one of the hardest things for me to learn in life is feeling loved, not just by another human being, but as a child in a family.  No, I was not deprived of love as a kid, but it wasn’t engrained in me. 

It was only as I was much older, and especially after I had my granddaughter that it all really started to have the intended impact.

God gave us families to learn, to understand, and to appreciate His love for us.  We may know in our heads that we have been justified by faith and that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, but it was only when I could see myself as a child loved by his parents that I could feel God truly having my back, so to speak.