The Will of God

"What, positively, is the will of God? The demand for love. 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself!' as the second greatest commandment belongs together with the first: 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength' (Mk 12:28-34). There is no obedience to God which does not have to prove itself in the concrete situation of meeting one's neighbor, as Luke (10:29-37), ... makes clear by combining the illustrative narrative of the Good Samaritan with Jesus' discussion of the greatest commandment." Theology of the New Testament (Vol. I) by Rudolf Bultmann

It's very sad to me how focused many people are on literalistic legalities in the Bible, when this was one of Jesus' main bones of contention. He railed against the Pharisees (right-winged conservatives of his day) for following the letter of the Law while missing its spirit.

God's Spirit has always been generous and loving. Attempting to apply laws that were applicable thousands of years ago (such as many of the laws and penalties of Leviticus), in a completely different culture, with a completely different worldview, misses the point of what Jesus' Good News proclaimed.

The people of Jesus' time saw the Universe in 3 tiers: Heaven was above the atmosphere, demons and angels operated invisibly within the atmosphere, and hell was inside the Earth. They did not know that the Earth is not in the center of the universe, or that the sun does not revolve around it. They did not understand that we aren't even in the center of our galaxy. They had no idea galaxies existed. They did not know there are at least two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each one with hundreds of millions or billions of stars. They didn't know about germs, or the quantum nature of reality, or the majority of what even an elementary school child knows today about the world. Modern Christians understand these things, yet some of them believe all the laws applicable to that primitive view of the world are still applicable to us today.

Jesus did not take every instruction, rule, or law written in the Old Testament literally as applying to the time in which he lived. He often disputed or interpreted the things written in the OT, as when he completely dismissed the dietary laws (Kosher Laws), instructed his disciples that the Sabbath is for human beings' rest and creativity (while the Pharisees had created so many laws related to the Sabbath that it became a burden for believers that God never intended, according to Jesus). Jesus equated lust with adultery, anger with murder, and slander of one's fellow human being as grounds for punishment. These were merely a few of the ways Jesus changed or reformulated things written in the OT. Primarily, most of the ways he interpreted it were to give priority to loving each other and loving God.

Today, there are too many 'Pharisees' among us, focused on laws in the Bible that were applicable to living in 2,000 BC and in A.D. 100, rather than on the clear message of Jesus, spelled out in his opinion of the two greatest commandments and in his parables (such as the Good Samaritan, the lost coin, the prodigal son, etc.) The Good News is that God so Loved human beings that he sent His son to save us from own sinfulness . . . and yet we spend much of our energy and time on Earth causing each other heartache through our judgmental attitudes and opinions.

If we want the Church to survive, Christianity to survive, and humankind to survive, we can only accomplish those things by loving them to life rather than judging them to death.

Robert Clemons, Author of The Four Rivers of Eden, available for immediate purchase at www.amazon.com/dp/B07YGQHNK7