One day a master of God’s Law issued a challenge to Jesus: “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” This was a test to see if Jesus really understood God’s revelation. Jesus responded, “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment” (Matthew 22:37-38). Put another way, God demands nothing less than total loyalty from all mankind.
The greatest commandment summarizes the first four of the Ten Commandments. And the first of these ten is, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Elton Trueblood calls this command “the allocation of priority.”[1] The one, true God demands nothing less than absolute loyalty. The first priority of every man on earth must be to glorify God through worship and obedience. Anything less than this is to commit grave sin. After all, we exist because of him and for him (Colossians 1:15-16).
We might summarize Trueblood’s reflection this way: The first commandment checks absolute state power and equalizes men. Positively, a commitment to the first commandment makes men both brave and humble. We’ll reflect on bravery in this article and humility in the next.
There is little distinction between a man with two wives and a man with three wives, but there is a vast distinction between a man with one wife and a man with more than one. The difference between singularity and plurality is huge. And God, in the first commandment, demands our singular focus.
Our absolute devotion to God halts the unfetterd expansion and exercise of state power. As Trueblood notes, “Any people is safe from acquiescence in wanton tyranny if it keeps clearly before it the recognition that there can be only one ultimate loyalty and that the Living God is the only worthy object of such loyalty.”[2] In other words, absolute power either belongs to God or to government, not both.
Not all in Hitler’s Germany allied themselves with the Nazis. In the postwar analysis, many wondered why certain individuals did not yield. “What did the church have that the labor unions and the newspapers and the universities did not have? We now know the answer. They had the first commandment.”[3]
Commitment to the first commandment gives men the necessary courage to stand against rising totalitarianism. Why? Their Spirit-empowered loyalty cannot be divided. These “central convictions…give them courage to refuse to murder and steal, even when a tyrant may require it.”[4] The man whose convictions are subjective and relative to the moment or popular opinion will fold like a lawn chair when the tyrant rises to power, but the man of God will not.
This is the Spirit-wrought courage that filled the hearts of the apostles. When the governing authorities sought to silence their preaching, they responded, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). This is the motto of God-fearing people all over the globe. From the Far East to East L.A., men whose loyalty is to God alone will never be cowed by the threats of an angry tyrant.
[1] Elton Trueblood, Foundations for Reconstruction, Revised Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), P. 12.
[2] Ibid., P. 14.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 16.
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