What Is The Greatest Commandment?

Friday of the Eighteenth Week in Course 2024

Today’s OT reading from the prophet Ezekiel is one of the most dramatic and memorable lessons from the Scriptures. It has even been popularized as Gospel songs like Dry Bones. But entertaining as the thought may be of millions of bones coming together to form human skeletons, and a prophetic word bringing them to life, it doesn’t really make God’s point. The prophet spent his whole ministry with Israelites who suffered the first Babylonian exile. After the quelling of a rebellion, the Babylonian emperor knew that the elitists in the Israelite government were the ones who rebelled against him. So he had rounded up all of the rebels, installed a new king, Zedekiah, and made them walk the long way to where he kept his slaves, near Babylon. They worked hard and even started families, looking forward to a time when the political situation would change and give them the chance to return to Israel. But by the time this oracle was given to them by the prophet, another rebellion had caused the Babylonians to lay siege once more to Jerusalem, kill thousands of Israelites, tear down the walls of the city and destroy the Temple of Solomon. So the survivors who had been exiled with Ezekiel were thrown into despair and gave up hope of returning.

Here, with this vision of the dry bones, the Lord was doing several life-giving actions at once. He gave hope that the bones, the people scattered all over the world by exile, would come back together. That would be done by the action of God’s word. Moreover, that prophetic word would wrap the bones with muscles and sinews and skin, and then the prophetic word would bring the people back to life. No more northern and southern kingdom, but a united Israel under a new King David, the one shepherd. Later in this chapter God would say “Thus the nations shall know that it is I, the Lord, who make Israel holy.” “My dwelling shall be with them; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Then they would sing "thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to the sons of men!"

This prophetic word came partially true with the return to Palestine, some sixty years or so after the exile began. But fulfillment came with the birth and ministry, death and Resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, a few hundred years later. Israel had, time after time, slipped away from keeping God’s law. Jesus, like Ezekiel, preached repentance. He also gave a goal to his first-century listeners. The Pharisees asked him to act like a good rabbi and enter the long-standing debate over Torah, “which is the great commandment of Torah?” Jesus answered, but in so doing told everyone, down to this present day, what our goal in life must be if we would truly follow Him: “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” “This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets."

That sums it up. If everyone you know would set that as their end, their goal, their true objective of every day, would not this world approach perfection? If we would bring up our children and their friends in this word, and teach them to keep teaching them to succeeding generations, is there any problem we could not, under Christ, solve?