Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. These words, which I command you today, shall be on your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates.
Parallel Translations
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Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one.
You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.
These words, which I command you today, shall be on your heart;
and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.
You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.
You shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates.
-
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.
And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.
Show all 3 translations
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HEAR, O ISRAEL: THE LORD OUR GOD, THE LORD IS ONE.
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart;
and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes.
And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates.
Examined in Scripture Analysis
Contradictions (1)
Questions where the Bible appears to say two different things, with the passages on each side set together.
Commandments (7)
The laws of the Torah, each cited and shown as a primary source.
- To acknowledge the unity of God, that He is one and indivisible
- To love God with all one's heart, soul, and resources
- To study Torah and teach it diligently to one's children
Show all 7
Cross-references (84)
- Mark 12:30 (v5) 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.’ This is…
- Matthew 22:37 (v5) Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
- Luke 10:27 (v5) He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and…
- Deuteronomy 10:12 (v5) Now, Israel, what does Yahweh your God require of you, but to fear Yahweh your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, and to serve…
- Mark 12:29-32 (v4) Jesus answered, “The greatest is, ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,…
Show all 82 cross-references
- Deuteronomy 30:6 (v5) Yahweh your God will circumcise your heart, and the heart of your offspring, to love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your…
- Deuteronomy 4:29 (v5) But from there you shall seek Yahweh your God, and you shall find him when you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul.
- 1 John 5:3 (v5) For this is loving God, that we keep his commandments. His commandments are not grievous.
- Mark 12:33 (v5) and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbor…
- Deuteronomy 11:13 (v5) It shall happen, if you shall listen diligently to my commandments which I command you today, to love Yahweh your God, and to serve him…
- John 14:20-21 (v5) In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. One who has my commandments and keeps them, that person is…
- 2 Kings 23:25 (v5) There was no king like him before him, who turned to Yahweh with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to…
- Isaiah 44:6 (v4) This is what Yahweh, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, Yahweh of Armies, says: “I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there…
- Matthew 10:37 (v5) He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me isn’t worthy of me.
- 1 Timothy 2:5 (v4) For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
- 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 (v5) For the love of Christ constrains us; because we judge thus, that one died for all, therefore all died. He died for all, that those who…
- Deuteronomy 11:19 (v7) You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when…
- Ephesians 6:4 (v7) You fathers, don’t provoke your children to wrath, but nurture them in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
- Isaiah 45:5-6 (v4) I am Yahweh, and there is no one else. Besides me, there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not known me, that they may know…
- John 17:3 (v4) This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ.
- Psalms 78:4-6 (v7) We will not hide them from their children, telling to the generation to come the praises of Yahweh, his strength, and his wondrous deeds…
- John 10:30 (v4) I and the Father are one.”
- Colossians 3:16 (v6) Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs,…
- Proverbs 7:3 (vv6, 8) Bind them on your fingers. Write them on the tablet of your heart.
- Proverbs 6:21 (v8) Bind them continually on your heart. Tie them around your neck.
- Isaiah 44:8 (v4) Don’t fear, neither be afraid. Haven’t I declared it to you long ago, and shown it? You are my witnesses. Is there a God besides me?…
- 1 Peter 3:15 (v7) But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts. Always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is…
- Isaiah 42:8 (v4) “I am Yahweh. That is my name. I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to engraved images.
- Jeremiah 31:33 (v6) “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” says Yahweh: “I will put my law in their inward…
- Deuteronomy 11:18 (vv6, 8) Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul. You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall…
- Deuteronomy 4:9-10 (v7) Only be careful, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes saw, and lest they depart from your heart all…
- Deuteronomy 4:35-36 (v4) It was shown to you so that you might know that Yahweh is God. There is no one else besides him. Out of heaven he made you to hear his…
- Deuteronomy 6:2 (v7) that you might fear Yahweh your God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you—you, your son, and your son’s son,…
- Proverbs 3:3 (v8) Don’t let kindness and truth forsake you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart.
- 2 Corinthians 3:3 (v6) being revealed that you are a letter of Christ, served by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tablets…
- Ephesians 4:29 (v7) Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth, but only what is good for building others up as the need may be, that it may give grace to…
- Exodus 13:9 (v8) It shall be for a sign to you on your hand, and for a memorial between your eyes, that Yahweh’s law may be in your mouth; for with a strong…
- Deuteronomy 11:20 (v9) You shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates;
- Psalms 37:31 (v6) The law of his God is in his heart. None of his steps shall slide.
- Genesis 18:19 (v7) For I have known him, to the end that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of Yahweh, to do…
- Jeremiah 10:10-11 (v4) But Yahweh is the true God. He is the living God, and an everlasting King. At his wrath, the earth trembles. The nations aren’t able to…
- 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 (v4) Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that no idol is anything in the world, and that there is no other…
- Deuteronomy 32:46 (v6) He said to them, “Set your heart to all the words which I testify to you today, which you shall command your children to observe to do, all…
- 1 Kings 18:21 (v4) Elijah came near to all the people, and said, “How long will you waver between the two sides? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal,…
- Proverbs 6:22 (v7) When you walk, it will lead you. When you sleep, it will watch over you. When you awake, it will talk with you.
- Exodus 12:26-27 (v7) It will happen, when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of Yahweh’s…
- Deuteronomy 5:6 (v4) “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
- Psalms 119:11 (v6) I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.
- Exodus 13:16 (v8) It shall be for a sign on your hand, and for symbols between your eyes; for by strength of hand Yahweh brought us out of Egypt.”
- Numbers 15:38-39 (v8) “Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them that they should make themselves fringes on the borders of their garments throughout their…
- 1 Chronicles 29:10 (v4) Therefore David blessed Yahweh before all the assembly; and David said, “You are blessed, Yahweh, the God of Israel our father, forever and…
- Isaiah 30:8 (v9) Now go, write it before them on a tablet, and inscribe it in a book, that it may be for the time to come forever and ever.
- Luke 6:45 (v7) The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings out that which is good, and the evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart…
- Psalms 40:9-10 (v7) I have proclaimed glad news of righteousness in the great assembly. Behold, I will not seal my lips, Yahweh, you know. I have not hidden…
- Isaiah 51:7 (v6) “Listen to me, you who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law. Don’t fear the reproach of men, and don’t be dismayed at…
- Exodus 13:14-15 (v7) It shall be, when your son asks you in time to come, saying, ‘What is this?’ that you shall tell him, ‘By strength of hand Yahweh brought…
- Proverbs 3:5 (v6) Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding.
- Isaiah 57:8 (v9) You have set up your memorial behind the doors and the posts, for you have exposed yourself to someone besides me, and have gone up. You…
- Matthew 12:35 (v7) The good man out of his good treasure brings out good things, and the evil man out of his evil treasure brings out evil things.
- Matthew 23:5 (v8) But they do all their works to be seen by men. They make their phylacteries broad, enlarge the fringes of their garments,
- Luke 8:15 (v6) Those in the good ground, these are those who with an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it tightly, and produce fruit with…
- Hebrews 2:1 (v8) Therefore we ought to pay greater attention to the things that were heard, lest perhaps we drift away.
- Psalms 40:8 (v6) I delight to do your will, my God. Yes, your law is within my heart.”
- Proverbs 10:21 (v7) The lips of the righteous feed many, but the foolish die for lack of understanding.
- Proverbs 15:2 (v7) The tongue of the wise commends knowledge, but the mouth of fools gush out folly.
- Luke 2:51 (v6) And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth. He was subject to them, and his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.
- Colossians 4:6 (v7) Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one.
- Psalms 119:46 (v7) I will also speak of your statutes before kings, and will not be disappointed.
- Psalms 129:8 (v7) Neither do those who go by say, “The blessing of Yahweh be on you. We bless you in Yahweh’s name.”
- Proverbs 2:10-11 (v6) For wisdom will enter into your heart. Knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. Discretion will watch over you. Understanding will keep you,
- Proverbs 3:1-3 (v6) My son, don’t forget my teaching; but let your heart keep my commandments: for they will add to you length of days, years of life, and…
- Proverbs 15:7 (v7) The lips of the wise spread knowledge; not so with the heart of fools.
- Habakkuk 2:2 (v9) Yahweh answered me, “Write the vision, and make it plain on tablets, that he who runs may read it.
- Exodus 12:7 (v9) They shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two door posts and on the lintel, on the houses in which they shall eat it.
- Ruth 4:11 (v7) All the people who were in the gate, and the elders, said, “We are witnesses. May Yahweh make the woman who has come into your house like…
- Job 19:23-25 (v9) “Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! That with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock…
- Psalms 37:30 (v7) The mouth of the righteous talks of wisdom. His tongue speaks justice.
- Psalms 119:98 (v6) Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for your commandments are always with me.
- Malachi 3:16 (v7) Then those who feared Yahweh spoke one with another; and Yahweh listened, and heard, and a book of memory was written before him, for those…
- Ruth 2:4 (v7) Behold, Boaz came from Bethlehem, and said to the reapers, “May Yahweh be with you.” They answered him, “May Yahweh bless you.”
- 2 John 1:2 (v6) for the truth’s sake, which remains in us, and it will be with us forever:
- Ruth 2:12 (v7) May Yahweh repay your work, and a full reward be given to you from Yahweh, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take…
82 distinct cross-references across this passage (84 total citations).
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this passage (19 sources)
Historical commentary, presented as a primary source — not an endorsement.
Private notes
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Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv7–9 Some read, thou shalt whet them upon thy children:…
Some read, thou shalt whet them upon thy children: to wit, that they may print them more deeply in memory.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv4–9 Deu 6:4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God…
Deu 6:4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God [is] one LORD:
Ver. 4. The Lord our God is one Lord.] One in Three, and Three in One. Here are three words answering the three persons; and the middle word, Our God, deciphering fitly the second, who assumed our nature, as Galatinus well observeth. Echad, One, may show the unity of essence in this plurality of persons. Others take notice that the last letter of this first word, "hear," is extraordinarily large in the Hebrew, as calling for utmost heed and attention: {Hebrew Text Note} and so is the last letter in the word rendered "One." {See Trapp on "Exo 34:14"} This last letter, daleth, which usually stands for four, signifieth, say the Hebrews, that this one God shall be worshipped in the four corners of the earth. Therefore whensoever, in their synagogues, they sing or say these word of Moses, they turn their heads to the four corners of the world.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv4–8 One in essence, and the only object of our…
One in essence, and the only object of our worship.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On v4 Here is, I. A brief summary of religion, containing…
Here is, I. A brief summary of religion, containing the first principles of faith and obedience, Deu 6:4, Deu 6:5. These two verses the Jews reckon one of the choicest portions of scripture: they write it in their phylacteries, and think themselves not only obliged to say it at least twice every day, but very happy in being so obliged, having this saying among them, Blessed are we, who every morning and evening say, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. But more blessed are we if we duly consider and improve,
1. What we are here taught to believe concerning God: that Jehovah our God is one Jehovah. (1.) That the God whom we serve is Jehovah, a Being infinitely and eternally perfect, self-existent, and self-sufficient. (2.) That he is the one only living and true God; he only is God, and he is but one. The firm belief of this self-evident truth would effectually arm them against all idolatry, which was introduced by that fundamental error, that there are gods many. It is past dispute that there is one God, and there is no other but he, Mar 12:32. Let us therefore have no other, nor desire to have any other. Some have thought there is here a plain intimation of the trinity of persons in the unity of the Godhead; for here is the name of God three times, and yet all declared to be one. Happy they that have this one Lord for their God; for they have but one master to please, but one benefactor to seek to. It is better to have one fountain that a thousand cisterns, one all-sufficient God than a thousand insufficient ones.
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2. What we are here taught concerning the duty which God requires of man. It is all summed up in this as its principle, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. He had undertaken (Deu 6:2) to teach them to fear God; and, in pursuance of his undertaking, he here teaches them to love him, for the warmer our affection to him the greater will be our veneration for him; the child that honours his parents no doubt loves them. Did ever any prince make a law that his subjects should love him? Yet such is the condescension of the divine grace that this is made the first and great commandment of God's law, that we love him, and that we perform all other parts of our duty to him from a principle of love. My son, give me thy heart. We must highly esteem him, be well pleased that there is such a Being, well pleased in all his attributes, and relations to us: our desire must be towards him, our delight in him, our dependence upon him, and to him we must be entirely devoted. It must be a constant pleasure to us to think of him, hear from him, speak to him, and serve him. We must love him, (1.) As the Lord, the best of beings, most excellent and amiable in himself. (2.) As our God, a God in covenant with us, our Father, and the most kind and bountiful of friends and benefactors. We are also commanded to love God with all our heart, and soul, and might; that is, we must love him, [1.] With a sincere love; not in word and tongue only, saying we love him when our hearts are not with him, but inwardly, and in truth, solacing ourselves in him. [2.] With a strong love; the heart must be carried out towards him with great ardour and fervency of affection. Some have hence though that we should avoid saying (as we commonly express ourselves) that we will do this or that with all our heart, for we must not do any thing with all our heart but love God; and that this phrase, being here used concerning that sacred fire, should not be unhallowed. He that is our all must have our all, and none but he. [3.] With a superlative love; we must love God above any creature whatsoever, and love nothing besides him but what we love for him and in subordination to him. [4.] With an intelligent love; for so it is explained, Mar 12:33. To love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, we must know him, and therefore love him as those that see good cause to love him. [5.] With an entire love; he is one, and therefore our hearts must be united in this love, and the whole stream of our affections must run towards him. O that this love of God may be shed abroad in our hearts!
II. Means are here prescribed for the maintaining and keeping up of religion in our hearts and houses, that it might not wither and go to decay. And they are these: - 1. Meditation: These words which I command thee shall be in thy heart, Deu 6:6. Though the words alone without the things will do us no good, yet we are in danger of losing the things if we neglect the words, by which ordinarily divine light and power are conveyed to the heart. God's words must be laid up on our heart, that our thoughts may be daily conversant with them and employed about them, and thereby the whole soul may be brought to abide and act under the influence and impression of them. This immediately follows upon the law of loving God with all your heart; for those that do so will lay up his word in their hearts both as an evidence and effect of that love and as a means to preserve and increase it. He that loves God loves his Bible. 2. The religious education of children (Deu 6:7): "Thou shalt teach them diligently to thy children; and by communicating thy knowledge thou wilt increase it." Those that love the Lord God themselves should do what they can to engage the affections of their children to him, and so to preserve the entail of religion in their families from being cut off. Thou shalt whet them diligently upon thy children, so some read it; frequently repeat these things to them, try all ways of instilling them into their minds, and making them pierce into their hearts; as, in whetting a knife, it is turned first on this side, then on that. "Be careful and exact in teaching thy children; and aim, as by whetting, to sharpen them, and put an edge upon them. Teach them to thy children, not only those of thy own body" (say the Jews) "but all those that are anyway under thy care and tuition." Bishop Patrick well observes here that Moses thought his law so very plain and easy that every father might be able to instruct his sons in it and every mother her daughters. Thus that good thing which is committed to us we must carefully transmit to those that come after us, that it may be perpetuated. 3. Pious discourse. "Thou shalt talk of these things, with due reverence and seriousness, for the benefit not only of thy children, but of thy other domestics, thy friends and companions, as thou sittest in thy house at work, or at meat, or at rest, or to receive visits, and when thou walkest by the way for diversion, or for conversation, of in journeys, when at night thou art retiring from thy family to lie down for sleep, and when in the morning thou hast risen up and returnest to thy family again. Take all occasions to discourse with those about thee of divine things; not of unrevealed mysteries, or matters of doubtful disputation, but of the plain truths and laws of God, and the things that belong to our peace." So far is it from being reckoned a diminution to the honour of sacred things to make them subject of our familiar discourse that they are recommended to us to be talked of; for the more conversant we are with them the more we shall admire them and be affected with them, and may thereby be instrumental to communicate divine light and heat. 4. Frequent reading of the word: They shall be as frontlets between thy eyes, and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, Deu 6:8, Deu 6:9. It is probable that at that time there were few written copies of the whole law, only at the feasts of tabernacles the people had it read to them; and therefore God appointed them, at least for the present, to write some select sentences of the law, that were most weighty and comprehensive, upon their walls, or in scrolls of parchment to be worn about their wrists; and some think that hence the phylacteries so much used among the Jews took rise. Christ blames the Pharisees, not for wearing them, but for affecting to have them broader than other people's, Mat 23:5. But when Bibles came to be common among them there was less occasion for this expedient. It was prudently and piously provided by the first reformers of the English church that then, when Bibles were scarce, some select portions of scripture should be written on the walls and pillars of the churches, which the people might make familiar to them, in conformity to this direction, which seems to have been binding in the letter of it to the Jews as it is to us in the intent of it, which is that we should endeavour by all means possible to make the word of God familiar to us, that we may have it ready to us upon all occasions, for our restraint from sin and our direction and excitement to our duty. It must be as that which is graven on the palms of our hands, always before our eyes. See Pro 7:1-3. It is also intimated that we must never be ashamed to own our religion, nor to own ourselves under the check and government of it. Let it be written on our gates, and let every one that goes by our door read it, that we believe Jehovah to be God alone, and believe ourselves bound to love him with all our hearts.
III. A caution is here given not to forget God in a day of prosperity and plenty, Deu 6:10-12. Here, 1. He raises their expectations of the goodness of their God, taking it for granted that he would bring them into the good land that he had promised (Deu 6:10), that they should no longer dwell in tents as shepherds and poor travellers, but should settle in great and goodly cities, should no longer wander in a barren wilderness, but should enjoy houses will furnished and gardens well planted (Deu 6:11), and all this without any care and expense of their own, which he here lays a great stress upon - Cities which thou buildest not, houses which thou filledst not, etc., both because it made the mercy really much more valuable that what they had come to them so cheaply, and yet, if they did not actually consider it, the mercy would be the less esteemed, for we are most sensible of the value of that which has cost us dear. When they came so easily by the gift they would be apt to grow secure, and unmindful of the giver. 2. He engages their watchfulness against the badness of their own hearts: Then beware, when thou liest safe and soft, lest thou forget the Lord, Deu 6:12. Note, (1.) In a day of prosperity we are in great danger of forgetting God, our dependence upon him, our need of him, and our obligations to him. When the world smiles we are apt to make our court to it, and expect our happiness in it, and so we forget him that his our only portion and rest. Agur prays against this temptation (Pro 30:9): Lest I be full and deny thee. (2.) There is therefore need of great care and caution at such a time, and a strict watch over our own hearts. "Then beware; being warned of your danger, stand upon your guard against it. Bind the words of God for a sign upon thy hand, for this end to prevent thy forgetting God. When thou art settled in Canaan forget not thy deliverance out of Egypt; but look to the rock out of which thou wast hewn. When thy latter end has greatly increased, remember the smallness of thy beginnings."
IV. Some special precepts and prohibitions are here given, which are of great consequence. 1. They must upon all occasions give honour to God (Deu 6:13): Fear him and serve him (for, if he be a Master, we must both reverence him and do his work); and swear by his name, that is, they must not upon any occasion appeal to any other, as the discerner of truth and avenger of wrong. Swear by him only, and not by an idol, or any other creature. Swear by his name in all treaties and covenants with the neighbouring nations, and do not compliment them so far as to swear by their gods. Swearing by his mane is sometimes put for an open profession of his name. Isa 45:23, Every tongue shall swear, is expounded (Rom 14:11), Every tongue shall confess to God. 2. They must not upon any occasion give that honour to other gods (Deu 6:14): You shall not go after other gods, that is, "You shall not serve nor worship them;" for therein they went astray, they went a whoring from the true God, who in this, more than in any thing, is jealous god (Deu 6:15): and the learned bishop Patrick observes here, out of Maimonides, that we never find, either in the law or the prophets, anger, or fury, or jealousy, or indignation, attributed to God but upon occasion of idolatry. 3. They must take heed of dishonouring God by tempting him (Deu 6:16): You shall not tempt the Lord your God, that is, "You shall not in any exigence distrust the power, presence, and providence of God, nor quarrel with him," which, if they indulged an evil heart of unbelief, they would take occasion to do in Canaan as well as in the wilderness. No change of condition will cure a disposition of murmur and fret. Our Saviour uses this caution as an answer to one of Satan's temptations, with application to himself, Mat 4:7, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, either by despairing of his power and goodness while we keep in the way of our duty, or by presuming upon it when we turn aside out of that way.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv4–9 Hear, O Israel,.... These are the words of Moses,…
Hear, O Israel,.... These are the words of Moses, stirring up the people to an attention to what he was about to say of this great and momentous article, the unity of God, to prevent their going into polytheism and idolatry. From one of the words here used, the Jews call this section Kiriathshema, which they oblige themselves to read twice a day, morning and evening (n); the last letter of the first word in this verse, "Shema", meaning "hear", and the last letter of the last word in it, "Echad", meaning "one", are greater than ordinary; which seems designed to excite the attention to what is contained in this passage:
the Lord our God is one Lord; the doctrine of which is, that the Lord, who was the covenant God and Father of his people Israel, is but one Jehovah; he is Jehovah, the Being of beings, a self-existent Being, eternal and immutable; and he is but one in nature and essence; this appears from the perfection of his nature, his eternity, omnipotence, omnipresence, infinity, goodness, self-sufficiency, and perfection; for there can be but one eternal, one omnipotent, one omnipresent, one infinite, one that is originally and of himself good; one self, and all sufficient, and perfect Being; and which also may be concluded from his being the first cause of all things, which can be but one; and from his relations to his creatures, as their King, ruler, governor, and lawgiver. And for this purpose these words are cited in Mar 12:29 but then they no ways contradict the doctrine of a trinity of persons in the unity of the divine essence, the Father, Word, and Holy Spirit, which three are one; the one God, the one Jehovah, as here expressed; see Jo1 5:7 and so the ancient Jews understood this passage. In an ancient book of theirs it is said (o) Jehovah, Elohenu, Jehovah (i.e. Jehovah, our God, Jehovah); these are the three degrees with respect to this sublime mystery; "in the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth"; and again (p), Jehovah, Elohenu, Jehovah, they are one; the three forms (modes or things) which are one; and elsewhere (q) it is observed, there are two, and one is joined to them, and they are three; and when the three are one, he says to (or of) them, these are the two names which Israel heard, Jehovah, Jehovah, and Elohenu (our God) is joined unto them; and it is the seal of the ring of truth, and when they are joined they are one in one unity; which is illustrated by the three names the soul of man is called by, the soul, spirit, and breath; and elsewhere they say (r) the holy blessed God, and his Shechinah, are called one; see Joh 10:30.
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(n) Mist. Beracot, c. 1. sect. 1, 2. (o) Zohar in Gen. fol. 1, 3. (p) Ib. in Exod. fol. 18. 3, 4. (q) Ib. in Numb. fol. 67. 3. (r) Tikkune Zohar, Correct. 47. fol. 86. 2.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv5, 7, 8 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with…
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart - And is this only an external commandment? Can any then say, that the Sinai - covenant was merely external? With all thy heart - With an entire love. He is One; therefore our hearts must be united in his love. And the whole stream of our affections must run toward Him. O that this love of God may be shed abroad in our hearts.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv4–9 Verse 4. Hear, O Israel] שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו…
Verse 4. Hear, O Israel] שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד shemA Yisrael, Yehovah Eloheinu, Yehovah achaD. These words may be variously rendered into English; but almost all possible verbal varieties in the translation (and there can be none other) amount to the same sense: "Israel, hear! Jehovah, our God, is one Jehovah;" or, "Jehovah is our God, Jehovah is one;" or, "Jehovah is our God, Jehovah alone;" or, "Jehovah is our God, Jehovah who is one;" or, "Jehovah, who is our God, is the one Being." On this verse the Jews lay great stress; it is one of the four passages which they write on their phylacteries, and they write the last letter in the first and last words very large, for the purpose of exciting attention to the weighty truth it contains. It is perhaps in reference to this custom of the Jews that our blessed Lord alludes, Mt 22:38; Mr 12:29-30, where he says, This is the first and great commandment; and this is nearly the comment that Maimonides gives on this place: "Hear, O Israel; because in these words the property, the love, and the doctrine of God are contained."
Many think that Moses teaches in these words the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. It may be so; but if so, it is not more clearly done than in the first verse of Genesis, to which the reader is referred. When this passage occurs in the Sabbath readings in the synagogue, the whole congregation repeat the last word achad for several minutes together with the loudest vociferations: this I suppose they do to vent a little of their spleen against the Christians, for they suppose the latter hold three Gods, because of their doctrine of the Trinity; but all their skill and cunning can never prove that there is not a plurality expressed in the word אלהינו Eloheinu, which is translated our God; and were the Christians, when reading this verse, to vociferate Eloheinu for several minutes as the Jews do achad, it would apply more forcibly in the way of conviction to the Jews of the plurality of persons in the Godhead, than the word achad, of one, against any pretended false tenet of Christianity, as every Christian receives the doctrine of the unity of God in the most conscientious manner. It is because of their rejection of this doctrine that the wrath of God continues to rest on them; for the doctrine of the atonement cannot be received, unless the doctrine of the Godhead of Christ is received too. Some Christians have joined the Jews against this doctrine, and some have even outdone them, and have put themselves to extraordinary pains to prove that אלהים Elohim is a noun of the singular number! This has not yet been proved. It would be as easy to prove that there is no plural in language.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv4–8 Deu 6:4. Hear, O Israel! — The passage contained…
Deu 6:4. Hear, O Israel! — The passage contained in this and the following verse, the Jews reckoned one of their choicest portions of Scripture. They wrote it on their phylacteries, (or slips of parchment bound on their foreheads, their necks, their breasts, or wrists,) and thought themselves not only obliged to repeat it twice every day, but very happy in being so obliged; having this saying among them, “Blessed are we who, every morning and evening, say, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord!” Jehovah our God is one Jehovah; 1st, The God whom we worship is Jehovah; a Being infinitely and eternally perfect, self-existent, and self- sufficient. 2d, He is the only living and true God, he only is God, and he is but one. The firm belief of this self-evident truth would effectually arm them against all idolatry, which was introduced by that fundamental error, that there are gods many. It is past dispute that there is one God, and that there is no other but he, Mar 12:32. Let us, therefore, neither have, nor desire to have any other.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 8 These words form the beginning of what is termed…
These words form the beginning of what is termed the “Shema” (“Hear”) in the Jewish Services, and belong to the daily morning and evening office. They may be called “the creed of the Jews.”
This weighty text contains far more than a mere declaration of the unity of God as against polytheism; or of the sole authority of the revelation that He had made to Israel as against other pretended manifestations of His will and attributes. It asserts that the Lord God of Israel is absolutely God, and none other. He, and He alone, is Jehovah (Yahweh) the absolute, uncaused God; the One who had, by His election of them, made Himself known to Israel.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv5, 7, 8 Whole heart....soul....and strength. God admits of no partner, nor…
Whole heart....soul....and strength. God admits of no partner, nor will he suffer any rivulet to be drawn from the fountain of love, which is not ultimately referred to himself. Our neighbour we must love only for his sake, and by the observance of this two-fold precept, we shall fulfil the whole law and the prophets, Matthew xxii. 40. (Haydock) See St. Augustine, de Doct. i. 22. --- We must love God disinterestedly for his own sake: we must sacrifice our soul and life for his honour, with all our strength, beginning every good work with fervour, and persevering in our undertakings. All our faculties and senses must be consecrated to the divine service, as well as all our goods; in which sense the Chaldean, &c., understand the word strength. Hebrew literally, ex toto valde tuo. By this singular expression Moses seems to insinuate, that he cannot find words to specify how much we ought to love the Sovereign Good. (Calmet) --- "The measure of loving God, is to love without measure." (St. Bernard) (Haydock) --- By many words, the same thing is more forcibly inculcated. (Tirinus) (Menochius) --- In the gospel we find, with thy whole mind, (Luke x. 27,) added by the lawyer. (Haydock) --- We must give God the preference before all, and thus have our heart perfect before him, like David, &c. (Tirinus)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v4 Hortatory Exposition of the First Two Commands
Hortatory Exposition of the First Two Commands
Deu_6:4 to Deu_11:32
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The First Commandment. (Deu_6:4 to Deu_8:20)
Deu_6:4-25
4Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. 5And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6And these words which I command [am commanding] thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7and thou shalt teach [sharpen] them diligently unto thy children [sons], and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 8And thou shalt [omit thou shalt] bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as front-lets 9[brow-bands] between thine eyes. And thou shalt [omit thou shalt] write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. 10And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee1 into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, 11and houses full of all [every kind of] good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive-trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full [and thou 12eatest and art full], Then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage [bondmen]. 13Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name. 14Ye shall not go after [go behind, follow] other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; 15(For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you;) lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth [land]. 16Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him in Massah. 17Ye shall diligently2 [truly, carefully] keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and his testimonies, and his statutes, which he hath commanded thee. 18And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well [good] with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land [the land, the good] which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, 19To cast out [so that, because he drives out] all thine enemies from before thee, as the Lord 20hath spoken. And when thy son asketh thee in time to come [in the future], saying, What mean [is wished, intended by] the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord our God hath commanded you? 21Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh’s bond-men in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand: 22And the Lord shewed [gave] signs and wonders, great and sore [evil] upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes: 23And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in [hither] to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers. 24And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day. 25And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe [think upon, keep] to do all these commandments3 [this whole command] before the Lord our God, as he hath commanded us.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. Deu_6:1-9. The exposition of the first command (comp. Deu_5:6-7) connects itself both with the doctrine, the matter of faith, Deu_6:4, and with the life, the moral demand, Deu_6:5. (This is to the Jew the sacred quintessence of his religion, through the involuntary expression of which many betrayed themselves, and were burned during the persecution in Spain.) אֶחָד is not synonymous with לְבַדִּי, alone. But if Jehovah is one, Deu_6:4, he is therewith also alone Jehovah. The sense of the verse is, Jehovah our God is as such, as this Jehovah, one (Mar_12:29; Mar_12:32). [Wordsworth: “Surely the adoption of these words of Deuteronomy by our blessed Lord Himself is a sufficient refutation of the theory of those who affirm that Deuteronomy is a spurious work. Our Lord makes them the very ground-work of all true religion.” Bib. Com. “This mighty text contains far more than a mere declaration that God is one. It asserts that the Lord God of Israel is absolutely God, and none other. The last letter of the first and last word are written large, which the Jewish commentators make highly significant.”—A.G.] The predicate of the sentence begins with the repeated Jehovah; but Jehovah is repeated in order to bring out more impressively the absolute being of the God of Israel, from which results, qualitatively, His universality and eternity, relatively His absoluteness, quantitatively His unity (Deu_4:35; Deu_4:39). With the unity of the absolute, His simplicity also must be conceded, which, although it does not occur in the Scripture, in its metaphysical abstraction, meets us still in the attributis derivatis, His immateriality, spirituality and invisibility in the second command (comp. upon. Deu_5:8). For this first command, so far as the doctrine or faith is concerned, limits itself to the oneness, i.e. to the monotheism of the absolute Jehovah, over against polytheism generally, and also over against every polytheistic, paganistic nationalizing or localizing of Jehovah (Zec_14:9). This is the explanation of the I am Jehovah thy God, and the no other gods before me. This oneness, and therefore exclusiveness, of Jehovah well supports, Deu_6:5, the moral demand for the perfect ordering of the life. The Hear, O Israel (as usually behold), which in the conciseness of the expression calls attention to the importance of the subject, reaches still to this also. The polytheist is absolutely dependent upon no one of his gods, and thus religion with him never reaches the truth of its idea. But as and just because Jehovah is one, His demand generally upon Israel, thus the whole law, with all its variety of commands, must have a unity (Joh_17:21 sq.), just as law and promise are also one, Gal_3:21. Since, however, the unity of Jehovah opens or begins the law, it is only fitting that the unity in the demands of Jehovah should be placed as the first command (as the πρώτη ἐντολή, Mat_22:38), the opening for all that follows, in the very spirit of which they are to be understood.—And thou shalt love, καὶ ἀγαπήσεις, Mar_12:30. A simple continuation of Deu_6:4, as that which evidently flows from it. It is scarcely and strictly a command, rather as a direction or concession: the duty belongs to thee to love in this measure, sq.: at the most a demand; so love, sq. (Deu_5:10). To the unity of the absolute, since He is the God of Israel (Deu_5:6), agrees the redemption from Egypt (Deu_6:12; Deu_6:21 sq.), as showing that He is such, through which also this Jehovah appears worthy of love, and indeed to the whole man, in heart and life, and in all his relations. Heart (Deu_5:26) the innermost, then soul as synonymous with life, thus already more external than heart, (Deu_4:29) and then strength, which designates the still more outward effective proofs of the life. (Mat_22:37; Luk_10:27; Mar_12:33). [Bib. Com.: “The specification is intended to include every faculty that can possibly come in question.” Alexander on Mar_12:29-31 : “There is no need of attempting any nice distinction between heart and soul and mind, the obvious design being to exhaust the one idea of the whole man.” It is clear also from the reference of our Lord to this command, that the law and the Gospel do not differ as an outward and carnal service from an inward and spiritual one. Love holds the same prominence in both, but the gospel gives new and peculiar motives to enforce this love.—A. G.]. As the love to Jehovah, and the keeping of His commands are connected, Deu_5:10, so now Deu_6:6 sq., follows Deu_6:5, as love must show itself in this relation, or way. These words which, thus all which is commanded, Deu_6:1. Shall be in [upon, Schroeder] thine heart, (Deu_11:18) as the duty which rests upon thee, but also a matter of the heart, and therefore must be a “pleasant burden” (Schultz) 1Jn_5:3. “As written upon the heart, Jer_31:33.” Knobel. Whatever the heart is full of, that comes out from the mouth, Deu_6:7, and whatever comes from the heart, reaches the heart; but that it may reach the hearts of the children, it must be sharpened [taught diligently] upon their hearts, rigorously commanded, for mere words secure only a mere recollection (Heb_4:12). Of them.בְּ as in Deu_3:26, so that the discourses rest in them, have their very substance and contents in them, and indeed at all times and everywhere, Psa_1:2. Deu_6:8-9, state how the commandment should rule the private, domestic, and public life in figurative, but therefore in more vivid and proverbial language (comp. Deu_11:18; Exo_13:9; Exo_13:16; Pro_3:3; Pro_3:21-22; Pro_6:21-22; Pro_7:3; Isa_49:16) precisely in accordance with oriental usage. We use the hand in our acts, and hence to bind them upon thy hand is to keep them for a sign for thy conduct, as ever to be regarded, and which must determine my manner of action. The brow, between thine eyes, represents the chamber of thought, is as the door to the intellectual nature of man (hence the easy transition to the door-posts, Deu_6:9). The commandments, as frontlets or browbands, become therefore a badge or confession by which one may be known, and embrace the private life, both on the side which is turned, and open to the man himself, and upon that which lies open to other men (Rev_13:16; Rev_14:1). טֹטָפֹת instead of טַפְטָפוֹת occurs only in the Pentateuch, is obsolete in later periods. Transformed into a symbol and by the Pharisees perverted to carnal ends, Mat_23:5. The socalled Tephillim, for the left hand and the head, small cases with the Scripture texts Exo_13:1-11; Exodus 11-17; Deu_6:4-10; Deu_11:13-26, fastened with a leathern thong, are still worn among the Jews of to-day as an appropriate prayer ornament. But writing is first spoken in Deu_6:9. Since the commandments are a pledge or confession, he states also how they express the rule and support of the domestic and public life. That which is thus a confession, serves at the same time as a continual self-exhortation, as with respect to the family, so in civil life the Litera scripta manet. The analogy of Deu_6:8, the universality in the terms and write them, and the indefiniteness as to what is to be written, all go to prove that Deu_6:9 uses merely figurative language, and does not require any actual inscription upon the gates and door-posts. The references to Egyptian usages (Hengstenberg and Schultz), to the customs of oriental nations of to-day (Knobel), which might be enlarged still further from Germany, show how little of this kind it was necessary to require. [See also Wilkinson, A. E. III., 364,—Lane, Modern Egypt,—Kitto and Smith for fuller statements as to these oriental and Jewish usages.—A. G.]. If writing has once become a popular means to aid the memory it is evident that one would say, “lest thou forget it, write it upon thy wall, upon thy door.” If this is not what it means, still it must be regarded as a proverbial figurative expression for forget not! as Deu_6:12 expresses the exhortation. As the Tephillim are connected with Deu_6:8, so the Talmud connects with Deu_6:9 the (מְזוּזָה, door-posts, Exo_12:7; Exo_21:6), mezuzah, a metal case containing a parchment roll, inscribed with Deu_6:4-9; Deu_11:13-22, and dedicated to Shaddai, (the Almighty) which every Jew fastened to the right door-post of his house as a protection against death, the devil, ghosts and witchcraft.
2. Deu_6:10-19. Deu_6:10. Comp. with Deu_1:8; Deu_4:37-38; Gen_50:24. Cities, sq. A detailed description for the purpose of warning, to which the exhortation now passes. Deu_6:11. And thou eatest sq. The rich enjoyment and pleasure should not destroy the remembrance of Jehovah. (Deu_5:6). The religious secularization (of God) is image worship, here they are warned against the moral secularization (of men). But comp. Deu_31:20; Deu_32:15. Deu_6:13. They must guard above all against forgetting the name with which the redeemer of Israel out of Egypt had named Himself. Hence the positive form of the lest thou forget with reference to the name Jehovah, still not now for the purpose of explaining the third command, but rather to impress the heartfelt fear of Jehovah (Deu_6:2; Deu_5:26) for the individual, and the service of Jehovah in the cultus and life (Deu_5:9) for the household (Jos_24:15). And shalt swear by His name, i.e., when thou swearest—the solemn, vital, essential confession of the mouth, as before the court, so also in civil life and acts (Isa_19:18; Isa_45:23; Isa_65:16; Jer_12:16; Jer_4:2; Psa_63:11), [of the oath as an act of worship. See Mat_5:34; Heb_6:16; Jam_5:12.—A. G.]. The emphatic position of אֶה־יְהוָֹה prepares the way for Deu_6:14 (comp. further Mat_4:10; Luk_4:8; the Sept. adds μόνῳ) with which comp. Deu_4:3. Deu_6:15. See Deu_5:9; Deu_4:24;—Exo_32:11;—Deu_4:26; Deu_5:16. Deu_6:16 parallel to Deu_6:14. There superstition, here unbelief, which calls in question the presence of Jehovah, or generally His existence. Exo_17:7; Mat_4:7; Luk_4:12; (1Co_10:9). [Deu_6:16. This is one of the texts quoted by Christ in the temptation. And as He quoted Deuteronomy as a part of the sacred Scriptures, and as it was then held, i.e., as the work of Moses, so we have here again His endorsement of the Mosaic authorship of this book.—A. G.] Deu_6:17. Forgetfulness leads to apostacy, and to sinful doubt, love, to the keeping of the commandments sq. Comp. Deu_4:40; Deu_4:45. Deu_6:18. יָשָׁר even, straight. טוֹב (contracted from טהב = צהב), bright, brilliant, beautiful, the good as it falls in the eyes namely, of God, as pleasing to Him, (1Jn_3:22; Joh_8:29). There is here a play upon words, to the good, good comes, it goes well—here in reference to the good land, (Deu_6:10). Deu_6:19; Deu_4:38; Exo_23:27; Lev_26:7. Preparatory to chap. 7.
3. Deu_6:20-25. Deu_6:20. The carrying out of Deu_6:7, as Deu_6:8 sq. is of Deu_6:6. מָה with respect to their import, or their ground and aim. The son asks because he sees the father doing, as Deu_6:7 enjoins (Exo_13:14; Exo_12:26). A testimony, example, and earnest instruction is presupposed, (Psa_34:11; Pro_4:1; Eph_6:4). It concerns the ground or reason, if the youth asks wherefore? and the application to the heart and life, if the question is that just as frequently asked, What is that to me? to what end? (How practical)? First the wretched condition of Israel, bondmen, sq., then the redemption (Deu_6:22נָהַן as Exo_7:9. Comp. Deu_4:34) to its completion (Deu_6:23, that he might, sq.) with a citation of the promise, which he swore, sq., and with an emphatic mention of the fruits of salvation (Deu_6:24, comp. upon Deu_4:1). Lastly the thankfulness in Deu_6:25 : So we are under obligation to God. Righteousness (Deu_24:13, comp. upon Deu_4:8) refers to the acquitting sentence of the law, as opposed to κατάκριμα (Rom_5:16) and hence involves the fulfilling (Rom_2:13) of the whole law (Jam_2:10); and as more nearly defined here as before the Lord this righteousness is not opposed to that in Rom_8:4, which also consists in walking not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. Thus Moses describes the righteousness which is of the law (Rom_10:5) as far from the hypocritical, or even merely external righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees (Mat_5:20) as Paul on his side separates widely justification by faith from the simple, external apprehension of the work of Christ for us. [But Paul never separates justification by faith from a hearty practical obedience to the law. He teaches that the man is justified by the simple apprehension and reception of the work of Christ for us, i.e., by faith—but this faith is never fruitless. The man so believing is in Christ, Rom_8:1, and so must walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. The note in Bib. Com. is judicious. The word translated righteousness is the same as in Gen_15:6, rendered in the N. T. by δικαιοσύνη. Moses from the very beginning has made the whole “righteousness of the law” to depend so entirely on a right state of the heart, in one word, on faith, that there can be no real inconsistency between the verse before us, taken thus strictly and properly, and the principle of Justification by faith only.—A. G.]. At the same time it is clear that although לפּני יְוָֹה cannot be referred to וצדקה, true righteousness is the justification of men, not before men, but before God, and therewith Christ is the end of the law for righteousness (Rom_10:4) Rom_8:3. Here also the faith, Deu_6:4, precedes the love, Deu_6:5.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. “All comprehensive obedience roots itself in the fear of the Lord, (Deu_6:2-3), for this is the first and nearest truth in the relations of Israel to Jehovah, (Deu_5:26). But if the fear of Jehovah especially restrains man from gratifying his selfish nature as opposed to God, it cannot rest in this mere denial of the self-will, although this is first as even the negative form of the decalogue shows, but leads to a union of the divine and human wills, and this is love, which has been explained as the true condition of obedience in the decalogue (Deu_5:10).” Baumgarten.
2. Since love—and love to God is the strength of the love to our neighbor—is represented as the sum of the commandments, the deep inward character of the Mosaic law appears here (comp. further Deu_10:12; Deu_11:1; Deu_11:13), and at the same time it is presented as one holy spiritual whole, so that we cannot speak of any higher New Testament stand-point in this regard. Pharisaism does not find its condemnation first in Christ, it met it long ago in Moses. But as this Jewish (not O. T.) idea and use of the law separates it into manifold external statutes, literally understood, so on the other hand it breaks the thread which connects the law, according to its origin with the covenant of God, and love as the fulfilling of the law with faith. The “position of faith to the law” in the old covenant, (Auberlen) is this, “the believer receives the law as a gracious gift of God, rejoices in its perfection, places his whole life under its sacred discipline and control. But the more earnestly he strives after the fulfilling of the law, the more he recognizes his own unfitness to the effort, his weakness to good, the power of evil in the heart. Then he seeks the forgiveness of sins, as it was already offered in the O. T., through the grace of God, and comforts himself with redemption through the Messiah.”
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
Deu_6:4-5. Luther: “That God is one, profits us not, but that He is held as one God and our God, that is blessedness and life and the fulfilling of all the law. The first explanation of the first command relates to faith. For no one can have one God who does not depend upon Him alone, does not leave all for Him alone, otherwise he will be hurried away to manifold works, and feign himself manifold deities. The second explanation flows from the first, and relates to love. For when we understand that all things flow from Him, then a sweet love necessarily follows. In Deu_6:4 He claims the confidence of all, and then in Deu_6:5 awakens a joyful and free service of God. Thus in faith we receive through the unity of God all things freely of God, through love we do all things cheerfully for our God. The one God and His one command. True love requires the whole man). Deu_6:6. Berl. Bib.: “The heart alone receives this lesson. The language of love is taught by love, and love teaches to love.” Luther: “Not alone in the book, nor in thought, but in the innermost affection of thy heart.” Tueb. Bib.: “The law of God must be engraved upon our hearts with an evangelical pen, if we will keep it.” Starke: “Whoever will truly teach and inculcate upon others the commands of God, must first take them to heart, that he may mould his Christian character, faith, and walk, upon them. Mark that, ye parents and teachers.” Deu_6:7. Randgl.: “The more one obeys the word of God the clearer and fresher it will become. The longer, the more lovingly.” Starke: “Parents should not only send their children to school, and lead them to Church, but hold frequent instructive conversations with them. They should be diligently trained in the Catechisms in the Church, school, and at home.” (How faith and love rule all, heart, home, and land). Richter: “According to Deu_6:9 every Israelite must be able to read and write.”(?) Deu_6:10-12. Luther: “He reproves wealth and luxury, especially mammon and avarice (1Ti_6:10; Col_3:5). For the human heart yields itself to present good, but has no confidence in that which is not present. But trust in wealth, and faith, and love cannot rule in the same heart at the same time. See how Moses guards against the idolatry of the heart before he speaks of other gods.” Schultz: To be full becomes a peculiar pregnant expression in Scripture. Deu_6:12. Cramer: “There must be great strength to support such good days.” Deu_6:13. Luther: “This is the strength of faith, and the result of the first command, that in prosperity we are reverent and fearful, in adverse affairs we are secure and free, and in both lean upon God. In great wealth do not trust therein, hast thou none, be not therefore despondent. Moses never dreams of the doulia, latria, hyperdoulia of the sophists. And so also should’st thou take this oath, since thou remainest in the service of God.” (The true oath an act of worship). Deu_6:14. A bad neighborhood often corrupts good morals. Deu_6:16. Luther: “Before, it was that we should in prosperous times do right, now that in the opposite condition we should suffer right, and be certain that God is near us in the time of need. God is tempted, 1) when we do not use what we have, thus whoever complains and thinks that God should feed him without his own efforts; 2) when we appoint Him place, time, method, and so to speak feel whether He is there; thus through the pressure of want, and the counsel of a weak faith.” What is it to tempt God? To doubt His being, to test His omnipotence, to give direction for His help, to question His faithfulness, to hasten or anticipate His providence, to limit His grace to our own will, to ridicule His long-suffering patience, and also His righteousness, etc. Berl. Bib.: “God was tempted in His wisdom, Psa_73:11, in His truth, 2Ki_7:2, in His goodness and providence over us, Mat_4:6-7, in His power, Num_11:4-5; Psa_78:19-20; Num_14:22, in His omnipresence, Exo_17:7.” God never tempts us to evil, and we ought not to tempt Him out of our wicked will, (Mat_22:18). The right and the wrong doubt. Gideon (Jdg_6:36 sq.) Ahaz (Isa_7:12) and Jesus (Mat_4:7). The good is at the same time the beautiful. That is good which, 1) will pass with God; 2) upon which and through which good comes to us; 3) through which we may enter upon the good, the eternal good. Deu_6:20. Schultz: “As revealed religion was introduced into the world through teaching and discipline, so it must be preserved through the same method.” Lange: “Happy parents whose children seek after the commandments of God.” Berl. Bib.: “One may better be sparing in pleasures, and have a Bible in his house, better than all prayer books, that he may read with his family, and ever take it to his heart.” Deu_6:24. Schultz: “Our life support comprehends all that makes our life truly beautiful, easy, and blessed. As there is nothing without life, so there is no life, truly so-called, without many things, as health, success, joy and peace.” Berl. Bib.: “Serving God we truly serve ourselves, for then we have all things for our use.”
Footnotes:
[1][Deu_6:10. Lit.: Shall have caused thee to come.—A. G.]
[2][Deu_6:17. Lit.: Keeping ye shall keep.—A. G.]
[3][Deu_6:25. All the command. The pronoun is singular; the commandment is one.]
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv4–9 4. The Lord our God is one Lord —…
4. The Lord our God is one Lord — The force of the Hebrew is with difficulty expressed: “Jehovah our God is one Jehovah.” The unity of the Godhead is thus brought out with strong emphasis to a people who had seen, and many of them been seduced by, the impure rites of polytheism.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv4–9 4. Hear, O Israel] So Deu_9:1; Deu_20:3, and similarly…
4. Hear, O Israel] So Deu_9:1; Deu_20:3, and similarly Deu_4:1, Deu_6:3; and nowhere else in the Hexateuch. The Sg. is to be explained as in Deu_5:1; but the continuance of the Sg. through the rest of this section is (especially if it is to follow immediately on Deu_6:1, see above) analogous to the appearance of the Sg. of the Decalogue in a Pl. context. There, as here, Moses uses the Pl. address for his own words, but quotes what God gave him at Ḥoreb in the Sg.
the Lord our God is one Lord] As the R. V. marg. shows, this is one of four possible translations of the elliptic Hebrew: Jehovah our-God, Jehovah One. The other three are: Jehovah our God, Jehovah is One; Jehovah is our God, Jehovah is One; Jehovah is our God, Jehovah alone. But the four are resolvable into these two: First, Jehovah our God is One, an expression of His unity, appropriate at a time when we know from Jeremiah that by the multiplication of His shrines the people of Judah conceived Him, as Baal or Ashtoreth was conceived, not as One, but as many deities with different characteristics and powers over different localities, cp. Jer_2:28. Second, Jehovah is our God alone: i.e. Israel’s only God, cp. Zec_14:9; Son_6:9; 1Ch_29:1. These passages are all post-exilic, and in the first two one may mean unique, but that here it means only (for Israel) is probable from the following verse. Some interpreters take the verse as ‘a great declaration of monotheism’ (so Driver). But had that been the intention of the writer the clause would have run ‘Jehovah is the God, Jehovah alone.’ The use of the term our-God shows that the meaning simply is Jehovah is Israel’s only God. Nothing is said as to the existence or non-existence of other gods, and the verse is therefore on an equality with Deu_5:7, the First Commandment, and with Deu_7:9, which implies no more than that Jehovah is a or the God indeed; cp. the curious Deu_4:19 b which seeks to reconcile His sovereignty with the fact that other gods are worshipped by other nations. Only in Deu_4:35; Deu_4:39 does an explicit declaration of monotheism appear in Deut.; it is to be remembered, however, that on other grounds the post-exilic date of these verses is possible1[126]. At the same time the phrase used here lends itself readily to the expression of an absolute monotheism, which later ages of a wider faith read into it. It is interesting to compare with our verse St Paul’s statement 1Co_8:4-6; we know that no idol is anything in the world and that there is no God but one; for though there be that are called gods …; as there be gods many and lords many, yet to us there is One God, the Father, of whom are all things. Note even here yet to us!
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[126] This is not meant to imply that some in Israel had not thrown off belief in the reality of other gods before the Exile. Jeremiah certainly had: e.g. Deu_2:11.
4–9. The Essential Creed and Duty of Israel, with enforcement of them. Known from its initial word as The Shĕma‘ (= Hear), this section (along with Deu_11:13-21 and Num_15:37-41) ‘has been for many ages the first bit of the Bible which Jewish children have learned to say and to read, just as it has for many ages formed the confession of faith among all members of the brotherhood of Judaism’ (C. G. Montefiore, The Bible for Home Reading, Pt i. 127). The later law required its recital by a Jew twice daily; for particulars see Schürer, Gesrh. des jüd. Volkes, § 27 and Appendix (3rd Germ. ed. ii. 459 f.; E.T. Div. ii. Vol. ii. pp. 77, 84). The LXX inserts before it a longish title1[125], which shows how late this editorial practice of inserting titles to important sections of Deut. continued, and explains some similar headings in the Heb. text.
[125] ‘And these are the statutes and the judgements which the Lord commanded to the children of Israel, when they were coming out of the land of Egypt.’
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 7, 8 (4, 5) Hear, O Israel . . .—These two…
(4, 5) Hear, O Israel . . .—These two verses are styled by our Lord “the first and great commandment” in the Law. The first words of the Talmud concern the hours when this form should be recited in daily morning or evening prayer—“Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah” The unity of Jehovah, as opposed to the belief in “gods many and lords many,” is the key-note of the Jewish faith. “We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.” But this truth, though visible in the Old Testament by the light of the New, was not explicitly revealed until it came forth in history, when the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world, and both sent the Holy Spirit to represent Him in the Church.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 8 Vers. 4-25. THE FIRST AND GREAT COMMANDMENT. "In the…
Vers. 4-25. THE FIRST AND GREAT COMMANDMENT. "In the fear of Jehovah all true obedience is rooted (vers. 2, 3); for this is the first and most intimate fact in the relation of Israel and Jehovah. (Deu_5:26) But where the supreme fear of Jehovah hinders men from allowing self to preponderate in opposition to God, there will be no stopping at this renunciation of self-will, though this comes first as the negative form of the ten commandments also shows, but there will come to be a coalescence of the human with the Divine will; and this is love, which is the proper condition of obedience, as the ten commandments also indicate" (Deu_5:10) (Baumgarten). Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. This is an affirmation not so much of the moneity as of the unity and simplicity of Jehovah, the alone God. Though Elohim (plu.), he is one. The speaker does not say, "Jehovah is alone God," but "Jehovah our Elohim is one Jehovah". (comp. for the force of dja. Exo_26:6, Exo_26:11; Eze_37:16-19) Among the heathen there were many Baals and many Jupiters; and it was believed that the deity might be divided and communicated to many. But the God of Israel, Jehovah, is one, indivisible and incommunicable. He is the Absolute and the Infinite One, who alone is to be worshipped, on whom all depend, and to whose command all must yield obedience. (cf. Zec_14:9) Not only to polytheism, but to pantheism, and to the conception of a localized or national deity, is this declaration of the unity of Jehovah opposed. With these words the Jews begin their daily liturgy, morning and evening; the sentence expresses the essence of their religious belief; and so familiar is it to their thought and speech that, it is said, they were often, during the persecution in Spain, betrayed to their enemies by the involuntary utterance of it.
Vers. 4-9. Truth and godliness to be perpetuated by means of home training.
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In this paragraph, the aged lawgiver rehearses the sum and substance of the Law he had delivered, and is showing what provision God had made in the structure of society for the maintenance and perpetuation of truth and godliness. It is easy to see how very incomplete his work would have been, had he not been guided to make provision for its perpetuation after his death. Doubtless God designs to use various kinds of workers in his field. Some may, like Whitefield, make a great impression while their oratory is swaying its thousands and tens of thousands. Others may be like Wesley, who not only moved the people for a generation by his pulpit power, but also prepared the way by his organizing skill for a great institution which should last for ages. Now, it is not for us to disparage one man because he does not do the work of another, but certain it is that, other things being equal, there is no comparison between the power of a man whose felt influence passes away with his life, and that of one whose works follow him, in the productions of his pen or the creations of his up-building skill. New, it was not by one like Aaron, eloquent though he was, that the continuance of the Hebrew faith and life was to be secured. He gives us no proof of stability or of that kind of power which ensures its own reproduction. That was found in Moses, a man naturally slow of speech, who, in spite of his occasional outbreaks of vehemence, was yet a patient, wise, faithful leader, by whose practical genius provision was made for the permanence of Israel"s religious ordinances and life. Moved by the Holy Ghost, he called into existence those great institutions of worship and teaching, by means of which even we down to this day are feeling the impulses which started from Mount Sinai. In the six verses before us, we have what may be called a threefold appointment of God, which in all its essential features is as much in force now as ever. We propose to study it, not so much in its historical and local aspect, as in its bearing on us and on all men for all time.
I HERE, AT THE BACK OF NATIONAL LIFE, IS SET THE EXPRESSION OF A CONDENSED THEOLOGY. "The Lord our God is one Lord." Time was when this verse was quoted in the Socinian controversy in proof of the unity of God, as against the Trinitarians, though it has in fact no bearing on the matter at all. It refers, not to the nature of the Divine Being in himself, but is rather set over against the faiths with which Israel had been surrounded, of "lords many and gods many." In contrast from polytheism, it declares that there is but one Great Supreme, who is the Lord of heaven and earth. And this is not the basis of Israel"s faith alone, but of ours likewise. We know more of God than the Hebrews did, but what they knew we retain. In atheism, the highest intellectual natures never can rest. Deism chills. Pantheism ignores personality. The God of the Bible, as revealed to us, satisfies the cravings of intellect and heart. In Jesus Christ, God is "manifest" as nowhere else. Nor should we leave out the touching word, "the Lord our God." We have one God and Father of all, to whom the vast and the minute are equally distinct, and by whose hand both are moved with equal ease; who, while he rolls the stars along, can take under his special sheltering love the widow and the fatherless; who hears the orphan"s moan and dries the falling tear. It is our inestimable privilege to know that infinitely above us, combined with an arm of mighty power, there is a heart of tenderest love, whose great concern it is to heal the wounds, to dry the tears, and obliterate the sins of a bleeding, weeping, guilt-stained world! What a revelation is this to our race! Well might Moses bid Israel "hearken"! For surely this one message to man, that there is a redeeming God whom he may call his own, is our gospel, our life, our joy, our crown!
II FRONT OF THE CONDENSED THEOLOGY, WE HAVE HERE CONDENSED RELIGION. (Ver. 5.) The fundamental truth of theology is to be fruitful in practical godliness. God"s revelation of himself to man is meant to be a redemptive power in man. Man has heart, soul, strength, understanding, emotion, will, energy. God would have no schism in our being. Our varied parts and powers are to be in tune. There is no need for us to present the sad spectacle of the heart going one way, while duty and conscience point another. Apart from the dissipation of force which that involves, what reproach and self-loathing such inward discord must ensure! Now, we have one inner faculty, even that of love, which is meant to rule, and does in fact rule, the man. According to the love, so intellect thinks, emotion feels, will decides, life moves. Our text says, let love be all concentrated on one grand object God! Let him have all (see chs. 10:12; 11:1, 13, 22; 19:9; 30:16). Not even in the New Testament have we a greater commandment than this. (Mat_22:37-40) "The love of God which the gospel demands is more intensive and cordial than that which the Law of Moses demands of the Israelites, according to the gradual unfolding of the love of God himself, which was displayed in a much grandee and more glorious form in the gift of his only begotten Son for our redemption than in the redemption of Israel out of the bondage in Egypt" (Keil). Thus closely related are theology and religion God as revealed to us in Christ that is theology; our love responding to God"s that is religion. Without the first, in what could the religious faculty find a proper object? Without the second, infinite love is defrauded of its rights! Still, a third question naturally follows: granted that in this interlacing of theology and religion we have both interpreted in meaning and both realizing their aims, what means can be devised to ensure the preservation of both through generation after generation?
III HERE IS A SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT DIVINELY APPOINTED, TO CONSERVE AND PERPETUATE BOTH.
1. The home is here supposed to be a center in which the conserving forces of truth and godliness are to be themselves conserved. What a profound principle Moses here indicates, viz. that a nation will be good or bad according to its home life! Wonderful! that an infant nation should, at starting, have this truth deep graven in its statutes; our land will be as our homes are!
2. In the home, our God looks to the parent to give it its character, tone, and influence. A child"s religious faith is, in a high and holy sense, to be chosen for him by anticipation, by those who were in Christ before" him.
3. The truths mentioned in sections 1 and 2 are to be in the parents" heart, that they may be poured out anew from thence as rivers of living water. Hence the word in ver. 7, "Thou shalt sharpen them;" coming fresh out of the sanctuary of a living soul, they are to be pointed, quick, and breathing truths.
4. By a variety of ways, the parent is to see his child"s spirit early saturated with the truths of God.
(1) By talking of them, in the house and out of it (ver. 7).
(2) By exhibiting them, not only in the literal sense (see art. "Phylacteries"), but in a higher spiritual one.
(3) By writing them (ver. 9; see art. "Mezuzah". Thus the child is from the first to be regarded as God"s child, to be trained for him. He is to receive God"s Word through the avenues of eye, ear, intellect, heart. Divine truth is to be ever before him, night and day, indoors and out. Those who gave him birth and who love him best, are to mold his young life for God; he is to grow up as the Lord"s rightful possession, with the view of his afterwards saying, in the spirit of devout surrender, "I am the Lord"s!". (Isa_44:5)
Note Whatever was essential in the days of Moses, in the training of children for God as the means of guarding a nation, is not less needful now. (Eph_6:4) The wider the range of human learning becomes, the more needful it should be rightly directed; otherwise the greater the attainment, the greater the peril!
Vers. 4-9. Love, the root-principle of obedience.
Attention is summoned for the reception of central truth, viz. the unity of the Godhead. At that period, this doctrine was in great peril. All the Orientals believed in lords many and gods many." Science here confirms Scripture. The unity of design, running through all natural law and force, indicates clearly unity of the Creator. To know the true God is, for honest minds, to love him. But rebellion of heart has engendered repugnance towards God dislike, hatred, enmity.
I THE SOURCE OF ALL AUTHORITY IS A BEING OF ESSENTIAL GOODNESS.
1. He is sole Monarch, incomparable and unapproachable. He dwells alone, higher than the highest creature. The disparity between him and an archangel is immeasurable,
2. He is absolutely perfect. Every attribute and quality that is essential to perfection is found in him. "He is light," having no dark shade anywhere.
3. He is the Source of life: Jehovah the Living the Life-giving. All we have, and are, and hope to be, is derived from him.
4. He has deigned to come into intimate relation with us. He has made a voluntary compact with us. He calls us his people. He allows us to call Lira our God. We have a proprietorship in him.
II THIS GOD DESERVES THE CENTRAL PLACE IN OUR HEARTS. Because of the moral beauty and essential goodness of our God, he is incomparably most worthy of human love. To give to any other a higher place in our affection than we give to God, would be an outrage against righteousness, fitness, and self-interest. For all these faculties and susceptibilities of the human heart have been fashioned by God himself, and have been fashioned for this very purpose, viz. that we should bestow our worthiest love on him. If this eternal design be frustrated, there is violence, disharmony, misery within. Such love is commanded. It is a duty as well as a privilege. Though we cannot instantly and summarily command our love, we can indirectly. We can fix our thought on the worthiest object of love. We can contemplate his charms. We can appreciate his goodness. We can assure ourselves of his love. It is to be an intelligent, reasonable, practical love.
III THE LOVE OF THE LAWGIVER PRODUCES LOVE TO HIS LAW. Law is a projection of God"s thought, a mirror of his mind, an overt act of love. The true child will highly esteem every known wish of its father. To have practical direction from an unseen father will be treasured as a choice token of that father"s regard. If children, we shall hide every word of our father in our memory and in our love. Every wish of his heart will be a visible feature in our life. It may be painful to the flesh, but it will be pleasant to the soul. To the dutiful child, obedience is a luxury, a banquet of joy. Oh! how I love thy Law!" exclaims the pious Psalmist. "Thy Law is within my heart." Thy Word is to me as honey, as the droppings of the honeycomb.
IV LOVE IS THE MOTIVE-POWER OF SPEECH. The tongue is the servant of the heart. We speak freely and fluently of that which is dear to our hearts. The child will speak freely of its toys anti games, the farmer of his crops, the artist of his works. If men esteemed and valued God"s Word, they would spontaneously converse of it, morning, noon, and night. It would be a painful restraint upon our desire if we withheld our speech. This precept of Moses need not be an external law imposed upon us from without; it may become the living law within, "the law of the Spirit of life.
V LOVE CONSTRUCTS ITS WHOLE LIFE ON THE MODEL OF GOD"S LAW. The hand will become the instrument of righteousness. On it will be written God"s Word, viz. industry, honesty, restraint, generous kindness, helpfulness. God"s Word will be our ornament. Instead of gold and jewels upon the forehead, "our adornment will be" modesty, chastity, cheerfulness, moral beauty. God"s Name will be indelibly inscribed upon our foreheads. Oar domestic affairs will be ordered by the Divine will. We shall write his Word on the posts of our houses. Every home in which love dwells will be a temple. Order, active piety, frugality, peace, mutual service, will be the principles conspicuous in godly homes. And our municipal and political life will be conducted on the same line of obedience. Legislation, justice, taxation, commerce, literature, art, will all be consecrated to God"s glory. As the flowers of earth send their fragrance heavenward, so from every act of ours a fragrance of homage should ascend to God. D.
Vers. 4, 5. The great commandment.
I THE GROUND OF IT. A just view of God. The view given in ver. 4 is as comprehensive as it is sublime. It embraces two parts mutually complementary.
1. God"s absoluteness and unity one.
2. God"s personal relation to Israel God." The two are combined:
3. In the covenant name
This, on the one hand, denotes God as the Eternal the ever-living, the self-existent, and therefore self-consistent One. On the other, it gathers into its rich significance the love, and truth, and faithfulness of centuries of gracious revelation. It will not awaken love to God to think of him merely as absolute Deity. It is the discovery of what else is contained in the Divine essence; above all, the revelation of his love, grace, and covenant-keeping faithfulness, which attracts affection. While, without the revelation of God as one and absolute exclusive, self-subsisting Deity it would be impossible to raise the demand for love to the requisite moral height. In Jesus Christ the revelation of God reaches its highest point. Only the Son could reveal him in the fullness of his glory and love.
II THE HEIGHT OF IT. It requires not merely that God should be loved, but loved with all the powers of our being, and with all the energy of these powers.
1. With clear intelligence (Mat_22:37; Mar_12:33)
2. With undivided affection
3. With entire self-surrender
4. With strenuous energy
The right view of God is obviously presupposed in the command to love him. The command would be unmeaning as addressed to a polytheist, a pantheist, an agnostic, or even to a deist disbelieving in revelation. But this view of God being given, the demand, as obviously, could not be placed lower. God as Creator and Savior cannot accept a place in our affections lower than the supreme one. He will have this or none. It is due to our morally perverted state that this demand should ever be felt by us to be unreasonable. Pure beings would not feel it to be so. They would delight in the exercise of love to God, and find it natural and easy. The angels, Christ, the just made perfect, love the Father thus. Nor ought the height of this demand unduly to discourage us. Love to God is truly begotten, though not yet perfected, in every heart which has made choice of God as its supreme Portion, and cleaves to him with constancy. God has the ruling place in such a heart, and it needs but growth to raise our love to its required purity and vigor. What is left unattained on earth will be attained in heaven. J.O.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv4–6 The Lord our God is one Lord.
Deu_6:4
The Lord our God is one Lord.
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Of the unity of God
I. Why God is called the living God.
1. In opposition to, and to distinguish Him from, dead idols (Psa_115:4-6; 1Th_1:9).
2. Because God is the fountain of life, having all life in Himself (Joh_5:26), and giving life to all things else. All life is in Him and from Him.
(1) Natural life (Act_17:28; 1Ti_6:13).
(2) Spiritual life (Eph_2:1).
(3) Eternal life (Col_3:4).
II. Why God is called the true God. To distinguish Him from all false or fictitious gods (1Th_1:9). There is a two-fold truth.
1. Of fidelity or faithfulness. Thus God is true--that is, faithful But that is not the truth here meant.
2. A truth of essence, whereby a thing really is, and does not exist in opinion only. The meaning is, that there is a true God, and but one true God.
III. That there is but one God.
1. The Scripture is very express and pointed on this head (chap. 6:4; Isa_44:6; Mar_12:32; 1Sa_2:2; Psa_18:31; Isa_46:9; 1Co_8:4; 1Co_8:6).
2. This truth is clear from reason.
(1) There can be but one First Cause, which hath its being of itself, and gave being to all other things, and on which all other things depend, and that is God; for one such is sufficient for the production, preservation, and government of all things; and therefore more are superfluous, for there is no need of them at all.
(2) There can be but one Infinite Being, and therefore there is but one God. Two infinites imply a contradiction.
(3) There can be but one independent Being, and therefore but one God.
(a) There can be but one independent in being; for if there were more gods, either one of them would be the cause and author of being to the rest, and then that one would be the only God; or none of them would be the cause and author of being to the rest, and so none of them would be God, because none of them would be independent, or the fountain of being to all.
(b) There can be but one independent in working. For if there were more independent beings, then in those things wherein they will and act freely they might will and act contrary things, and so oppose and hinder one another; so that, being equal in power, nothing would be done by either of them.
(4) There can be but one omnipotent.
(5) The supposition of a plurality of gods is destructive to all true religion. For if there were more than one God, we would be obliged to worship and serve more than one. But this it is impossible for us to do, as will appear if ye consider what Divine worship and service is. Religious worship and adoration must be performed with the whole man.
(6) If there might be more gods than one, nothing would hinder why there might not be one, or two, or three millions of them. No argument can be brought for a plurality of gods, suppose two or three, but what a man might, by parity of reason, make use of forever so many. Hence it is that when men have once begun to fancy a plurality of gods, they have been endless in such fancies and imaginations. (T. Boston D. D.)
Trinity and unity
I. The Scriptural Trinity implies that God is One. So far from being against the cardinal truth of Gods unity, it actually assumes it. The Trinity of our faith means a distinction of persons within one common indivisible Divine nature. If we ask, What is the chief spiritual benefit which we derive from the knowledge of the unity of God? the answer is this: The unity of God is the only religious basis for a moral law of perfect and unwavering righteousness. It is a unity of moral character in the Ruler, and therefore of moral rule in the universe. It is such a unity as excludes all conflict within the Divine will, all inconsistency in the Divine law, all feebleness in the Divine administration.
II. What religious advantages do we reap from the fresh Christian discovery of a Trinity within this unity of the Divine nature?
1. To this question we answer, that the doctrine of the Trinity has heightened and enriched our conception of the nature of God.
2. This doctrine affords a basis for those gracious relations which it has pleased God to sustain towards us in the economy of our salvation. (J. Oswald Dykes, D. D.)
One God
I. The belief in one God gives rest to the active man; it satisfies his intellectual, his moral, his emotional, his spiritual being.
II. In the field of scientific research this faith inspires us with a confident hope of reducing all phenomena to law, since all proceed from one hand, and express one creative will. This faith supplies that which physical science lacks and yet requires--namely, a prime mover and a sustaining power.
III. In morals this faith acts most powerfully upon our will, and rouses us to exalt the higher nature and repress the lower. Polytheism deifies the human passions. But if there be only one God, then our highest aspirations must give us the truest image of Him.
IV. Faith in one God brings peace to the mourner and to the suffering, for we know that He who now sends the trouble is the same God whose kindness we have felt so often. Having learned to love and trust Him, we are able to accept suffering as the chastisement of a Fathers hand. If there were gods many, we could regard the troubles of life only as the spiteful acts of some malevolent deity; we must bribe his fellow gods to oppose him.
V. Upon one God we are able to concentrate all the powers of the soul, our emotions are not dissipated, our religious efforts are not flittered away upon a pleasing variety of characters, but the image of God is steadily renewed in the soul, and communion with God grows ever closer. (F. R. Chapman.)
The Lord our God
I. The supremacy of the Lord. The one Being--incomparable, unrivalled.
1. As regards His existence. Alpha and Omega. Uncreated. Independent. From everlasting.
2. As regards His decrees. Consummate wisdom.
3. As regards His operations. Needs no assistance. Makes no mistakes.
4. As regards His faithfulness. The one immutable God.
5. As regards His love. Admits no rival. Has no equal.
6. As regards His claims. The only Being who has a right to our praise, service, love.
II. The relationship of the Lord. Our God.
1. Has made a covenant with us (Exo_6:4-8; Heb_8:6).
2. Has adopted us.
3. Has endowed us. With Himself. His power, wisdom, etc., are all at our service.
4. Has owned the relationship.
III. The command of the Lord. Hear, O Israel. God would have us think much on this two-fold theme--what He is, and what He is to us--
1. To cheek presumption.
2. To stimulate faith.
3. To increase devotedness.
4. To dissipate fears.
5. To impart comfort.
6. To fire love. (R. A. Griffin.)
The one Jehovah
Knowledge as to the fact that there is one God is of high importance to its possessor. In connection with this statement, as to its importance, it may be predicated that evidence has never been adduced to prove that there is more than one God--the one Jehovah. Evidence upon evidence, however, can be adduced to prove that there is one God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, the Upholder and Proprietor of all things. In evidence of this, we have only to look around us upon the things that exist; for they all speak of God as the Great First Cause of their existence. For the sake of argument, however, let it be supposed that the proposition is submitted that there are more Gods than one, how could this proposition be supported? How could there be any being equally high with the Highest, or equally excellent with the Most Excellent--two super-superlatives? The idea is not tenable. Not so, however, is it with the idea that there is one God, one Supreme Ruler in the universe; and from whom the universe itself had its origin. This idea has manifold support; and, from among the many evidences that might be adduced in support of it, reference may be made to that unity of design which is manifest throughout all the works of God: as in these works, so far as they can be surveyed by the human mind in present circumstances, this unity, embracing simplicity, testifies to the infinite wisdom and power of a Designer. The extent to which this truth might illustratively be carried out can only be glanced at in present circumstances. New countries, for example, are constantly discovering themselves to the eye of the traveller; and yet, go where he may, he still finds that the old laws of nature, by the appointment of Heaven, come into view. Many new plants may be found on foreign shores; yet all of them indicate the necessity of their continuance to exist in the adhesion of the pollen of the stamens to the gummy stigma of the pistil. Yes; and new animals may be found in different parts of the globe. Whatever their variety, however, they are all maintained by the same earth, cheered by the same sun, invigorated by the same breath, and refreshed by the same moisture. Go where we will the elements act upon each other, the tides uniformly fluctuate; and true to its index is the instrument, when properly adjusted, by which the ship may be steered. Man, too, go where we may, has the same origin, the same general external construction, and the same characteristics by which he is distinguished from creatures of a lower grade. Now whence, or for what purpose, does this uniformity of design exist? The text replies--The Lord our God is one Lord, one self-existent, all-wise, and independent Jehovah, and of whose existence and attributes there is incontrovertible evidence, not only in things that exist, but in the unity, simplicity, and harmony of those principles which operate, with marvellous uniformity, throughout every department of the material world. In Him, as thus revealed, we have a God to adore, worthy of our worship, worthy of our confidence, and whose goodness may well captivate with thrilling emotions every affectionate impulse of the soul. But an awful question here comes into my mind. Is this one Jehovah, so plainly revealed, my God? How can I, without arrogant presumption, cherish the thought that I may find acceptance in the sight of Him, compared with whom I am as nothing; less than nothing, and vanity? His greatness, and my insignificance; His holiness, and my impurity, seem to repel every ground on which the hope of acceptance with Him would seek to rest. Through what medium, honouring to God, can His favour ever reach this poor heart of mine? How can condescension, in God, to take notice of me, ever accord with His own infinite purity, justice, and dignity? The case transcends my reason: it is too great for me. I am as one utterly out at sea in a frail bark, without a rudder or a hand to guide it. Here, in this labyrinth of perplexity, the great Jehovah might have left me to the guidance of my own mental wanderings till the long night of death had closed over my head. But in great goodness He has not left me thus! With a condescension upon which created intelligence, of itself, never could have reckoned, He has unfolded to me the mystery, that, while there is only one God, there are yet, in the essence of this one God, or Godhead, three distinct personalities--the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost--each of them fulfilling a separate department in the economy of human redemption; and that, while thus separate in their gracious manifestations, they are nevertheless one as to undivided essence. The day now begins to dawn somewhat upon my hitherto benighted soul; and though its light be dim amid the darkness through which it comes, there is in it an intimation that, like the dawn of morn, its light shall increase. Be it borne in mind, however, that the revelation indicated is only intended to suit the infancy of our existence in the life that now is; and that while it does not tell us all that in due time we shall be made to know, it tells us all that our present circumstances require. (Thos. Adam.)
The unity of nature proclaims one intelligent Mind
Owing to the imperfection and limitation of our powers, we are obliged to deal with fragments of the universe, and to exaggerate their differences. But the more profound and varied our study of the objects of Nature, the more remarkable do we find their resemblances. And we cannot occupy ourselves with the smallest province of science without speedily becoming sensible of its intercommunication with other provinces. The snowflake leads us to the sun. The study of a lichen or moss becomes a key that opens up the great temple of organic light. If we could understand, as Tennyson profoundly says, what a little flower growing in the crevice of a wayside wall is, root and all, and all in all, we should know what God and man are. And the same unbroken gradation or continuity which we trace throughout all the parts and objects of our own world pervades and embraces the whole physical universe--so far, at least, as our knowledge of it at present extends. By the wonderful discoveries of spectrum analysis, we find the same substances in sun, moon, and stars which compose our own earth. The imagination of the poet is conversant with the whole, and sees truth in universal relation. He attains by insight the goal to which all other knowledge is finding its way step by step. And the Christian poet and philosopher, whose eye has been opened, not partially, by the clay of Natures materials, worked upon by human thought so that he sees men as trees walking, but fully and perfectly, by washing in the fountain opened for sin and uncleanness, whose pure heart sees God in everything, and in Gods light sees light--he stands at the shining point where all things converge to one. Wherever he turns his inquiring gaze, he finds shade unperceived so softening into shade, and all so forming one harmonious whole, that not a link is wanting in the chain which unites and reproduces all, from atom to mountain, from microscopic mass to banyan tree, from monad up to man. And if the unity of the tabernacle proved it to be the work of one designing mind, surely the unity of this greater tabernacle, this vast cosmos, with its myriads of parts and complications, proves it to be no strange jumbling of chance, no incoherent freak of fortuity, but the work of one intelligent Mind having one glorious object in view. (Hugh Macmillan, LL. D.)
The unity of God
1. Here religion and philosophy are in accord. The saints and the scientists alike maintain the unity of God. Authority and reason go thus far together. God must be one; cannot be other than one.
2. The revelation of God is of necessity progressive. All education is progressive, because all knowledge is conditioned by the mind of him who knows. You may take a whole ocean of water, but you can get only two pints of it into a quart cup. The water is conditioned, limited, by the cup. Thus is knowledge conditioned by the mind.
3. The highest truth which the mind can touch is truth about God. The supreme knowledge is knowledge of God. But this, like all other knowledge, is conditioned by the mind of him who knows. God changes not; but year by year in the life of a man, and age by age in the life of the race, the conception of God changes. It is like the ascent of a hill which overhangs a plain. The plain does not change, does not get wider, mile by mile, as the beholder climbs. No, the beholder changes. The higher he gets, the more he sees.
4. Thus religion grew out of belief in God as many, into belief in God as one. Some see a trace of this old change out of the polytheistic into the monotheistic idea of God in the fact that in the beginning of the Bible the Hebrew name of God is plural, while the verb which is written with it is singular. Men began to see that the gods of their imperfect creed were but personifications of the attributes of the one God.
5. It was a hard lesson to learn. It is evident in the Old Testament that faith in the unity of God won its way little by little. The best men held it, but the people in general were slow to believe it. Even in the Psalms, God is often spoken of as the greatest of the gods.
6. All religion, however imperfect and mistaken, is an endeavour after a better knowledge of God. And as men grows they are able to know more--to know more about everything, even about God. God is able to reveal Himself more and more. At first, every tree is a god. Then there is a god of the trees, and then of all the universe and of man included in it. God is known as one.
7. We have not yet learned all the truth of God. We are not universally sure, e.g., that God cares more for deeds than creeds. But we have learned that God is one; we have abandoned polytheism.
8. We believe in God the Father, and we believe in God the Son, and we believe in God the Holy, Ghost. But there is one God, and there is none other. The word person, which the old creed-makers used to express these different ideas of God, has given rise to endless confusion. With us a person is an individual. But this word person comes into English out of Latin, and in Latin was a blundering translation of a wiser word in Greek. It means distinction. There is one God in threefold distinction. The Divine nature is complex as our human nature is. And there are three ways of thinking about God, corresponding to the being of God, ways which are not only true but essential, so that if we are to think of God aright we must think of Him in all these three ways.
(1) God is the source of life, the infinite, the eternal--the Father.
(2) God has manifested Himself to us--so that we may know Him and love Him, and know that He loves us--in the plainest and most universally understood of all possible manifestations, in a human personality; the Word become flesh--the Son.
(3) And God is ever present with us, speaking to all men everywhere, in the past and in the present, teaching, warning, inspiring--the Holy Spirit.
9. Thus the Christian doctrine, taking that old truth that God is one, and holding to it, draws new truth out of it. It is an advance upon monotheism, as that was upon polytheism. It meets the longings of the heart. It answers the eager questions of the race. (George Hodges, D. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On vv4, 6 IN these verses we approach "the commandments, the statutes,…
LOVE TO GOD THE LAW OF LIFE
Deu_6:4-5
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IN these verses we approach "the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments" which it was to be Moses duty to communicate to the people, i.e., the second great division of the teaching and guidance received at Sinai. But though we approach them we do not come to them for a number of chapters yet. We reach them only in chapter 12, which begins with almost the same words as chapter 6. What lies between is a new exhortation, very similar in tone and subject to that into which chapters 1-3 have been transformed.
To some readers in our day this repetition, and the renewed postponement of the main subject of the book, have seemed to justify the introduction of a new author here. They are scornfully impatient of the repetition and delay, especially those of them who have themselves a rapid, dashing style; and they declare that the writer of the laws, etc., from chapter 12 onwards cannot have been the writer of these long double introductions. They would not have written so; consequently no one else, however different his circumstances, his objects, and his style may be, can have written so. It is true, they admit, that the style, the grammar, the vocabulary are all exactly those of the purely legal chapters, but that matters not. Their irritation with this delay is decisive; and so they introduce us, entirely on the strength of it, to another Deuteronomist, second or third or fourth-who knows? But all this is too purely subjective to meet with general acceptance, and we may without difficulty decide that the linguistic unity of the book, when chapters 6 to 12 are compared with what we find after 12, is sufficient to settle the question of authorship.
But we have now to consider the possible reasons for this second long introduction. The first introduction has been satisfactorily explained in a former chapter; this second one can, I think, quite as easily be accounted for. The object of the book is in itself a sufficient explanation. To modern critical students of the Old Testament the laws are the main interest of Deuteronomy. They are the material they need for their reconstruction of the history of Israel, and they feel as if all besides, though it may contain beautiful thoughts, were irrelevant. But that was not the writers point of view at all. For him it was not the main thing to introduce new laws. He was conscious rather of a desire to bring old laws, well known to his fellow-countrymen, but neglected by them, into force again. Anything new in his version of them was consequently only such an adaptation of them to the new circumstances of his time as would tend to secure their observance. Even if Moses were the author of the book this would be true; but if a prophetic man in Manassehs day was the author, we can see how naturally and exclusively that view would fill his mind. He had fallen upon evil times. The best that had been attained in regard to spiritual religion had been deliberately abandoned and trodden under foot. Those who sympathize with pure religion could only hope that a time would come when Hezekiahs work would be taken up again. If Deuteronomy was written in preparation for that time, the legal additions necessary to ward off the evils which had been so nearly fatal to Yahwism would seem to the author much less important than they appear to us to be. His object was to retrieve what had been lost, to rouse the dead minds of his countrymen, to illustrate that on which the higher life of the nation depended, and to throw light upon it from all the sources of what then was modern thought. His mind was full of the high teaching of the prophets. He was steeped in the history of his people, which was then receiving, or was soon to receive, its all but final touches. He was intensely anxious that in the later time for which he was writing all men should see how Providence had spoken for the Mosaic law and religion, and what the great principles were which had always underlain it, and which had now at last been made entirely explicit.
Under these circumstances, it was not merely natural that the author of Deuteronomy should dwell with insistence upon the hortatory part of his book; it was necessary. He could not feel Wellhausens haste to approach his restatement of the law. To him the exhortation was, in fact, the important thing. Every day he lived he must have seen that it was not want of knowledge that misled his contemporaries. He must have groaned too often under the weight of the indifference even of the well disposed not to be aware that that was the great hindrance to the restoration of the better thoughts and ways of Hezekiahs day.
He had learned by bitter experience, what every man who is in earnest about inducing masses of men to take a step backward or forward to a higher life always learns, that nothing can be accomplished till a fire has been kindled in the hearts of men which will not let them rest. To this task the author of Deuteronomy devotes himself. And whatever impatient theorists of today may say, he succeeds amazingly. His exhortation touches men from one end of the world to the other, even to this day, by its affectionate impressiveness, This exhibition of the principles underlying the law is so true that, when our Lord was asked, "Which is the first commandment of all?" He answered from this chapter of Deuteronomy: "The first of all the commandments is this, The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. The second is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these." Now these are precisely the truths Deuteronomy exhibits in these prefatory chapters, and it is by them that the after-treatment of the law is permeated. The author of Deuteronomy by announcing these truths brought the Old Testament faith as near to the level of the New Testament faith as was possible; and we may well believe that he saw his work in its true relative proportions. The hortatory chapters are really the most original part of the book, and exhibit what was permanent in it. The mere fact that the author lingers over it, therefore, is entirely inadequate to justify us in admitting a later hand. Indeed, if criticism is to retain the respect of reasonable men, it will have to be more sparing than it has hitherto been with the "later hand"; to introduce it here under the circumstances is nothing short of a blunder.
In our verses, therefore, we have to deal with the main point of our book. Coming immediately after the Decalogue, these words render explicit the principle of the first table of that law. In them our author is making it clear that all he has to say of worship, and of the relation of Israel to Yahweh, is merely an application of this principle, or a statement of means by which a life at the level of love to God may be made possible or secured. This section, therefore, forms the bridge which connects the Decalogue with the legal enactments which follow; and it is on all accounts worthy of very special attention. Our Lords quotation of it as the supreme statement of the Divine law, in its Godward aspect, would in itself be an overwhelmingly special reason for thorough study of it, and would justify us in expecting to find it one of the deepest things in Scripture.
The translation of the first clause presents difficulties. The Authorized Version gives us, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord," but that can no longer be accepted, since it rests upon the Jewish substitution of Adhonai for Yahweh. Taking this view of the construction, it should be rendered, "Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God is one Yahweh"; and this is the meaning which most recent authorities-e.g., Knobel, Keil, and Dillmann-put upon it. But equally good authorities-such as Ewald and Oehler-render, "Yahweh our God-Yahweh is one." This is unobjectionable grammatically. Still another translation, "Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone," has been received by the most recent and most scholarly German translation of the Scripture, that edited by Kautzsch. But the objection that in that case lbhaddo, not echadh, should have been used, seems conclusive against it. The two others come very much to the same thing in the end, and were it not for the time at which Deuteronomy was written, Ewalds translations would be the simpler and more acceptable. But the first-"Yahweh our God is one Yahweh"-exactly meets the circumstances of that time, and moreover emphasises that in Israels God which the writer of Deuteronomy was most anxious to establish. As against the prevailing tendency of the time, he not only denies polytheism, or, as Dillmann puts it, asserts the concrete fact that the true God cannot be resolved in the polytheistic manner into various kinds and shades of deity, like the Baalim, but he also prohibits the amalgamation or partial identification of Him with other gods. Though very little is told us concerning Manassehs idolatry, we know enough to feel assured that it was in this fashion he justified his introduction of Assyrian deities into the Temple worship. Moloch, for example, must in some way have been identified with Yahweh, since the sacrifices of children in Tophet are declared by Jeremiah to have been to Yahweh. Further, the worship at the High Places had led, doubtless, to belief in a multitude of local Yahwehs, who in some obscure way were yet regarded as one, just as the multitudinous shrines of the Virgin in Romanist lands lead to the adoration of our Lady of Lourdes, our Lady of Naples, and so on, though the Church knows only one Virgin Mother. This incipient and unconscious polytheism it was our authors purpose to root out by his law of one altar; and it seems congruous, therefore, that he should sum up the first table of the Decalogue in such a way as to bring out its opposition to this great evil. Of course the oneness of deity as such is involved in what he says; but the aspect of this truth which is specially put forward here is that Yahweh, being God, is one Yahweh, with no partners, nor even with variations that practically destroy unity. No proposition could have been framed more precisely and exactly to contradict the general opinion of Manasseh and his followers regarding religion; and in it the watchword of monotheism was spoken. Since it was uttered, this has been the rallying point of monotheistic religion, both among Jews and Mohammedans. For "there is no God but God" is precisely the counterpart of "Yahweh is one Yahweh"; and from one end of the civilized world to the other this strenuous confession of faith has been heard, both as the tumultuous battle-shout of victorious armies, and as the stubborn and immovable assertion of the despised, and scattered, and persecuted people to whom it was first revealed. Even today, though in the hands of both Jews and Mohammedans it has been hardened into a dogma which has stripped the Mosaic conception of Yahweh of those elements which gave it possibilities of tenderness and expansion, it still has power over the minds of men. Even in such hands, it incites missionary effort, and it appeals to the heart at some stages of civilization as no other creed does. It makes men, nay, even civilized men of the wild fetish-worshipping African; but for want of what follows in our context it leaves them stranded-at a higher level, it is true, but stranded nevertheless, without possibilities of advance, and exposed to that terrible decay in their moral and spiritual conceptions which sooner or later asserts itself in every Mohammedan community.
Israel was saved from the same spiritual disease by the great words which succeed the assertion of Yahwehs oneness. The writer of Deuteronomy did not desire to set forth this declaration as an abstract statement of ultimate truth about God. He makes it the basis of a quite new, a quite original demand upon his countrymen. Because Yahweh thy God is one Yahweh, "thou shalt love Yahweh thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." To us, who have inherited all that was attained by Israel in their long and eventful history as a nation, and especially in its disastrous close, it may have become a commonplace that God demands the love of His people. But if so, we must make an effort to shake off the dull yoke of custom and familiarity. If we do, we shall see that it was an extraordinarily original thing which the Deuteronomist here declares. In the whole of the Old Testament there are, outside of Deuteronomy, thirteen passages in which the love of men to Yahweh is spoken of. They are Exo_20:6, Jos_22:5, Jos_23:11, Jdg_5:31, 1Ki_3:3, Neh_1:5, Psa_18:2, Psa_31:24, Psa_91:14, Psa_97:10, Psa_116:1, Psa_145:20; and Dan_9:4. Now of these the verses from Nehemiah and Daniel are manifestly later than Deuteronomy, and of the Psalms only the eighteenth can with any confidence be assigned to a time earlier than the seventh century B.C. All the others may with great probability be assigned at earliest to the times of Jeremiah and the post-exilic period. Three of the passages from the historic books again- Jos_22:5; Jos_23:11 1Ki_3:3 -are attributed, on grounds largely apart from the use of this expression, to the Deuteronomic editor, i.e., the writer who went over the historical books about 600 B.C., and made slight additions here and there, easily recognizable by their differing in tone and feeling from the surrounding context. Indeed Jos_22:5 is a palpable quotation from Deuteronomy itself.
Of the thirteen passages, therefore, only three- Exo_20:6, Jdg_5:31, and Psa_18:2 -belong to the time previous to Deuteronomy, and in all three the mention of love to God is only allusive, and, as it were, by the way. Before Deuteronomy, consequently, there is little more than the mere occurrence of the word. There is nothing of the bold and decisive demand for love to the one God as the root and ground of all true relations with Him which Deuteronomy makes. At most, there is the hint of a possibility which might be realized in the future; of love to God as the permanent element in the life of man there is no indication; and it is this which the author of Deuteronomy means, and nothing less than this. He makes this demand for love the main element of his teaching. He returns to it again and again, so that there are almost as many passages bearing on this in Deuteronomy as in the whole Old Testament besides; and the particularity and emphasis with which he dwells upon it are immeasurably greater. Only in the New Testament do we find anything quite parallel to what he gives us; and there we find his view taken up and expanded, till love to God flashes upon us from almost every page as the test of all sincerity and the guarantee of all success in the Christian life.
To proclaim this truth was indeed a great achievement; and when we remember the abject fear with which Israel had originally regarded Yahweh, it will appear still more remarkable that the book embodying this should have been adopted by the whole people with enthusiasm, and that with it should begin the Canon of Holy Scripture; for Deuteronomy, as all now recognize, was the first book which became canonical. I have said that the conception was an extraordinarily original one, and have pointed out that it had not been traceable to any extent previously in Israels religious books or its religious men. It will appear still more original, I think, if we consider what a growth in moral and spiritual stature separates the Israel of Moses day and that of Josiahs; what the attitude of other nations to their gods was in contrast to this; and, lastly, what it involves and implies, as regards the nature of both God and man.
As we have already seen, the earlier narratives represent the men to whom Moses spoke as acknowledging that they could not, as yet at any rate, bear to remain in the presence of Yahweh. Between their God and them, therefore, there could be no relation of love properly so called. There was reverence, awe, and chiefly fear, tempered by the belief that Yahweh as their God was on their side. He had proved it by delivering them from the oppressions of Egypt, and they acknowledged Him and were jealous for His honor and submissive to His commands. So far as the record goes, that would seem to have been their religious state. Progress from that state of mind to a higher, to a demand for direct personal relations between each individual Israelite and Yahweh, was not easy. It was hindered by the fact that Israel as a whole, and not the individual, was for a long time regarded as the subject of religion. That, of course, was no hindrance to the development of the thought that Yahweh loved Israel; but so long as that conception dominated religious thought in Israel, so long was it impossible to think of individual love and trust as the element in which each faithful man should live.
But the love of Yahweh was declared, century after century, by prophet and priest and psalmist, to be set upon His people, and so the way for this demand for love on mans part was opened. Mans relations with God began to grow more intimate. The distance lessened, as the use of the words "them that love Me" in the song of Deborah and the Davidic word in Psalms 18, "I love thee, Yahweh my rock," clearly show. Hosea next took up the strain, and intensified and heightened it in a wonderful manner, but the nation failed to respond adequately. In the later prophets the love and grace and long-suffering of Yahweh and His ceaseless efforts on behalf of Israel are continually made the ground of exhortations, entreaties, and reproaches; but, as a whole, the people still did not respond. We may be sure, however, that an ever increasing minority were affected by the clearness and intensity of the prophetic testimony. To this minority, the Israel within Israel, the remnant that was to return from exile and become the seed of a people that should be all righteous, the love of Yahweh tended to become His main characteristic. That love sustained their hopes; and though the awe and reverence which were due to His holiness, and the fear called forth by His power, still predominated, there grew up in their hearts a multitude of thoughts and expectations tending more and more to the love of God.
As yet it was only a timid reaching out towards Him. a hope and longing which could hardly justify itself. Yet it was robust enough not to be killed by disappointment, by hope deferred, or even by crushing misfortune; and in the furnace of affliction it became stronger and more pure. And in the heart of the author of Deuteronomy it grew certain of itself, and soared up with an eagerness that would not be denied. Then, as always where God is the object of it, love that dares was justified; and out of its restless and timid longings it came to the "place of rest imperturbable, where love is not forsaken if itself forsaketh not." From knowledge, confirmed by the answering love and inspiration of God, and impelled consciously by Him, he then in this book made and reiterated his great demand. All spiritual men found in it the word they had needed. They responded to it eagerly when the book was published; and their enthusiasm carried even the torpid and careless masses with them for a time. The nation, with the king at their head, accepted the legislation of which this love to God was the underlying principle, and so far as public and corporate action can go, Israel adopted the deepest principle of spiritual life as their own.
Of course with the mass this assent had little depth; but in the hearts of the true men in Israel the joy and assurance of their great discovery, that Yahweh their God was open to, nay, desired and commanded, their most fervent affection, soon produced its fruit. From the fragments of the earliest legislation which have come down to us, it is obvious that the Mosaic principles had led to a most unwonted consideration for the poor. In later days, though the ingrained tendency to oppression, which those who have power in the East seem quite unable to resist, did its evil work in both Israel and Judah, there were never wanting prophetic voices to denounce such villainy in the spirit of these laws. The public conscience was thereby kept alive, and the ideal of justice and mercy, especially to the helpless, became a distinguishing mark of Israelite religion. But it was in the minds of those who had learned the Deuteronomists great lesson, and had taken example by him, that the love which came from God, and had just been answered back by man, overflowed in a stream of blessing to mans "neighbors." Deuteronomy had uttered the first and great commandment! but it is in the Law of Holiness, that complex of ancient laws brought together by the author of P, and found now mainly in Leviticus 17-26, that we find the second word, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." {Lev_19:18; Lev_19:34} If we ask, Who is my neighbor? we find that not even those beyond Israel are excluded, for in Lev_19:34 we read, "The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself." The idea still needed the expansion which it received from our Lord Himself in the parable of the Good Samaritan; but it is only one step from these passages to the New Testament.
From the standpoint of mere fear, then, to the standpoint of love which casteth out fear, even the masses of Israel were lifted, in thought at least, by the love and teaching of God. And the process by which Israel was led to this height has proved ever since to be the only possible way to such an attainment. It began in the free favor of God, it was continued by the answer of love on the part of man, and these antecedents had as their consequence the proclamation of that law of liberty-for self-renouncing love is liberty-"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Without the first, the second was impossible; and the last without the other two would have been only a satire upon the incurable selfishness of man. It is worthy of remark, at least, that only on the critical theory of the Old Testament is each of these steps in the moral and religious education of Israel found in its right place, with its right antecedents; only when taken so do the teachers who were inspired to make each of these attainments find circumstances suited to their message, and a soil in which the germs they were commissioned to plant could live.
But great as is the contrast between the Israel of Moses day and that of Josiahs, it is not so great as the contrast between the religion of Israel in the Deuteronomic period and the religion of the neighboring nations. Among them, at our date 650 B.C., there was, so far as we know them, no suggestion of personal love to God as an effective part of religion. In the chapters on the Decalogue the main ideas of the Canaanites in regard to religion have been described, so that they need not be repeated here. I shall add only what E. Meyer says of their gods: "With advancing culture the cultus loses its old simplicity and homeliness. A fixed ritual was developed - founded upon old hereditary tradition. And here the gloomier conception became the ruling one, and its consequences were inexorably deduced. The great gods, even the protecting gods of the tribe or the town, are capricious and in general hostile to man-possibly to some degree because of the mythological conception of Baal as sun-god-and they demand sacrifices of blood that they may be appeased. In order that evil may be warded off from those with whom they are angry, another human being must be offered to them as a substitute in propitiatory sacrifice-nay, they demand the sacrifice of the firstborn, the best-loved son. If the community be threatened with the wrath of the deity, then the prince or the nobility as a whole must offer up their children on its behalf." This also is the view of Robertson Smith, who considers that while in their origin the Semitic religions involved kindly relations and continual intercourse between the gods and their worshippers, these gradually disappeared as political misfortune began to fall upon the smaller Semitic peoples. Their gods were angry and in the vain hope of appeasing them men had recourse to the direst sacrifices. Hints concerning these had survived from times of savagery; and to the diseased minds of these terror-stricken peoples the more ancient and more horrible a sacrifice was the more powerful did it seem. At this time, therefore, the course of the Canaanite religions was away from love to their gods. The decay of nationality brought despair, and the frantic efforts of despair, into the religion of the Canaanite peoples; but to Israel it brought this higher demand for more intimate union with their God. Whatever elements tending towards love the Canaanite religions originally may have had, they had either been mingled with the corrupting sensuality which seems inseparable from the worship of female deities, or had been limited to the mere superficial good understanding which their participation in the same common life established between the people and their gods. Their union was largely independent of moral considerations on either side. But in Israel there had grown up quite a different state of things. The union between Yahweh and His people had from the days of the Decalogue taken a moral turn; and gradually it had become clear that to have Abraham for their father and Yahweh for their God would profit them little, if they did not stand in right moral relations and in moral sympathy with Him. Now, in Deuteronomy, that fundamentally right conception of the relation between God and man received its crown in Yahwehs claim to the love of His people. No contrast could be greater than that which common misfortune and a common national ruin produced between the surrounding Semitic peoples and Israel.
But besides the small kingdoms which immediately surrounded Palestine, Israel had for neighbors the two great empires of Egypt and Assyria. She was exposed therefore to influence from them in even a greater degree. Long before the Exodus, the land which Israel came afterwards to occupy had been the meeting-place of Babylonian and Egyptian power and culture. In the fifteenth century B.C. it was under the suzerainty if not the direct sovereignty of Egypt; but its whole culture and literature, for it must have had books, as the name Kirjath-Sepher (Book-town) shows, was Babylonian. Throughout Israels history, moreover, Assyrian and Egyptian manners and ways of thought were pressed upon the people; and we cannot doubt that in regard to religion also their influence was felt. But at this period, as in the Canaanite religions, so also in those of Assyria and Egypt, the tendency was altogether different from what Deuteronomy shows it to have been in Israel.
In regard to Egypt this is somewhat difficult to prove, for the Egyptian religion is so complicated, so varied, and so ancient, that men who have studied it despair of tracing any progress in it. A kind of monotheism, polytheism, fetishism, animism, and nature-worship such as we find in the Vedas, have in turn been regarded as its primitive state; but as a matter of fact all these systems of religious thought and feeling are represented in the earliest records, and they remained constant elements of it till the end.
Whatever had once formed part of it, Egyptian religion clung to with extraordinary tenacity. As time went on, however, the accent was shifted from one element to the other, and after the times of the 29th dynasty, i.e., after the time of the Exodus, it began to decay. A systematized pantheism, of which sun-worship was the central element, was elaborated by the priests; the moral element, which had been prominent in the days when the picture of the judgment of the soul after death was so popular in Thebes, retired more into the background, and the purely magical element became the principal one. Instead of moral goodness and the fulfillment of duty being the main support of the soul in its dread and lonely journeys in the "world of the Western sky," knowledge of the proper formulas became the chief hope, and the machinations of evil demons the main danger. In the royal tombs at Thebes the walls of the long galleries are covered with representations of these demons, and the accompanying writing gives directions as to the proper formulas by knowledge of which deliverance can be secured. This, of course, confined the benefits of religion, so far as they related to the life to come, to the educated, and the wealthy. For these secret spells were hard to obtain, and had to be purchased at a high price. As Wiedemann says, "Still more important than in this world was the knowledge of the correct magical words and formulas in the other world. No door opened here if its name was not known, no daemon let the dead pass in if he did not address him in the proper fashion, no god came to his help so long as his proper title was not given him, no food could be procured so long as the exactly prescribed words were not uttered." The people were therefore thrown back upon the ancient popular faith, which needed gods only for practical life, and honored them only because they were mighty. Some of them were believed to be friendly; but others were malevolent deities who would destroy mankind if they did not mollify them by magic, or render them harmless by the greater power of the good gods. Consequently Set, the unconquerable evil demon, was worshipped with zeal in many places. With him there were numerous demons, "the enemies," "the evil ones," which lie in wait for individuals, and threaten their life and weal. The main thing, therefore, was to bring the correct sacrifices, to use such formulas and perform such acts as would render the gods gracious and turn away evil. Moreover the whole of nature was full of spirits, as it is to the African of today, and in the mystic texts of the Book of the Dead, there is constant mention made of the "mysterious beings whose names, whose ceremonials are not known," which thirst for blood, which bring death, which go about as devouring flame, as well as of others which do good. At all times this element existed in Egypt; but precisely at this time, in the reign of Psamtik, Brugsch declares that new force was given to it, and on the monuments there appear, along with the "great gods," monstrous forms of demons and genii. In fact the higher religion had become pantheistic, and consequently less rigidly moral. Magic had been taken up into it for the life beyond the grave, and became the only resource of the people in this life. Fear, therefore, necessarily became the ruling religious motive, and instead of growing toward love of God, men in Egypt at this time were turning more decisively than ever away from it.
Of the Assyrian religion and its influence it is also difficult to speak in this connection, for notwithstanding the amount of translation that has been done, not much has come to light in regard to the personal religion of the Assyrians. On the whole it seems to be established that in its main features the religion of both Babylon and Assyria remained what the non-Semitic inhabitants of Akkad had made it. Originally it had consisted entirely of a spirit and demon worship not one whit more advanced than the religion of the South Sea islanders today. As such it was in the main a religion of fear. Though some spirits were good, the bulk were evil, and all were capricious. Men were consequently all their lifetime subject to bondage, and love as a religious emotion was impossible. When the Semites came at a later time into the country their star-worship was amalgamated with this mere Shamanism of the Akkadians. In the new faith thus evolved the great gods of the Semites were arranged in a hierarchy, and the spirits, both good and evil, were subordinated to them. But even the great gods remain within the sphere of nature, and have in full measure the defects and limitations of nature-gods everywhere. They are not entirely beneficent powers, nor are they even moral beings. Some have special delight in blood and destruction, while the cruel Semitic child-sacrifice was practiced in honor of others. Again, their displeasure has no necessary or even general connection with sin. Their wrath is generally the outcome of mere arbitrary whim. Indeed it may be doubted whether the conception of sin or of moral guilt ever had a secure footing in this religion. It certainly had none in the terror-struck hymn to the seven evil spirits who are described thus:-
"Seven (are) they, seven (are) they. Male they (are) not, female they (are) not; Moreover the deep is their pathway. Wife they have not, child is not born to them. Law (and) order they know not, Prayer and supplication hear they not. Wicked (are) they, wicked (are) they."
There is here an accent of genuine terror, which involved not love, but hatred. Even in what Sayce calls a "Penitential Psalm," and which he compares to the Biblical Psalms, there is nothing of the gratitude to God as a deliverer from sin which in Israel was the chief factor in producing the response to Yahwehs demand for the love of man. Morally, it contains nothing higher than is contained in the hymn of the spirits. The transgressions which are so pathetically lamented, and from the punishment of which deliverance is so earnestly sought, are purely ceremonial and involuntary. The author of the prayer conceives that he has to do with a god whose wrath is a capricious thing, coming upon men they know not why. So conceived God cannot be loved. It is entirely in accord with this that in the great flood epic no reason is given for the destruction of mankind save the caprice of Bel. The few expressions quoted by Sayce from a hymn to the sun-god-such as this, "Merciful God, that liftest up the fallen, that supportest the weak Like a wife, thou submittest thyself, cheerful and kindly men far and wide bow before thee and rejoice"-cannot avail to subvert a conclusion so firmly fixed. These are simply the ordinary expressions which the mere physical pleasure of the sunlight brings to the lips of sun-worshippers of all ages and of all climes. At best they could only be taken as germs out of which a loving relation between God and man might have been developed. But though they were ancient they never were developed. At the end as at the beginning the Assyrio-Babylonian religion moves on so low a level, even in its more innocent aspects, that a development like that in Deuteronomy is absolutely impossible. In its worse aspects Assyrian religion was unspeakable. The worship of Ishtar at Nineveh outdid everything known in the ancient world for lust and cruelty.
On this side too, therefore, we find no parallel to Israels new outgrowth of higher religion. Comparison only makes it stand out more boldly in its splendid originality; and we are left with the fruitful question, "What was the root of the astonishing difference between Yahweh and every other god whom Israel had heard of?" Precisely at this time and under the same circumstances, the ethnic religions around Israel were developing away from any higher elements they had contained, and were thereby, as we know now, hastening to extinction. Under the inspired prophetic influence, Israels religion turned the loss of the nation into gain; it rose by the darkness of national misfortune into a nobler phase than any it had previously known.
But perhaps the crowning merit of this demand for love of God is the emphasis it lays upon personality in both God and man, and the high level at which it conceives their mutual relations. From the first, of course, the personal element was always very strongly present in the Israelite conception of God. Indeed personality was the dominating idea among all the smaller nations which surrounded Israel. The national god was conceived of mainly as a greater and more powerful man, full of the energetic self-assertion without which it would be impossible for any man to reign over an Eastern community. The Moabite stone shows this, for in it Chemosh is as sharply defined a person as Mesha himself. The Canaanite gods, therefore, might be wanting in moral character; their existence was doubtless thought of in a limited and wholly carnal manner; but there never was, apparently, the least tendency to obscure the sharp lines of their individuality. In Israel, a fortiori, such a tendency did not exist; and that a writer of Matthew Arnolds ability should have persuaded himself, and tried to persuade others, that under the name of Yahweh Israel understood anything so vague as his "stream of tendency which makes for righteousness," is only another instance of the extraordinarily blinding effects of a preconceived idea. So far from Yahweh being conceived in that manner, it would be much easier to prove that, whatever aberrations in the direction of making God merely "a non-natural man" may be charged upon Christianity, they have been founded almost exclusively upon Old Testament examples and Old Testament texts. If there was defect in the Old Testament conception of God, it was, and could not but be, in the direction of drawing Him down too much into the limits of human personality.
But though the gods were always thought of by the Canaanites as personal, their character was not conceived as morally high. Moral character in Chemosh, Moloch, or Baal was not of much importance, and their relations with their peoples were never conditioned by moral conduct. How deeply ingrained this view was in Palestine is seen in the persistency with which even Yahwehs relation to His people was viewed in this light. Only the continual outcry of the prophets against it prevented this idea becoming permanently dominant even in Israel. Nay, it often deceived would-be prophets. Clinging to the idea of the national God, and forgetting altogether the ethical character of Yahweh, without, perhaps, conscious insincerity, they prophesied peace to the wicked, and so came to swell the ranks of the false prophets. But from very early times another thought was cherished by Israels representative men in regard to their relations with God. Yahweh was righteous, and demanded righteousness in His people.
Oblations were vain if offered as a substitute for this. All the prophets reach their greatest heights of sublimity in preaching this ethically noble doctrine; and the love to God which Deuteronomy demands is to be exhibited in reverent obedience to moral law.
Moreover, that God should seek or even need the love of man threw other light on the Old Testament religion. If, without revelation, Israel had widened its mental horizon so as to conceive Yahweh as Lord of the world, it may be questioned whether it could have kept clear of the gulf of pantheism. But by the manifestation of God in their special history, the Israelites had been taught to rise step by step to the higher levels, without losing their conception of Yahweh as the living, personal, active friend of their people. Moreover they had been early taught, as we have seen, that the deep design of all that was wrought for them was the good of all men. The love of God was seen pressing forward to its glorious and beneficent ends; and both by ascribing such far-reaching plans to Yahweh, and by affirming His interest in the fate of men, Israels conception of the Divine personality was raised alike in significance and power; for anything more personal than love planning and working towards the happiness of its objects cannot be conceived. But the crown was set upon the Divine personality by the claim to the love of man. This signified that to the Divine mind the individual man was not hid from God by his nation, that he was not for Him a mere specimen of a genus. Rather each man has to God a special worth, a special character, which, impelled by His free personal love, He seeks to draw to Himself. At every step each man has near him "the great Companion," who desires to give Himself to him. Nay, more, it implies that God seeks and needs an answering love; so that Brownings daring declaration, put into the mouth of God when the song of the boy Theocrite is no more heard, "I miss My little human praise," is simple truth.
But if the demand illustrates and illuminates the personality of God, it throws out in a still more decisive manner the personality of man. In a rough sense, of course, there never could have been any doubt of that. But children have to grow into full self-determining personality, and savages never attain it. Both are at the mercy of caprice, or of the needs of the moment, to which they answer so helplessly that in general no consistent course of conduct can be expected of them. That can be secured only by rigorous self-determination. But the power of self-determination does not come at once, nor is acquired without strenuous and continued effort; it is, in fact, a power which in any full measure is possessed only by the civilized man. Now the Israelites were not highly civilized when they left Egypt. They were still at the stage when the tribe overshadowed and absorbed the individual, as it does today among the South Sea islanders. The progress of the prophetic thought towards the demand for personal love has already been traced. Here we must trace the steps by which the personal element in each individual was strengthened in Israel, till it was fit to respond to the Divine demand.
The high calling of the people reacted on the individual Israelites. They saw that in many respects the nations around them were inferior to them. Much that was tolerated or even respected among them was an abomination to Israel; and every Israelite felt that the honor of his people must not be dragged in the dust by him, as it would be if he permitted himself to sink to the heathen level. Further, the laws regarding even ceremonial holiness which in germ certainly, and probably in considerable extension also, existed from the earliest time, made him feel that the sanctity of the nation depended upon the care and scrupulosity of the individual. And then there were the individual spiritual needs, which could not be suppressed and would not be denied. Though one sees so little explicit provision for restoration of individual character in early Yahwism, yet in the course of time-who can doubt it?-the personal religious needs of so many individual men would necessarily frame for themselves some outlet. Building upon the analogy of the relation established between Yahweh and Israel, they would hope for the satisfaction of their individual needs through the infinite mercy of God. The Psalms, such of them as can fairly be placed in the pre-Deuteronomic time, bear witness to this; and those written after that time show a hopefulness, and a faith in the reality of individual communion with God which show that such communion was not then a new discovery. In all these ways the religious life of the individual was being cultivated and strengthened; but this demand made in Deuteronomy lifts that indirect refreshment of soul, for which the cultus and the covenants made no special provision, into a recognized position, nay, into the central position in Israelite religion. The word, "Thou shalt love Yahweh thy God," confirmed and justified all these persistent efforts after individual life in God, and brought them out into the large place which belongs to aspirations that have at last been authorized. By a touch, the inspired writer transformed the pious hopes of those who had been the chosen among the chosen people into certainties. Each man was henceforth to have his own direct relation to God as well as the nation; and the national hope, which had hitherto been first, was now to depend for its realization upon the fulfillment of the special and private hope. Thus the old relation was entirely reversed by Deuteronomy. Instead of the individual holding "definite place in regard to Yahweh only through his citizenship," now the nation has its place and its future secured only by the personal love of each citizen to God. For that is obviously what the demand here made really means. Again and again the inspired writer returns to it; and his persistent endeavor is to connect all else that his book contains-warning, exhortation, legislation-with this as the foundation and starting-point. Here, as elsewhere, we can trace the roots of the new covenant which Jeremiah and Ezekiel saw afar off and rejoiced at, and which our blessed Lord has realized for us. The individual religious life is for the first time fully recognized for what ever since it has been seen to be, the first condition of any attempt to realize the kingdom of God in the life of a nation.
And not only thus does our text emphasize individuality. Love with all the heart, and all the mind, and all the soul is possible only to a fully developed personality; for, as Roth says, "We love only in the measure in which personality is developed in us. Even God can love only in so far as He is personal." Or, as Julius Muller says in his "Doctrine of Sin," "The association of personal beings in love, while it involves the most perfect distinction of the I and Thou, proves itself to be the highest form of unity." Unless other counteracting circumstances come in, therefore, the more highly developed individuality is, the more entirely human beings are determined from within, the more entirely will union among men depend upon free and deliberate choice, and the more perfect will it be. In being called to love God men are dealt with as those who have attained to complete self-determination, who have come to completed manhood in the moral life. For all that could mix love with alloy, mere sensuous sympathy, and the insistent appeal of that which is materially present, are wanting here. Here nothing is involved but the free outgoing of the heart to that which is best and highest; nothing but loyalty to that vision of Good which, amid all the ruin sin has wrought in human nature, dominates us so that "we needs must love the highest when we see it." The very demand is a promise and a prophecy of completed moral and religious liberty to the individual soul. It rests upon the assurance that men have at last been trained to walk alone, that the support of social life and external ordinances has become less necessary than it was, and that one day a new and living way of access to the Father will bring every soul into daily intercourse with the source of all spiritual life.
But this demand, in affirming personality of so high a kind, also re-created duty. Under the national dispensation the individual man was a servant. To a large extent he knew not what his Lord did, and he ruled his life by the commands he received without understanding, or perhaps caring to understand, their ultimate ground and aim. Much too of what he thus laid upon himself was mere ancient custom, which had been a protection to national and moral life in early days, but which had survived, or was on the point of surviving, its usefulness. Now, however, that man was called upon to love God with all his heart and mind and soul, the step was taken which was to end in his becoming the consciously free son of God. For to love in this fashion means, on the one hand, a willingness to enter into communion with God and to seek that communion; and on the other it implies a throwing open of the soul to receive the love which God so persistently has pressed upon men. In such a relation slavery, blind or constrained obedience, disappears, and the motives of right action become the purest and most powerful that man can know.
In the first place, selfishness dies out. Those to whom God has given Himself have no more to seek. They have reached the dwelling "of peace imperturbable," and know that they are secure. Nothing that they do can win more for them; and they do those things that please God with the free, uncalculating, ungrudging forgetfulness of self, which distinguishes those fortunate children who have grown up into a perfect filial love. Of course it was only the elect in Israel who in any great degree realized this ideal. But even those who neglected it had for a moment been illuminated by it; and the record of it remained to kindle the nobler hearts of every generation. Even the legalism of later days could not obscure it. In the case of many it bore up and transfigured the dry details of Judaism, so that even amid such surroundings the souls of men were kept alive. The later Psalms prove this beyond dispute, and the advanced view which brings the bulk of the Psalter down to the post-exilic period only emphasizes the more this aspect of pre-Christian Judaism. In Christianity of course the ideal was made infinitely more accessible: and it received in the Pauline doctrine, the Evangelical doctrine, of Justification by Faith, a form which more than any other human teaching has made unselfish devotion to God a common aim. It would hardly be too much to say that those philosophical and religious systems which have preached the unworthiness of looking for a reward of well-doing, which have striven to set up the doing of good for its own sake as the only morality worthy of the name, have failed, just because they would not begin with the love of God. To Christianity, especially to Evangelical Christianity, they have assumed to speak from above downwards; but it alone has the secret they strove in vain to learn. Men justified by faith have peace with God, and do good with passionate fervor without hope or possibility of further reward, just because of their love and gratitude to God, who is the source of all good. This plan has succeeded, and no other has; for to teach men on any other terms to disregard reward is simply to ask them to breathe in a vacuum.
In the second place, those who rose to the height of this calling had duty not only deepened but extended. It was natural that they should not seek to throw off the obligations of worship and morality as they had been handed down by their ancestors. Only an authoritative voice which they were separated from by centuries could say, "It hath been said by them of old time…but I say unto you"; and men would be disposed rather to fulfill old obligations with new zeal, while they added to them the new duties which their widened horizon had brought into view. It is true that in course of time the Pharisaic spirit laid hold of the Jews, and that by it they were led back into a slavery which quite surpassed the half-conscious bondage of their earlier time. It is one of the mysteries of human nature that it is only the few who can live for any time at a high level, and hold the balance between extremes. The many cannot choose but follow those few; and the dumb, half-reluctant, half-fascinated way in which they are drawn after them is a most pathetic thing to see. But too often they avenge themselves for the pressure put upon them, by taking up the teaching they receive in a perverted or mutilated form, dropping unawares the very soul of it, and suiting it to the average man. When that is done the bread from heaven becomes a stone; the message of liberty is turned into a summons to the prison house; and the darkness becomes of that opaque sort which is found only where the light within men is darkness. That tragedy was enacted in Judaism as rarely elsewhere. The free service of sons was exchanged for the timorous, anxious scrupulosity of the formalist. How could men love a God whom they pictured as inexorable in claiming the mint and cumin of ceremonial worship, and as making life a burden for all who had a conscience? They could not, and they did not. Most substituted a merely formal compliance with the externalities of worship for the love to God and man which was the presupposition of the true Israelites life, and the mass of the nation fell away from true faith. Strangely enough, therefore, the strength of mens love for God, and of their belief in His love, gave an impulse to the legalistic Pharisaism which our Lord denounced as the acme of loveless irreligion.
But it was not so perverted in all. There always was an Israel within Israel that refused to let go the truths they had learned, and kept up the succession of men inspired by the free spirit of God. Even among the Pharisees there were such-witness St. Paul-men who, though they were entangled in the formalism of their time, found it at last a pedagogue to bring them unto Christ. We must believe therefore that at the beginning the attainment marked by the demands of Deuteronomy and the Law of Holiness existed and was carried over into the daily life. As the national limits of religion were broken down, the word "neighbor" received an ever-wider definition in Israel. At first only a mans fellow-tribesman or fellow-countryman was included; then the stranger; later, as in Jonahs picture of the conduct of the sailors, it was hinted that even among the heathen brethren might be found. Finally, in our Lords parable of the Good Samaritan the last barrier was broken down. But it needed all St. Pauls lifework, and the first and most desperate inner conflict Christianity had to live through, to initiate men into anything like the full meaning of what Christ had taught. Then it was seen that as there was but one Father in heaven, so there was but one family on earth. Then too, though the merely ceremonial duties by which the Jew had been bound ceased to be binding on Christians, the sphere for the practice of moral duty was immensely widened. Indeed, had it not been for the free, joyous spirit with which they were inspired by Christ, they must have shrunk from the immensity of their obligation. For not only were mens neighbors infinitely more numerous now, but their relations with them became vastly more complicated. To meet all possible cases that might arise in the great and elaborate civilizations Christianity had to face and save, our Lord deepened the meaning of the commandments; and so far from Christians being free from the obligation to law, immeasurably more was demanded of them. To them first was the full sweep of moral obligation revealed, for they first had reached the full moral stature of men in Jesus Christ.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv4, 6, 8 General Information:
General Information:
Moses continues to tell the people of Israel Yahweh's words as if the Israelites are one person. (See: Forms of You)
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Yahweh our God is one
"Our God Yahweh is the one and only God"
with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might
Here "heart" and "soul" are metonyms for a person's inner being. These three phrases are used together to mean "completely" or "earnestly." See how you translated "with all your heart, with all your soul" in Deuteronomy 4:29. (See: Metonymy and Doublet)
translationWords
Israel
Yahweh
God
love
heart
soul
might
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv4, 5, 7, 8, 9 6:4-5 Listen (Hebrew shema‘): The Shema is the fundamental…
6:4-5 Listen (Hebrew shema‘): The Shema is the fundamental statement of Israel’s faith. Jesus described these verses as the greatest of the commandments (Matt 22:34-39; Mark 12:28-31; Luke 10:25-28), a sentiment shared by ancient and modern Judaism. The rabbi Hillel (first century BC) spoke of the Shema as the central theological idea of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), calling the rest mere commentary.
6:4 The Lord is our God, the Lord alone: Only God is worthy of worship (5:7).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.