Why is it that I keep coming back to this teaching of Christ?
Mainly because Jesus Himself placed so much emphasis upon it. To love God first and always.
This is a very simple statement, but it is one of the hardest of all things to do. To place God before yourself ESPECIALLY in today’s society is one daunting effort. How do I know this? Because I struggle with it every single day. So since I know how hard it is, is it any different for anyone else? I am just an average guy, if you saw me on the street you would walk right passed me. I am in no way special. That means I know how others respond to this. I see how they act and compare it to how I act. We all do this. Some might call it judging, but that is not what I am doing. I am just comparing how we act to how we are told to act in the Bible.
How can you place God first if you are more interested in what is on the television?
How can you place God first if you are more concerned about how you look when you go out?
These are just two examples. There are thousands more and would take too long to list them out.
When you place life before God you are worshiping it. This is something that has been done for thousands of year and has caused thousands of wars, murders and other types of bloodshed and mayhem. All of which leads to a selfishness and desire to be the center or ruler of it all, in one form or another.
An excellent example is how people perceived the universe just before the Renaissance period of our history.
At this time, most not only thought of the world as flat, but that the sun, the moon and stars all revolved about this planet we live upon. This is mass selfishness. A selfishness that made people to build castles and fight one another for dominion over one another.
Well we again live in an era of mass selfishness. Are we due for a new renaissance? Maybe. Ever since we found out that the earth revolved about the sun it cause a change in how we thought for a time being. It enabled Martin Luther to post his thesis on the door, which in turn caused the church which was then solely the Catholic Church, which selfishly desire to control the teachings of the Bible to splinter and so protestants came into being in the formation of the Lutheran Church.
Now we are in an era where we find not only is our sun, even though the center of our solar system, is just one of a million stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy and that there are millions of other galaxies out there. Within them their own solar systems and within them their own planets that circle that a sun.
This has caused a rift in faith. It has caused many to run from God thinking that He is not real since we are just a speck within a huge universe, some place off to the side and we have no meaning.
I beg to differ with this thinking. One of the greatest qualities we can have is humility. If you are the center of it all are you truly able to become humble? The answer to that is no.
So to me, God placing this tiny speck of a planet on the edge of a galaxy is to teach us that it is not us that is important, but God. It is meant to make us look at the universe, even though we are in a small part of it and see that it is His creation. To see that WE are His creation. This universe is so vast and it expanse so big that it is immeasurable, yet here we are living, thinking beings. How can people even consider we are here as a random accident caused “maybe” by a comet that “maybe” carried the right combination of cells to “maybe” cause life? That entire thought process is laughable when you really consider it, yet millions are buying into it. Why? Because Christians do not understand their true existence themselves. They themselves question how and where they come from. Why? Because they are human.
Humanity is not perfect. All of us have doubts. All of us question, which results in a misunderstand of the teaching of the Bible. Which resulted in for example a Lutheran priest to tell his congregation the book of Revelation is nothing but a story made up to scare people. Yet at this very moment elements of the last book of the Bible are coming true at this very moment. A book in the Bible that is also witnessed by the book of Daniel reaffirming that in reality it is not a fairy tale but like the entire Bible the words of God given to us to know that we are His creation and that even though we are but a speck within this huge and wondrous universe. A universe so filled with beauty, that God sees us as something beautiful and wonderful. For we are His creation, something that He said is worthy of existing.
Think upon this, and become humble, and realize that if you seek to be the center of it all you are in reality denying God, since time and again He tells humans that they are not the center of the universe, but that HE is.
So as the second of the greatest commandments tells us to do. We are to love our fellow human beings as we love ourselves, but to do that we my first humble ourselves. For when you humble yourself you realize that you could never be at the center of anything and we are to treat ALL humanity as not only our equals, but as our brothers and sisters in this wondrous creation of the Creator our Lord God, the Father of our Savior the Christ, Jesus.