We read in our Torah portion for this week (i.e., parashat Eikev): “But now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask from you … but to love him with all your heart and with all your soul?” (Deut. 10:12). But how are we able to love God be’khol levavka (בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ) – “with all our heart” – and be’khol nafshekha (וּבְכָל־נַפְשֶׁךָ) – “with all our soul,” apart from healing of the brokenness that makes our hearts divided and sick? That is what the redemption from Egypt was about: we were personally chosen by God, redeemed by his grace, led out from from cruel bondage, only to be led into the desert, away from the world, where we slowly began to understand that we were valued, cared for, and beloved of God. We believed in the possibility of promise, of covenant… Only then could we hear the request from heaven: “Now love Me…” In other words, we can only truly love God by knowing we are beloved by God, and the invitation to love him is a response of his great passion for you (1 John 4:19). Accept that you are accepted in the heart of the Beloved (Eph. 1:4-6).
What the LORD asks from us is humanly impossible, since the human heart is unable to truly love and serve the LORD apart from intervening grace (Eph. 2:1-10). The real miracle of faith is found in a transformed heart. It is never a question of “willpower” or the “zeal” of man; no – it is never a question of what I can do but rather what God can do (John 1:13).
We love because He loves us (and we receive and accept that love). It is the strength of his love that keeps you, not the strength of your own… Nevertheless it seems to be the pattern of God’s grace to bring affliction and trouble into our lives so that we will begin to seek the Presence of God (i.e., the “troubles of love”). We all are delivered from Egypt by the blood (i.e., the love) of God in the tribulation of hard exile. After all, how many of us came to know the LORD apart from the pain that comes from apprehending our own slavery to inner brokenness? Indeed it is a “severe mercy.” Therefore our Savior says: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). The hard “outer shell” of the seed must be broken so that the life of the Spirit can come through… The commandment to love the LORD, then, only finds its voice after we come to faith, after we experience the Holy Spirit’s power, indeed, after we are made alive from the dead.
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For more on this, see “Blessings and Brokenness.”
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