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‘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.’
Deu_6:4-7
They are words so familiar to us that it may seem strange to assert that the truth, as well as the command, contained in them, has been proved by experience to be singularly difficult of apprehension by the human mind. But the whole history of the religious training of Israel shows that these words needed the continual reiteration which the passage before us prescribes before they could become part of the religious conscience of the chosen race. Yet we know, how in spite of this, they fell away to other gods, and served Baalim and Ashtaroth, and Moloch, and the hosts of diverse and conflicting deities which the human imagination has conceived to account for the manifold phenomena of the universe. So hard is it to grasp and retain the primal truth, ‘The Lord our God is one Lord.’
And in proportion as they lost hold of it did their national life fade and wither, till the great captivity proved the truth of the prophetic warnings against apostasy. Throughout the Old Testament the foundation of true social welfare is declared to be the knowledge and the love of God. And when the horizon broadens into the world-wide Kingdom of God which was proclaimed by Jesus Christ, the knowledge and the love of God are still the conditions of all true life, whether individual or social. ‘This is eternal life, that they might know Thee the only true God.’ The precept of the text, reiterated throughout the Old Testament, is taken up and developed in the New. Love, in its threefold aspects, the love of God for man, and man for God, and the love of man for man in God, becomes the whole of religion.
I. Now we must notice that, simple and familiar as these words and ideas are to us, the declaration of the unity of God was at the time that it was proclaimed a new and startling dogma.—By dogma I mean an authoritative statement of a truth unattainable by the ordinary processes of human reason or perception. But even if we use the word in what has been lately called the more ordinary modern sense by which any assertion which a controversialist does not like or will not believe, is called dogmatic, it still remains true that at the time that it was made the declaration, ‘The Lord our God is one Lord,’ was a dogma. Here was a people surrounded on all sides by other nations, other religions, other gods, by people closely related to kindred races, a people but lately emerged from a bondage in which they had almost become a portion of the great and civilised Egyptian community with its elaborate and organised faith; and to these people it was declared that they were to discard all alien religions whatsoever, to put away every vestige of belief in other deities, and to exalt the God of their fathers into a sole and unapproachable supremacy, being linked together and separated from all other men by an exclusive and intolerant faith.
II. And what was this great dogmatic assertion? Was it a generally accepted truth, or was it a truth which when once declared could be readily corroborated by experience and observation? On the contrary, the dogma of the unity of God was in almost direct contradiction of the facts of the world and of life as the ancient mind conceived them. The infinite variety of the universe, its bewildering multiplicity of experience, made it easy for primitive man to assign to every hill and river its own divinity, and to explain the manifold appearances in heaven and earth by a theory of gods many and lords many. It is only gradually and by a laborious process that reason has in this overtaken revelation, and indeed we might almost say that it has been reserved for our own nation and our own time to complete the course which has led from polytheism to monotheism. The scientific confirmation of the Mosaic utterance is found in Newton’s proof of the unity of force throughout the universe, and in Darwin’s theory of the unity of life. Whatever other hypotheses may be made in the future, it is impossible at least to ascribe to more than One Supreme Mind the origin or the maintenance of the universe, which is knit together by the one force of gravitation, in the development of the most diverse forms of life by the one law of evolution. But in proving this, science has re-echoed in its own language, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.’
It is a dogma, then, that lies at the foundation of the Jewish and therefore also of the Christian religion.
Practical religion, then, rests on dogma: from an unbroken chain we can trace the love of man dependent upon the love of God, and the love of God resulting from our knowledge of Him and what He is.
But modern thought rejects dogma; often in our days on the ground that these are matters of which we know nothing, and that therefore we must be content with a vague feeling of awe towards the great force that works in nature and in man, and a vague emotion of benevolence or love towards all that He or it has made. No one can study the various utterances of contemporary speculation on religious subjects without seeing that the old definite opposition between faith on the one hand and unbelief on the other has given place on both sides to a common agreement that though nothing can be known of the force that lies behind the world of sense, we yet can reverence and even love the unknowable God, provided we think of Him only as manifesting Himself in the natural course of the universe. But there have been, and there are still souls who know God, whose eyes have seen the King the Lord of Hosts, and from them, from prophet and psalmist and apostle and seer and saint, has been gathered the record of the revelation made to them which men contemptuously call dogma. If we, who have received this sacred trust, do not transmit it to them who come after, that their posterity may know it, and the children that are yet unborn, we shall be cutting away the foundadation on which practical religion, the love of God, and the love of man, can alone be built up. Ask those who know, and they will tell you that the love of man, the true enthusiasm of humanity, by which I do not mean the reformer’s instinct for mere social order and improvement—that the love of man is inspired by the love of God within us. Ask them again, and they will tell you that we cannot love what we do not know, and that dim and imperfect as our insight into spiritual truth may always be, it is yet the condition of that absorbing affection, that yearning of the whole nature of man for God, which is the goal of our spiritual life on earth. To us then as to the Israelite of old, dogmatic truth is the foundation of life. ‘Hear, O Israel: 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 might.’
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Bishop A. T. Lyttelton.
Illustration(1) ‘I must think of God as a living, loving person, for life and love and personality are the highest things I know, although I know them by my experience of man, and as a man. If you can show me anything in the sphere of human knowledge nobler than the noblest man, more venerable than the purest human virtue, wiser than the keenest human intellect, more lovable than human love, I will clothe with its qualities my thoughts of God. But till then I will think of Him under the human aspects of righteousness and mercy and holiness and love, though I know that His holiness is purer than the purest, and His love tenderer than the tenderest of human love. In a word, personality sums up all that is best in our experience, and therefore we believe that God is a person. And we claim that this belief is justified by the facts of the universe so far as we know them. We trace in the order of creation the workings of an intelligence similar though immeasureably superior to our own reason, while the spiritual experiences of individual souls assure us that in the Being with whom we have to do there is the quality which we know as love. The God whom we dimly surmise is a personal God. And when we turn from the guesses of natural religion to the fact of the Incarnation we find the same truth declared in Him who is the express image of the person of God; for the Man Christ Jesus is for us the revelation of the divine nature: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” ’
(2) ‘A new generation has grown up, a generation that never knew the defiling idolatry of Egypt, and had never bowed under the debasing yoke of Pharaoh. Those were a people whose freedom had been purchased at a great price; but this is a people free born. They had been trained and disciplined in the school of the wilderness, and had learned its lessons; familiar through all their life with the presence and service of the God of Israel. The nation had been born in a day, but it takes forty years to educate it, and fit it for its high calling. We feel as we stand on the borders of Canaan that we are amidst a people a whole heaven above the slaves that had come forth from Egypt, haunted as they were by fear, and incapable of any lofty faith or brave endurance. The murmurings are left behind, and here stands a people that do know their God, and are strong, and shall do exploits. To these people another tone is possible; and there naturally comes a new appeal.
To this new spirit, then, is given a new revelation. And now for the first time is heard the great commandment, the ten in one, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” ’