What is your vision of a perfect world? Most envision a civilized life where nobody hurts anyone else, where everybody works for the common good, where there is no poverty, crime or injustice. Interestingly, that is the way God made the world to be. He also built free will into that utopian dream, because He didn’t want us to be unloving robots. The only rule at the beginning was that the man and woman were not to eat a certain fruit. Breaking that only rule seemed pretty harmless; the fruit was not even poisonous. The first people who lived in a utopian paradise chose freely to disobey the only “law,” thus creating an unfortunate chain of events that led to the chaos in which we now live.
Many years later, God delivered to the ancient nation of Israel the most perfect set of laws, the Mosaic Law, which included the Ten Commandments. If God’s people followed these laws, they would enjoy a civilization that, while imperfect, could be somewhat utopian. The interesting thing about The Law is that God knew when He gave them, humanity would be incapable of keeping them perfectly; after all, the first couple couldn’t even obey one rule!
When asked what was the greatest of all the commandments, Jesus boiled it all down to love: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind…You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt 22:37, 39) Keeping this law of love seems simple enough and will surely make the world a better place.
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