Commandment #1 – Hateful Love & Loving Hate

Description:

Listen to Episode:

Transcript of Episode:

Radio Announcer: The Reconstructionist Radio podcast network presents the Moral Foundations podcast, with Reverend Jeremy Walker, where you will learn to teach the Bible, line upon line, precept upon precept, in a systematic and comprehensive manner.

Jeremy Walker: You’re listening to the Moral Foundations Podcast and I’m your host, Reverend Jeremy Walker. The Moral Foundations podcast is a production of the GCS Apprenticeship program. The GCS Apprenticeship Program trains young men and women to become successful Christian teachers and how to own and operate their very own Christian school. For more information, you can visit the apprenticeship website at gcsapprenticeship.com. You can also find this podcast episode and all the Moral Foundation podcast episodes on the Moral Foundation’s podcast website at gcsapprenticeship.com/podcast.

Now on this episode, we are on episode number three of the First Commandment. Our first episode covered authority and our second episode in this series covered the importance of fearing God. And this episode is going to be entitled Hateful Love and Loving Hate, because love and hate is a aspect here of this First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

If you say that you love something or that you hate something, there’s a couple different aspects to this that you have to understand. The first part is, is what is the standard for love? I mean, what actions are considered loving? There’s gotta be something that’s considered to be loving. And then what are your actions that are considered to be hateful? What things are good, what things are bad? Somebody does something, was it a loving action, was it a hateful action?

So when you’re teaching your students, when you’re teaching your children, this concept of love and hate is tied interchangeably to this First Commandment of “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It’s important then that you discuss this subject with your children because how it is whenever they say “I love you Mommy, I love you Daddy,” or if, of course, they say they love God, what does that mean? What does love and hate mean? Where is this standard, where does it come from? Who set’s the standard for what is loving and what might be hateful?

After all, what are the concepts, we have concepts in our society today of something being a hate crime or hate speech. These are common terminologies that you hear in our modern age. And we talk about, we see signs all the times of loving this and loving that, but what does it mean? What does love mean? What does hate mean?

So let’s go into some things I think are very important for you, as the teacher or as the parent, you’re going to want to discuss and make sure that your students and children understand whenever you go over this subject because, once again, I think people mistake the idea of teaching the Ten Commandments, like somebody is just gonna run through it and it’s something that is just kinda shallow, kind of a shallow dish with a little bit of water in the bottom of it, but it’s really not.

The Commandments and their explanation of how you teach them and their applications to your life are vast and what you love and what you hate is tied to this First Commandment. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Because love and hate, they’re actions, they’re not emotions, they’re not feelings. In other words, you can’t separate your actions from your emotions or from your feelings because what that means is that if somebody says that they love their Mommy, it doesn’t mean that they’re gonna walk up and slap Mommy in the face. That is not a loving action towards mommy. If somebody says that they love Mommy, then they’re going to listen to Mommy. Mommy says “Go to bed”, the child is saying “I love you, Mommy”, that means that they’re now going to climb into that bed, lay down and go to sleep like Mom said.

You cannot separate your actions from your emotions or feelings, they’re intertwined. Because actions come from the heart, as Jesus said. He had asked his disciples, his disciples who were questioning about not washing their hands and Jesus was sitting down with the disciples and the Pharisees had asked the question about washing hands, and he says, “Don’t you understand? Evil is not from without.” The dirt, filth, is not on the outside, it’s not something that you can put into your mouth, that gets your hands contaminated, but sin is on the inside of the heart.

This is where lust comes from. This is where murders come from, this is where drunkenness comes from. Covetousness comes from, adulteries and fornications. All this comes from inside out. So if a person has a evil or hateful action, let’s saying, hitting someone, then that comes from their heart. So you can’t have a hateful action, but a good heart. In other words, you slapped Mommy, you can’t say that I love my Mommy. If a husband is committing adultery, he can’t say, “But I still love you.”

This is what it means to not be able to separate love and hate and the emotions and the feelings. So children should be taught that the standard here that we’re talking about is that the standard is God and his Commandments, this is our standard. Because the natural man has no love really, for anyone or any thing other than himself. That is all that he loves. His true love is himself. He believes he’s God, we’ve gone over this before and the only thing he loves is himself.

In fact, the worst thing that the natural man could do is ever, in a million years, ever sacrifice something. His time, his energy, his money. Sacrificing anything is absolutely repulsive to the normal man. Now, to illustrate this a little bit, just for us parents and adults, this isn’t something you would necessarily share with your children or with your students, but it something you can share in concept, and you don’t have to share the quote.

But Ayn Rand, if you’re not familiar with Ayn Rand, she wrote Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, very popular. But Ayn Rand, she was quite the thinker. She was non-Christian of course, but one of the quotes she had is that “The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters and he intends to be the master.” Her other quote was, “The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral.” See, Ayn Rand understood this quite well, that the normal man despises the concept of sacrifice.

If someone is going to put you out, that means that this person is automatically your master. She saw sacrifice as being foolish. In fact, she saw it as morality of the immoral. So basically was completely and utterly opposed to Christianity, where Christianity talks about sacrifice quite a bit and we’re going to get into that a little bit. But man refuses to sacrifice pretty much even the most basic of things for other people.

This is something you should share with your students and your children, because sacrifice is built into Christianity. To put yourself out, to put someone before yourself. This is the basic tenet of Christianity, actually. To put others first, before yourself. Especially this goes into when you become a parent, to put someone first. Even if you’re a brother or sister, this is something you can discuss, is putting your brother or sister before yourself. Or a friend, or a neighbor, or a stranger.

But some of the basic ways, just to give illustrations here of what we’re talking about, about hating sacrifice, is concepts like road rage for adults. You’ll see people trying to get in front of people while they’re driving on the road and somebody will cut somebody off and then they get angry and want to honk their horn and they want to shout and scream and flip people off and the concept of just letting someone go first or waiting in line is not possible.

In fact, there’s many stories of people where they’re going to park in the same parking lot and there’s one parking spot, maybe it’s up front and one person gets in the parking spot first and they’ll actually get in fist fights. People actually fight each other over a parking spot at the shopping center. Not only that, but if you look at children, if it’s dinner time and they’re going to see who gets the food first, they never want to be in the back. They never want to let somebody go first.

If you’re in a classroom setting, there’s always those kids who want to be in the front of the line, and they will fight for it, push each other down, knock each other down. We see this also in your shopping malls, in your supermarkets and things like that. People wanting to jump you in line if you’re trying to get there, whatever it is that you’re doing. Kids holding TV controllers, if somebody’s got the controller and they’re flipping channels or controlling the volume, a fight’s about to happen, because they do not want somebody else to have that and their wishes. How loud the TV is, what they’re watching, if it’s paused or not. Whatever it might be. The child does not want somebody else’s will to be put above their own.

In other words, they’re not going to self-sacrifice and do what somebody else wants. They want what they want done. This comes back to believing that they’re God. This is why we don’t want to sacrifice for anyone, because we believe we’re God. Now of course, we have an un-biblical view of sacrifice because God is the one who sacrificed for us. I mean, after all, and this is a concept you should bring up with your children, is that people think of sacrifice, like Ayn Rand, as a morality of the immoral, that I’m going to give up anything for you, they consider to be immoral.

But God. God gave up everything, gave up his only son, so that his people could be saved. Now that is not what mankind thinks is strength. That’s not what mankind thinks is love. In fact, Ayn Rand put it best. She considers sacrifice to be the morality of the immoral. This was evil. This was something that she despised. So we see how the coin is turned on it’s head here. That love and hate. Because Ayn Rand’s idea is like every other child on the planet who they don’t want to share their toys, they don’t want to let somebody go first, or whatever it might be, because they believe they’re God, the concept of sacrifice is absolutely abhorrent to them.

They find sacrifice for anyone, any time, to be an evil concept and she said here somebody wants you to sacrifice, it’s only because they want to be your master. This is what she is trying to say. But it’s antithesis to what Christianity is and they really don’t understand it. And the last thing I’ll say about sacrifice, which also goes with parenting, but we’ve mentioned this before, like in the First Commandment, we mentioned be fruitful and multiply, but having children is a giant sacrifice. Your time, your money, your bodies, for the ladies, having children and this is something that is a sacrifice on all parts and the most general concept why people don’t want children or don’t want many children is because they really are, once again, they think that sacrifice is a morality of the immoral.

Why do I have to give up my time? Why do I have to give up my money? Why do I have to give up my body? My figure or whatever it might be, for someone else? And so they find this to be not an action of love, to have children, they find it to be an action of hate that somebody else is going to impose upon me. And you see this in the abortion movement, the pro-choice movement and all the rest because the child is going to impose upon you. You’re going to have to sacrifice your time, your money, your career, whatever it might be, for somebody else and so they view this, this concept of sacrifice, as evil, not as a concept of love.

Instead of sacrifice being a thing of love where God sacrifices himself, where we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. This was his form of love to us. Ayn Rand said that this kind of concept is the morality of the immoral and so this is kind of what we’re talking about. So love and hate is very important, sacrifice is a part of that and it’s something that you should teach your children that if they’re going to be people who really do love, than sacrifice is part of that concept.

Then God of course, is going to tell us what forms of sacrifice are good, because just sacrifice in general is not okay, but it’s lawful, good forms of it. And we’re going to get into some of that in a minute. But the concept of sacrifice being important to the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and building on the concept that love and hate are based off of God’s Commandments and our standard is built off that as well.

Now another point here we need to go over is that the First Commandment declares that God is the one that sets the standard of good and evil. It is God who declares what actions are loving and what actions are hateful. Now this is important. I’m going to give some examples here of what it means to have loving actions. Let’s see. Loving action, here’s an example, carrying for the needs of your spouse. So if you have a husband or you have a wife, they’re going to need a place to stay, they’re going to need clothing, they’re going to need food, they’re going to need medical attention, they’re going to need emotional support, they’re going to have physical needs as a husband or a wife would that have to be met. So meeting and caring for your spouse’s needs, these are actions of love, all these go into the concept of duty within marriage as well. So these are all within the guidelines of marriage where God put it, that all these things are good. Marital relations is a loving thing inside marriage.

You have also the caring for one’s children’s needs, so your children need a place to stay, they need to be safe, clothes, food, medical attention, education, all the things that go with it and so in order to give your children these things is an act of love. Which of course, is an act of duty, as well. And so your parents show that they love their children by meeting their needs that they need. A spouse shows that they love their spouse, the husband loves the wife, the wife loves the husband, by meeting their needs according to God’s Commandments.

Next would be a person who has a boss, they listen to their boss, they perform their duties, which they’re being paid to do. So they honor authority and they don’t steal, so they perform their duties well so the paycheck that they’re getting is one that is well-earned because they’ve not a thief, they’re diligent and they’ve earned their paycheck. These are of course actions of love again. Honoring authority, doing your jobs to the best of your ability, these are Commandments that God’s given to us, said these are duties and when we do them, these are acts of love. You’ll love your boss, so you’re not going to steal from him and you’re also going to listen to him.

These actions are tied to what the heart’s condition is. And so if a person finds it difficult to listen to their boss or they find it difficult to do their job or take care of their kids or take care of their spouse, there’s something going wrong on their heart. Then of course there’s other ones like telling the truth about your friends and your enemies, both alike. Not slandering people, not going out of your way to heart people. Protecting the property of people, so you’re not going to steal from people and if you see that something’s wrong, you’re going to help. Like if you saw that somebody was breaking into your neighbor’s house, you might call the police. You might try to stop them. You’re going to do your best to protect your neighbor and their property as well.

So all these things go into actions that are loving, but these actions equate themselves out with what God’s Commandments are, as in thou shalt not kill, therefore you’re supposed to protect and make sure that people are safe. You’re not supposed to steal, so you’re instead supposed to protect the possessions of other people and so forth and so on.

Now let’s go into some hateful actions real quick. Hateful actions would be stealing property from somebody, so stealing somebody’s wallet. Lying in order to get somebody in trouble, so this could be brothers and sister lying about each other to get somebody in trouble. Taking the stand in a court case, so you can lie about someone to get someone in trouble or to get somebody out of trouble. Getting somebody out of trouble is not a loving action, because you’re subverting justice, so this is also a thing of hate. Hateful action.

Physical assault is where you physically attack somebody. Husband who physically attacks his wife obviously shows he’s not loving her. He’s beating his wife or he’s just beating his children and he’s clearly not loving them, he’s clearly hating them. His actions are showing that he hates them. If husband and wife are not giving due marital relations to each other, then they’re not showing love towards each other, they’re showing hate towards each other. If they’re not meeting the medical needs of each other, then they’re showing hate towards each other.

If you go into hear, where let’s say in the family, if the wife was spending all the money that was in the home, just as a spendthrift, or the husband was, making ridiculous purchases of that, this is a sign of hate, not a sign of love for the family.

Harming the character of somebody, if you’re lying about somebody, slandering them, gossiping about them, these are actions of hate. Another action of hate would be seducing someone’s husband or wife. This is not your husband, this is not your wife, but you want these types of marital relations without the marriage and so you’re going to seduce these people outside the marriage, which is adultery. You therefore are not loving the husband, if you’re seducing him, you’re not loving the wife if you’re seducing her. What you’re doing is, if you’re seducing someone’s husband then you’re hating their wife. If you are seducing someone’s wife, then you’re hating the husband. If you’re seducing husband or wife, then you’re hating the children.

Whatever you’re doing, you’re hating someone. It’s not about love. This concept is about hate. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Therefore breaking God’s Commandments is an action of hate. Also, once again, seducing someone’s sons or daughters. These are younger people and they’re seducing somebody’s son or daughter, then you hate that family. You hate the person that you’re seducing because you’re wanting them to break their wedding vows, fornication, adultery and you also hate their parents, you hate the family, because you’re wanting to dishonor this child, this son, this daughter, this whomever.

This are not actions of love. Our movies and our plays and all the rest, show these things to be things of love. Relations outside of marriage. But they’re not, they’re always actions of hate, because outside of God’s Commandments, these actions are hateful, they’re not loving. So this is the difference right here. This is something that we really need to hammer home with your students, hopefully you’re starting to get this idea of how this works. We love [inaudible 00:19:03] keep the Commandments, we hate is when we break them.

Once again, going in further, this is a simple one, kidnapping. If you’re going to kidnap somebody’s children, or hold somebody hostage, clearly you’re showing hate to this person. You’re not giving them freedom. If you’re going to rape somebody, which is to take sexual advantage of somebody without any consent at all, it wasn’t even part of their idea, they weren’t even seduced, you just took it from them, this is clearly hate. Sexual perversions of all sorts, it doesn’t matter if it’s homosexuality, or if it is necrophilia, it goes on and on and on.

It goes into also husband and wife having relations during monthly cycles. These type of actions that are sexual perversions, which are quite extensive in the Bible, these are not things of love, like incest. It doesn’t matter if these people think that they like each other, it doesn’t matter if they are attracted to each other, it doesn’t matter if they think they want to get married, this is not a thing of love, this is a action of hate, because it is a violation of God’s Commandments.

Then of course, you have destruction of somebody’s property, of course, obviously burning somebody’s house down is obviously a thing of hate. Now, a hate crime, in general, we mentioned this earlier, a hate crime is seen in our modern times as something that is done because of somebody’s national origin or because of what they look like, hair color, skin color, whatever it might be. But this is not what, biblically speaking, is what’s considered a hate crime. A hate crime is any act that violates God’s Commandments.

This means what we’re talking about here is two young teenage people who decide that they’re going to, as we call it here, have a fornication, or relations prior to marriage. They are not in love. They’re in lust, which is also unlawful, but they’re not in love. If they’re in love and they wanted to have relations with each other, they would get married. But otherwise, these people are hating each other. The young teen who is having relations with another young teen of sorts, then the young lady hates the young man, the young man hates the young lady, they both hate the respective parents and all the dishonor that comes with it and they both hate God.

So these are not actions of love. No matter how many movies they make it look like it’s wonderful and all the rest. These are actions of hate. Hate speech, we mentioned that earlier as well. Hate speech is any speech that promotes a violation of God’s law. So that means that anytime anybody’s trying to tell you that breaking God’s Commandments is good, fun, enjoyable, anything of any sorts, that is hate speech. That means that this person hates you. This person is not trying to help you. They are trying to tell you that stealing is okay, then these people are, is a form of hating you.

They tell you that not listening to your parents, this is a form of hating you. Anything that goes with it, breaking your marital vows, through adultery, through fornication, through anything about, from top to bottom, these are all forms of hate. These people who are talking like this hate you and themselves. They also hate themselves as well because you can’t break the Commandments of God without it affecting you, yourself and affecting other people.

And so this is why it’s hate. If you’re trying to promote somebody to break God’s Commandments, no matter which commandment it is, then you yourself are going to get in trouble for what you’re doing and anybody who listens to you as well. So you’re hating yourself, it’s a form of self-hate, sadism as it was, and masochism is where you want to hurt somebody else, so this concept of sado-masochists, these are the people who hate God’s Commandments, they want to hurt themselves, they want to hurt other people and they do this by breaking God’s Commandments, and wanting other people to do it, so they’re promoting the violation of God’s Commandments.

Another point we need to cover here is without law, there is no love. And without a law giver, there is no law. So men that desire to love apart from God’s law, are incapable of love. These actually embrace evil, so whenever you take God’s Commandments and you toss it aside, if you want to say, “Well, we’re just going to love each other, we don’t care what any law says, we don’t take what anybody else says, we’re just going to love each other. That means I can steal from you, lie to you, seduce anybody I want to, whatever it means, we’re just going to love, but we’re not going to have it defined by any law of any sorts. So there won’t be any law to define my actions as loving or not.”

That means that they’re actually embracing evil. So this is something that modern people have embraced, modern movies have embraced, something we need to be having our students and our children pay attention to. If something does not line itself with God’s law, with the Bible, then it’s not love at all. It’s actually evil. And people are trying to embrace evil because those that abandon God and his law also abandon love, because apart from God’s law there is only evil and there’s only hate.

So it’s something that we have to make sure that our children and our students understand this concept. Because while attempting to embrace evil and call it good, man destroys himself and others and they claim to be doing good. And a couple way that they do this, we mentioned this a minute ago by when they embrace evil they’re trying to call it good, but they’re really just hurting themselves and hurting the other people around them.

One of those are what’s considered to be legal sexual perversions. This would be adultery is legal, fornication is legal, there’s other forms of sexuality that are considered to be legal, but not Godly, not good, not loving, not Biblical. So even though it’s considered to be legal, it’s still going to be evil, it’s still going to hurt this person, and it’s still going to hurt the people that they involve others with it.

There’s also things like legal murder, where you can take your children and kill them, if you have abortion, things like that. They call this good, they embrace it, but it’s not good. They’re going to destroy themselves by breaking God’s Commandments and obviously, clearly here, they’re destroying someone else. They’re killing their children. Not only that, it’s also an attack also on the husband, the man who is also espoused this child. When they kill this child, they’re also not just attacking the child, they’re also attacking the husband and so this is an act of hate, it’s not an act of love. It’s not even self-love, because if they love themselves, then once again, like we said, they would embrace God’s Commandments, what God says is good.

So whenever someone does something like abortion, they are of course, clearly, hating themselves, hating their child and hating the man, husband, spouse, father of the child, whatever you want to call it, it is hate all the way around. Including the grandparents as well. This is someone’s grandchild, on the mother’s side, grandchild on the father’s side. This is their progeny and you’re destroying it, and so this is not an act of love. This is an act of hate.

And so this is what it means by you’re attempting to embrace evil and call good, but you can destroy everybody around you. And it goes further into that, it goes into community welfare programs, it goes into property taxes, child protective services, you know, they’re meaning well, but instead of helping, they end up, the majority of times, hurting families in a lot of ways. You have government vaccination programs where doctors want to do good, but instead, they end up harming people instead.

So there’s lots of different ways people are claiming to do things that are good, but destroying themselves and others around them. And so it’s very important for us to teach and to keep the First Commandment correctly. We have to submit to God’s authority and decision concerning those things that are good and evil and what is considered to be love and hate.

We must love the things that God loves and hate the things that God hates. We must also love those people that love God and His Word, and we also should be avoiding those that despise God and His Word as well because these people are the ones who are going to lead us further down the road in trying to convince us to break God’s Commandments and call it good. So these are people that your children, your students should be trying to label people, my friends, whomever my associates. Are these people, people that have God’s standard of good and evil, love and hate and are they trying to convince me that God’s standard is right or are they trying to convince me that God’s standard is wrong?

So this is why the title was Hateful Love and Loving Hate. Because people think that they’re loving people when they’re really not, it’s hateful love. They’re really harming people. And they’re loving hate because they call something good when it’s not and they say that’s what they love. They love to break God’s Commandments. So this is why we pick the title here.

But to close up here, in conclusion, a couple of questions for us, you should go over with your students and yourself and your children with this kind of concept of First Commandment is how do we know that we love somebody? And the answer should be that we know we love somebody because we keep the Commandments towards them. That is the simple answer. You know you love somebody if you’re not stealing from them. You know you love somebody if you are, like your spouse, if you’re performing your duties of your spouse, you’re faithful to those people.

You know you love these people by your actions. The second question, how do we know that someone loves us? Well, it’s real simple. Is this person keeping the Commandments towards us? Are they stealing from us, are they lying to us. This is how we know if somebody loves us. Also, do they love us, are they teaching us to keep the Commandments? How do you know your mom and dad love you? Not only are they keeping the Commandments towards you, but they’re also teaching you to keep the Commandments.

How do you know your friends love you? Well, they’re keeping the Commandments towards you and they’re teaching you or they’re instructing you, they are influencing you to keep the Commandments yourself as well. This is how you know someone loves you. How do we know that we love God? Well, this is real simple. We know that we love God when we keep His Commandments as James says, that His Commandments are not grievous. It means you know the Commandments of God, you want to keep the Commandments of God and you don’t consider them a burden, you consider them to be a reward, a blessing, you’re thankful for them.

This is something that’s showing you how to become more blessed, more rewardable, and so you know that you love God if you have a growing power and ability to keep God’s Commandments, that’s how you know you love God is you everyday day wake up, and even if you messed up some shape form or fashion, you’ve repented of that, you’ve gotten back up and you’ve started moving forward again. A process we like to call sanctification. It’s also you should mention to your students and to your children, sanctification is something you very rarely hear about in the church today, but it’s not a pray the prayer one time thing.

Your salvation is not based off a one time prayer. Your salvation and not really your salvation, but the understanding that you are saved, your assurance, is built on the fact that you have a continued progression towards repentance and a continued progression towards obedience. The long suffering of the saints, they’d continue moving forward, they’d never give up the faith. Perseverance as some people call it.

How do you know that God loves you? Well, real simple. Is God convicting you of sin? Because the Bible’s very clear, it says, “The one who is not convicted or disciplined of God is not a son of God.” So ask your child, ask your student, are they convicted whenever they sin? Are they convicted when they break a commandment? Are they convicted, do they feel bad whenever they did something wrong. And if they can say that they are, then that’s a good sign that God loves them because God is not allowing them to feel comfortable with breaking His Commandments. He’s coming in and He is making them feel the guilt of what they’ve done and that guilt will push them back to Christ for forgiveness and then move forward again in sanctification.

So that’s how you know if God loves you, if He continues to do this and in more crucial times, sometimes He has to have a stronger hand of judgment for people who continue in their sins. Well, if He does, He does out of love. And so that’s the number one way you can know that God loves you, is if you have continued conviction of sin, which drives you closer to repentance and drives you towards more obedience and a desire to keep those Commandments. That’s what your child could say, they have a good reason to believe that God loves them. If they’re not convicted of their sins, and they never feel remorse for them, if they never go to God in repentance, if they don’t have a growing power to keep the Commandments, then that child should not be told that they have a good reason to believe that they’ve actually been saved. Because these are basic signs of God’s love, is your conviction of sin and your progressive obedience and the Holy Spirit will help you and lead you into obedience.

And then the last one here to close up, to love to someone means to desire their good only. And this means that we want to help them obey God. That means if you love somebody, as a parent, you’re going to want them to, like your children, your job is to teach your children to obey God’s Commandments, and that is how you’re going to show them that you love them, is by doing that. You’re going to show them that you love them by doing your duties towards them.

As far as teachers, same thing, you’re going to show that you love your students by teaching them God’s Commandments as well. You show brothers and sisters that you love them or your friends that you love them by your keeping the Commandments towards them and your continued push and/or goading towards having your siblings or your friends keep the Commandments too, correcting them. Peer pressure as they say. Godly peer pressure.

Same thing with people that you know, associates. The way that you show people you love them is by keeping the Commandments towards them, and then of course, as you get chance and opportunity to goad those people towards obedience to God as well to influence them, Godly peer pressure as it were.

So hopefully this gives you some things to think about, about the First Commandment, but the concept of Thou shalt have no other gods before me sets the standard that God is the standard for love and God is the standard for hate. We have to love the things that God loves, hate the things that God hates. We should not want to break the Commandments, we should want to keep them. And so this is integral concept to teaching the First Commandment is teaching how to understand what love and hate is.

So hopefully this has given you plenty of things to think about and I hope you can join us back next week. Thank you and God bless.

Radio Announcer: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network brings to you a complete lineup of podcasts where you will hear practical and tactical theology. Our desire is not simply that you consume our shows, but that you also live out your faith in every area of life. We can talk all day long about these things, but if we fail to put them into practice, then we fail as ambassadors of Jesus Christ our King.

Subscribe now to your favorite Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network shows, or you can subscribe to the Reconstructionist Radio Master Feed, where all of the content we produce, including the audiobooks and audio articles will pop up as soon as they are available.

And don’t forget to visit reconstructionistradio.com to volunteer as a narrator or to partner with this ministry financially. May the Holy Spirit stir you into action for Christ and His Kingdom.