Who did Jesus come down hardest on? The pharisees, saducees, experts in the law--those who thought they could achieve acceptance of God through works, and having achieved this, felt the liberty to avoid/withhold love and compassion for others. To them, it had become a game of ''kick as many people down as you can, heaven has limited occupancy, and the more of 'them' I can 'out-holy,' the better MY chances are of getting in.'' As well as ''following rules is what God wants, He is demanding, strict, judging, and merciless. I esteem this image as God, and so emulate it, myself, since I'm an expression of God, and this is what I understand and perceive God to be.''
How many times have we heard/read ''God is love?'' No, really, God is love. Were they just speaking in metaphors? ''A new command I give to you'' Jesus said, for the benefit of those who regarded the fulfillment of commandments as the only way to attain ''righteousness'' ''a new command I give to you: that you love one another; that as I have loved you, you also may love one another.'' and ''Love is the fulfillment of the law.''
Jesus said ''he who would save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life, for my sake, will find it.'' and ''It would be easier for a camel to enter through a needle eye than for a rich man to enter into heaven.'' It's not only about wealth. He was talking about those who put something-anything of such great importance that it overshadowed the greatest two commandments. These experts in the law were fighting tooth-and-nail to try to get into heaven with observance of the law to the letter; building riches up in heaven. They were still ''rich men,'' but their currency was a sense of pride, self-sufficiency, and self-righteousness. Even if there was no monetary ''wealth'' involved, it was still a rat race.
Doing good deeds (or even believing in Jesus as the son of God, for that matter), just to try to avoid hell, doesn't make me good or moral in any way. It means I'm self-seeking and afraid of hell. It means I'm striving to build up securities to ensure my own survival. It means I'm still trying to become rich. ''I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the father, but by me.'' At that instant, look at Jesus' life. What does he do? He has NOTHING to do with building up any riches. Giving--all he did was give. At all times, he was always giving. Love, the chief ''commandment,'' is not love until it is given.
That is the ''way.'' That is the truth of who we are, since we are expressions of this divine love. That is how to fully embody and exemplify the life manifested by the divine love in the physical realm as ''us,'' because it is the nature of the author of such life.
Hate is nothing more than the chosen cultivation of the void of love. The feelings that hatred bring are the frustrations we feel when our true nature, as expressions of divine love, is denied expression by our mislead logic. Thank God for frustrations, or we might never have any ''wake up call'' to the notion that something's amiss. You've heard the saying ''God-shaped hole,'' maybe even heard the song? It points to the fact that we, as expressions of the divine, have a nature intrinsic to the divine from which we have been expressed. Greed, fear, hatred, all these go hand-in-hand with many others. They never satisfy because that is not what/who we truly are.
All the commandments see their fulfillment in love. Fulfilling ''the laws'' devoid of love only ''kills'' us, because it is ''discipline,'' forced on us from outside, rather than the discipline of our own true nature of love, being expressed from the inside.
