(This post is a work in progress. Come back later when it's done.)
What is the first commandment?
Here, I'm actually baiting a misdirection, to either the first of the ten commandments ("You shall have no other gods before me"), or the greatest commandment ("Love the Lord your God... "). But the actual "first commandment" I have in mind is the first one that God ever gave humanity, in Genesis 1. It goes as follows:
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
This commandment must surely be very important, given its primacy in time. In fact, absent further instructions, keeping this commandment is the default purpose of your life.
Now, that is a strong claim. How about those other commandments, like the first of the ten commandments or the greatest commandment? What about the obvious examples of Biblical singleness, which include the Apostle Paul and even our Lord Jesus Christ? In order to understand this whole picture, we must first understand what a "commandment" is.
The nature of a commandment
Some people think that Biblical commandments are absolute in that they can have no exceptions, addendums, or modifications. This is clearly false, as the above examples of Biblical singleness shows. Even in the very heart of the law - right in the middle of Leviticus, the priestly manual for executing God's commandments - there is a story about how Aaron and his sons deviated from their duty due to a family tragedy, and Moses (and presumably God) approved of it. There is also the story of the daughters of Zelophehad, and the fact that you can rescue your sheep even on the Sabbath.
And so, God's commandments are not meant to work like the operations of mathematics or physics. They are not meant to be algorithmically enforced rules for human behavior. They are not axioms in a purely logical system dictating right and wrong. Remember, the law was never meant to be the totality of what God has for us. This is not a bug, but a feature. The law is not one of the above things. To confuse the law for those things is to make a categorical error.
Instead, God's commandments are exactly what you expect from seeing them in the Bible: the most relevant, important rules we need to know for living a holy, righteous, and good life, useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training, with varying degrees of specificity or generality as is appropriate to each commandment. Nor is this some special pleading for Biblical commandments: ALL good rules for people work in this way. In other words, God's commandments are like a parent telling a child to "look both ways before you cross the street". A good child would obey and be safe. By contrast, it would be a foolish or a wicked child that ignores their parent's commandment because it doesn't have infinite precision and applicability ("what if a kidnapper blinds me and I'm running away from him and I have to cross the street?").
The way I like to think about this is by borrowing an analogy from mathematics: I think God's laws are dense in the space of human experiences, like how the rational numbers are dense in the real numbers. Or how a vector space is spanned by its basis set. After all, the Bible is of finite length, and the commandments within (said to number 613 in the Old Testament) cannot possibly cover everything that everyone ever experiences with perfect precision. But they are always applicable in some sense, and any situation can be successfully navigated by taking all relevant commandments into consideration. In this way a finite text can cover innumerable circumstances.
Note that this implies a certain succinctness in God's commandments. After all, your parents simply told you to look both ways before you cross the street, without weighing down this commandment with a ton of over-specific details. Likewise, the second greatest commandment is to "love your neighbor as yourself" - but how could you love your neighbor as yourself, unless you love yourself? Yet "love yourself" is not a separate, explicitly stated commandment in the Bible, because it can be safely assumed. It's natural and obvious for us to love and care for ourselves, and so such a commandment would not be particularly informative. While there are occasional exceptions where one is too harsh or neglectful of themselves, these can be handled with just a reminder to be good to yourself, and a reasonable inference from the second greatest commandment.
(refine, rewrite, incorporate) So, how does all this apply to the first commandment, in Genesis 1? From everything we've said above, we can say that this first commandment is the most basic commandment (because it's the first), that's worth mentioning (because people will actually get this wrong). It relates to the second greatest commandment, because to "love your neighbor" or "love yourself" then means helping them fulfill this commandment. It then informs the greatest commandment, because if we say we love God we would keep his commandments. It relates to society, because a society that does this well is a good one.
that applies to the general population (because it's a general commandment), that can have exceptions for specific individuals (as later passages show).
How do we do all this? Genesis 2 tells you the most excellent way.
(need a section here about nature of commandments?)
In fact I think it holds the solution to many ills that ails our society today. But why? How? Is it not enough to simply love God and love people? Aren't they first and second most important commandments?
Yes, those commandments are the more important. But because of their importance, they can be hard to understand in isolation. Their importance comes from their relationship to other commandments - the fact that they serve as the foundation, crux, and summary to all other commandments. "Upon these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets”. This necessary context is why they're not the first commandments given in the Bible, and not identified as the greatest until the New Testament.
So then, what does that mean for the first commandment, to be fruitful and multiply? This is not the "greatest" commandment, but it is the most basic. It's what we humans most needed to hear, as we rose from among the animals to become spiritual beings.
Here, I think an illustration would be helpful, from the second greatest commandment: to love your neighbor as yourself. Now, note that this commandment makes an assumption: you cannot love your neighbor as yourself unless you love yourself. Therefore, if there were a commandment to "love yourself", it would be more basic than the second greatest commandment, although it would not supersede it in greatness or importance. The "first commandment" is like that: it is the most basic of the commandments, as befitting the first thing that God ever said to humans.
Now, of course, there is no explicit, specific commandment to "love yourself". This is because this is mostly obvious, as we naturally nourish and cherish ourselves. So this doesn't need to exist as its own commandment, because it's already naturally obvious, and the commandment would not be particularly informative. While there are occasional exceptions where one is too harsh or neglectful of themselves, these can be handled with just a reminder to be good to yourself, and do not warrant a full commandment.
So, what does it mean for the "first commandment"? Unlike "love yourself", God thought that this one was actually worth mentioning. It is, in that sense, not obvious, and therefore actually informative. So it it is superior to the hypothetical "love yourself" commandment in that sense, because it has this extra quality. Therefore, the "first commandment" is the most basic and informative thing that humans need to know. It's what we most needed to hear, as we rose from among the animals to become spiritual beings.
This then directly ties in with all the other commandments.
to this that warrant an reminder for us to take care of ourselves, for the most part the fact that w
To understand how these commands interact, Actually, I think the second commandment - to love your neighbor as yourself - is illustrative here,
for our current society, for the ills that ails us today.
many of the issues that our society is facing today.
Not absolute. People have done other things. But you need a special command to overwrite. If you don't know what to do, then do this. Default.
exceptions: singleness, "eunuchs", etc. All fine.
Failure to follow it is to be met with grace, forgiveness, tolerance, allowance, and acceptance, but not with praise, amplification, celebration, or propagation.
the first commandment that God gave humanity. Not the most important, but the most basic one that was worth mentioning.
How it relates to other commandments.
Marriage
best marriage. Polygamy, homosexuality, etc. not as good. Further deviation is worse.
Love God, love people. But what does that mean?
the problems plaguing our society
PvE, not PvP,
Otherwise, you will wither and die in obscurity. Mechanistically.
Your final score in life
basic algebra/calculous: how to optimize
Make it funny
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