NOTES for Deu 10:12

Commentators, reasoning about the fear of God and love for God, often set them against each other. But the Torah, as we can see, joins them so that one is impossible without the other. True, the fear spoken of in the Book of Deuteronomy has nothing in common with the fear of punishment that a child sometimes feels before strict parents or an adult before the state whose laws he has violated. Otherwise it would be hard to explain how such fear could make the one who fears walk in God's way, since the matter is not formal observance of certain norms and rules, but loving God with all one's heart and all one's being, or "soul."

Here it is rather fitting to speak of the fear of God as sacred trembling, which God's presence always evokes in a spiritually sensitive person, the trembling of a finite created being before the infinite Creator. And this trembling, of course, is not accidental: the gulf that separates us from God is completely insurmountable, neither by the laws of the untransformed world nor by the laws of the Kingdom. There is not and cannot be in the world any nature, transformed or untransformed, that would allow this gulf to be crossed. It is crossable only for God's love. It is precisely God's love that becomes the first cause and spiritual foundation of all revelations, all theophanies, and the incarnation of God itself. But a person can share in this love, enter into it, only if he is ready to turn to God "with all his heart" and "with all his soul."

Indeed, it is the heart, which in biblical language denotes the spiritual center of the human person, that spiritual "I" without which man as the image of God does not exist, that determines who and what a person will be before God and before people. The choice is made in the heart; decisions are accepted by the heart. And what is called spiritual life depends on the choice made and the decisions accepted: relations with God, with Christ, with one's neighbor.

But the matter is not limited to the heart alone, to the spiritual "I" alone. The choice made and the decisions accepted in connection with it, for example the choice to follow the Torah and observe the commandments given by God, will inevitably entail the restructuring of a person's whole inner world, the system of his values and priorities, and then also his way of thinking and behavioral patterns that determine all of life. In fact, it is otherwise impossible to follow the way of God, since the matter is love, and one cannot love partly. One can love only to the end. With all one's heart and all one's being. So that the gulf separating us from God may become crossable.

The whole essence of the Torah comes down to one thing: to love God with all one's heart and with all one's soul, to walk through life by the way He has opened to the human person, and to fear Him. This is, of course, not the fear of punishment or eternal torment that often arises in the minds of Bible readers when they see these lines. In this case it would be better to speak of the holy awe familiar to everyone who has experienced God's nearness, the awe that arises when the finite meets the Infinite face to face. A person's right relationship with God begins with this holy awe, a relationship that in the end can become deep, strong, stable, and conscious.

A person's understanding of his place before God becomes the foundation of the whole subsequent spiritual path. And this path begins with the heart. In the Bible, the heart is usually the deep spiritual "I" of a person, the thing that makes self-awareness and free will possible, and therefore also a person's self-determination before God and other people.

It is there, in the heart, in the depth of a person's spiritual "I," that conversion to God takes place; otherwise it remains only an intellectual choice or an emotional experience, which cannot fully and truly define human life. This deep conversion, in turn, changes the whole inner life, what the Bible usually calls the soul. One cannot love God with the heart and not love Him with the soul, because then a person's whole life would be split in two, and he would become two different people in one body.

Here the commandments begin to play a special role: understood as an inner spiritual and moral imperative, as intentions addressed by God to the human person, the commandments become a kind of spiritual skeleton that gives his life shape and forms its firm, unchanging core, which can build up all of life, both inner and outer. As for the laws ("statutes"), they are important as the experience of practical obedience to the commandments in concrete life circumstances, without which life with God is impossible. After all, one must know how to live with Him not only in a forest cell or a mountain cave, but also in a big city, or in a small village, among people with whom one will have to deal and build relationships. Such is the way of the Torah as the Book of Deuteronomy sees it.

It turns out that God demands nothing beyond our strength. Only reverence and love, only openness and honesty, only faithfulness and gratitude. Perhaps in practice this does not seem so simple? Yet Christ also says that His yoke is easy and His burden light. What, then, is the problem? Why does all this seem such an overwhelming task to us? How are we to love and open ourselves to God? Where is the threshold beyond which the burden of love becomes light?

The Gospel's answer is simple—simpler still than these demands: learn meekness and humility of heart from Jesus. It is so difficult... and so easy.