The basics -- what are they? A huge part of religious life is believing (or trying to believe) that we’re in God’s hands. We’re supposed to be learning how to trust Him. If we’re going to do that, we need to know what He wants. By this I don’t mean that we should know “some things that God would like.” I’m talking about what God puts first. What’s the prize He has His eye on? What does He want most of all?
If you’ve been involved with religion for any length of time, you could probably put together a long list of things that God wants. He wants us to go to heaven. He wants us to love our neighbor. He wants us to fight evil. He wants peace on earth. He wants us to be free to make our own choices… the list could go on. But even this short list reveals that there are some tensions between the various things that God wants. He wants peace, but He wants us to resist evil. He wants us to make our own choices, but He wants us to choose heaven. Only one of His goals can come first — and that ruling love will organize and subordinate everything else that He wants.
If we turn to the Scriptures, we’ll be hard-pressed to find an obvious definitive statement about the thing that the Lord wants most of all. In the Old and New Testaments, He usually doesn’t speak in terms of what He wants — rather He talks about what’s good for us. But there are some exceptions. For example, He says:
"I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" (Luke 12:49). (Note that fire symbolizes love.)
"These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full." (John 15:11)
"Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am… And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:24, 26)
The teachings of the New Christian Church deal explicitly with what the Lord wants — what He desires most of all. Here's a good example from "Divine Providence":
"Spiritual love is such that it wishes to give what it has to another, and to the extent this is possible it is in the enjoyment of its being, its peace, and its bliss. Spiritual love derives this characteristic from the Lord’s Divine love, which is infinitely of such character. It follows from this that Divine love… has as its goal a heaven consisting of people who have become or who are becoming angels, to whom it is possible for the Lord to impart all the blessings and happinesses connected with love and wisdom, and to impart these from Himself in them." (Divine Providence 27.2)
The teachings of the New Church also say, in many places, that the Lord is love itself. This means that He is “ruled” by pure love. Here are some teachings that make it easier to understand what this means:
"There are two things which make up the essence of God: love and wisdom. But there are three things which make up the essence of His love: to love others outside of Himself, to desire to be one with them, and to render them blessed from Himself." (True Christian Religion 43)
"[The Lord is] love itself, to which no other attributes are appropriate than those of pure love and so of pure mercy towards the whole human race, that mercy being such that it wills to save all people, to make them eternally happy, and to impart to them all that is its own…." (Arcana Coelestia 1735).
So what does the Lord want most of all? If you answered, “He wants us to go to heaven,” you’d be pretty near the mark. But the way I’d put it is that the thing the Lord wants most of all is to make us happy — as happy as we can possibly be. He wants to share His joy with us. This is almost the same thing as saying that He wants us to go to heaven — because heaven really just means “the place where we are with God, and blessed by God.”
Of course there are some important truths that qualify this idea. The Lord wants us to be as happy as we possibly can be — forever. He values our long-term happiness way more than our short-term happiness. Which means that, in the short term, He asks us to do a lot of things that aren’t necessarily fun. “It doesn’t make me happy” is a poor excuse for ignoring His teachings. He knows what real joy is. Do we?
The other qualification that really needs to be made is that God wants to make us happy, but His efforts to do this would fall to pieces if He forced us to be happy. If He were to force His will on us, there would be no “us” anymore. So instead, He makes us as happy as we’re willing to be. He gives us as much of His joy as we will accept.
As I said, these teachings are the basics of religion. This stuff gets talked about all the time, but that’s because it’s so important. We need to get the basics right. If we get them wrong — if the foundation is cracked — then the rest of our faith is liable to topple.
To begin with, we need to understand the love that reigns over heaven and earth.
