"If ye love me, keep my commandments." This might be rendered thus: "If you would obey me, follow my example and my teachings." This was clearly the Great Teacher's meaning. He asked not personal worship or adoration. On the contrary, he sternly rebuked it. When, in a moment of apparent enthusiasm, "one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?" Jesus peremptorily replied: "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God."
There is but One Good, One God, hence there is but one Way to eternal life. Jesus pointed that way in his answer to his interrogator. He said: "But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." His questioner, like many Truth seekers nowadays, evidently thought he might find through, the Master's superior wisdom, some short route to eternal life,—a royal road to Heaven. But as he was doomed to disappointment, so are his modern prototypes. Not one good act, but the continual living in goodness, would insure him eternal life, for he must "keep [all] the commandments."
Not yet awakened to this necessity, his questioner again asked, "Which?" Jesus replied by citing in substance the Mosaic Decalogue: "Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honor thy father and mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The young man replied that all these things he had done from his youth up; and doubtless he thought he had. He no doubt had lived his best conception of these commandments, but he had not lived them truly, for he must "go and sell all that he possessed," and "have treasure in Heaven, and come and follow me." He must forsake the delusive things of the material senses and live in the spiritual, or Truth of Being.
