The Bible is a love story, the story of God revealing his love for man and of man’s response to that love, making the Bible a source of moral reflection.
This love story begins with God creating Adam and Eve and inviting them to freely join him in a covenant of holy love. Morality—being good or evil—is the response to that love, to accept to live in a union of hearts and wills with him or to reject him. Man can embrace God’s love and be happy, or he can reject that love, enslaving himself to isolating selfishness and pride that destroys his relationship with God and damages his relationship with others, as well as with nature—God’s gift to man.
This love story led to God’s Word taking on human flesh to free man from the slavery of selfishness, becoming a story of God’s mercy that restores man’s ability to love both God and others.
A Call to Love, Freedom, and Holiness
God loves us and wants us to love him in return. But God doesn’t force himself on anyone. We must choose to love in return, freely responding to his invitation by embracing his will. In creating us free, God put us into the hands of our own counsel (see Sirach 15:14). To love the creator and to do his will requires freedom, as the Second Vatican Council explains:
Only in freedom can man direct himself toward goodness… God willed that man “of his own accord” seek his creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him. Man’s dignity therefore requires him to act out of conscious and free choice, as moved and drawn in a personal way from within, and not by blind impulses in himself or by mere external constraint (Gaudium et Spes, 17).
We are “called to freedom” (Galatians 5:13) because only free persons can love, and only love can make us happy. The more we truly love the freer we become. Thus, Christian morality entails becoming saints by uniting our will to his in love (doing good) and by avoiding isolating selfishness (doing evil): “This is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from unchastity” (1Thessalonians 4:3). God’s will is that we be saints, sanctifying everything we do by doing it for love. As the Second Vatican Council puts it:
Christians sanctify themselves more and more in and through all their life’s conditions, duties, and circumstances if they receive all things with faith from the hand of the heavenly Father and cooperate with the divine will, thus showing the love with which God has loved the world in temporal service (Lumen Gentium, 41).
We listen to God’s Word in the Bible to discern his will, praying to carry it out: “thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is what drove Jesus: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, to accomplish his work” (John 4:34) and “I have come not to do my will but the will of the One who sent me” (John 6:38), even surrendering his human will to his Father’s in his agony in the garden: “Not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). Doing God’s will right where he has placed us is key to holiness.
Like a father, God gives us the Ten Commandments, teaching how to love and please him. God raises our sites even higher in the Beatitudes, teaching us to love as he loves us, going beyond the minimum to sacrifice ourselves for our Love (God) and for his children. All this is reflected in the two Commandments of love: to love God with all one’s heart, mind, strength, and soul, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (see Matthew 22:37-39).