Even amid rules and regulations in Deuteronomy and all the admonitions warning the Jewish nation that the people must obey “His commandments, His judgments, and His statutes,” they were first and foremost to love God with all their heart and soul and might. Of course, they had good reasons to do just that.

 Read Deuteronomy 4:37; Deuteronomy 7:7, 8, 13; Deuteronomy 10:15; Deuteronomy 23:5; and Deuteronomy 33:3. What do these verses teach about God’s love for His people?

 Over and over in Deuteronomy, Moses told the people about God´s love for their fathers and for them. But more than just words, the Lord revealed this love by His actions. That is, even despite their shortcomings, their failures, their sins, God´s love for them remained steadfast — a love that was powerfully manifested in His dealing with them.

 “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NKJV). How does this text help us understand why we should love God?

 God´s love for us predated our existence, in that the plan of salvation was in place way before “the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).

 As Ellen G. White said it: “The plan for our redemption was not an afterthought, a plan formulated after the fall of Adam. It was a revelation of ´the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal.´ Rom. 16:25, R.V. It was an unfolding of the principles that from eternal ages have been the foundation of God´s throne.” — The Desire of Ages, p. 22.

 How fortunate we all are that God is, indeed, a God of love, a love so great that He went to the cross for us, a self-sacrificing love in which “He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8, NKJV). Thus, we today have a revelation of God´s love for us that the children of Israel probably couldn´t even have imagined.