“The Great and First Commandment”

Well, let us pray:

God our Father, how we bless you that you are love, that you are the God of covenant-keeping love, that “from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”[1] There’s never been a moment in all of time when you’ve been anything other than you are. And we want this evening, as we have done on each of these sessions, today and yesterday, to turn our gaze towards your Word so that our minds might be instructed, that our hearts might be stirred, our wills might be directed, and in all that our lives might be changed—that we might be increasingly conformed to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. We know that one day when we see him, we will be like him.[2] But that day is yet in the future. And so we pray that as a result of all that we do in these days and all that we consider now from your Word, that you will continue to bear with us, to work in us and through us as we seek to live to the praise of your glory. And we ask it humbly in Christ’s name. Amen.

Well, I invite you to turn to Matthew and to chapter 22 and follow along as I read. I think it’s helpful for me to read not just the Great Commandment as we have it in verses 34 and following but to set the context in these questions that are being posed to Jesus and then, finally, in the question that is posed by Jesus.

So, from verse 15, after the account of the parable of the wedding feast, we read:

“Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, ‘Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?’ But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.’ And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said, ‘Caesar’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.

“The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, ‘Teacher, Moses said, “If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.” Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her.’

“But Jesus answered them, ‘You[’re] wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He[’s] not God of the dead, but of the living.’ And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

“But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’

“Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, ‘What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David.’ He said to them, ‘How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet’”? If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?’ And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

He turns the table on them masterfully, doesn’t he? It’s quite wonderful. Without being unkind in any way, he leaves them in absolutely no doubt about what’s going on.

Well, I hope that what he had to say to them there—“You’re wrong, because you don’t know the Scriptures or the power of God”—could not be applied to us. As we come to the study this evening, it’s the end of a long day. And we have been enjoying the ministry of the Word, and we’ve eaten a number of meals, as it were. And now here we have another one, of all things, at this point.

And I was reminded as I looked over my notes just this evening of the Puritan preacher who, in his morning study, had gone to such lengths that at one point he said, “Now, twenty-sixthly…” And his wife said to him when he got home, “You know, that really was more than most people could stomach.” And so when he came back in the evening, he said, “I do recognize that it went on quite a bit. I had so many points. And so, for your encouragement this evening, my sermon will be pointless.” And as I looked at my notes, I said, “I think I’m in danger of agreeing with that perspective.” You know, when Columbus set out for America, he didn’t know where he was going. When he got there, he didn’t know where he was. And when he got back, he didn’t know where he’d been. And some of us are very good at preaching sermons right along those lines. You’re not supposed to say you’re afraid of that this evening, but I am partly afraid of that.

There will be three parts to it, all right? Part one, in which I want to make some general observations about the place of the law in the life of the Christian; secondly, when we consider what it means to love God; and thirdly, to consider what it means to love our neighbor as ourself.

The Law in the Life of the Christian

I do think that before we look at the Great Commandment, it is very, very important that we are clear about the place of the law in the life of the Christian. If you survey contemporary evangelicalism, which is not difficult to do, you discover that many of the elements that are represented in our contemporary culture, in our church environments, are marked by a number of things which I want to suggest to you are directly related to a misunderstanding or a misapplication or a misappropriation of the place of the law of God in the life of the Christian.

For example: an absence of a true and realistic understanding of the seriousness of sin, a superficial kind of preaching that appeals to men and women’s felt needs, a general listlessness and lawlessness in the lives of professing Christians, an absence of the fear of God in public worship and in private living, a wholesale capitulation to the culture on the matter of the Lord’s Day, churches relying on strategies borrowed from business and from psychology, and a growing confidence in ourselves and an accompanying loss of confidence in God and in his Word.

I hope you don’t feel that that is in any sense a harsh judgment or that I sit in judgment. I recognize that these things point back towards us. It’s nothing new. Martin Luther in his day encouraged all who fear God, especially those who intended to become ministers of the gospel, to learn from the apostle Paul, he said, the proper use of the law, for,

I fear that after our time the right handling of the Law will become a lost art. Even now, although we continually explain the separate functions of the Law and the Gospel, we have those among us who do not understand how the Law should be used. What will it be like when we are dead and gone?[3]

That’s Luther. That’s not some disgruntled old minister in the twenty-first century.

So, without expanding that really at all, let’s just lay down certain things as being foundational. We need to understand and embrace the all-demanding nature of God’s law—a law which was given in the context of redeeming grace. The Ten Commandments were laws for God’s redeemed people. He did not take them out of Egypt because they kept the Ten Commandments; they were to keep the Ten Commandments because he took them out. The moral law has an abiding place in the Christian’s life, for it is the law of God which informs us of what God requires, and the Spirit empowers us to fulfill what God requires.

To talk in this way is not immediately amenable to contemporary thinking. Let me just quote my favorite, John Murray, for a moment, writing again in his collected writings. The kind of thing that I have just said—Murray says, “The statement of such a position is exceedingly distasteful to many phases of modern thought both within and without the evangelical family.” And remember, he’s writing a good time ago. “It is [agreed] that the conception of an externally revealed and imposed code of duty, norm of right feeling, thought and conduct, is entirely out of accord with the liberty and spontaneity of the Christian life.” You hear this all the time.

We are told that conformity to the will of God must come from within, and … therefore any stipulation or prescription from without in the form of well-defined precepts is wholly alien to the spirit of the gospel. It is inconsistent, they say, with the spirit or principle of love: “Don’t speak of law, nor of moral precepts, nor of a code of morals. Speak of the law of love.”[4]

Now, just contextualize that for a moment. Think about where you are in the church—people that you’ve met with, you’ve been counseling with, listening to, perhaps your children, perhaps a neighbor or a friend. And it’s not uncommon for them to say, “Well, you know, we just go with whatever our heart teaches us, however our heart teaches us. And we’re able to know if we’re on the right tracks, because then our heart will affirm this for us.”

So, what would control your heart? What would give guidance to your emotions? What would determine your activities? And very quickly, if you engage in conversation, somebody will immediately go to Romans 6:14, and immediately out it comes: “We’re not under law; we’re under grace.”[5] First of all, you have to read the whole of Romans 6 and Romans 7. Frankly, read the whole book of Romans. That’ll help us well. But the answer to that is very straightforward. What is Paul saying there? He’s not setting aside the moral law. He’s making clear to the readers that the Christian is not under law as a way of justification, that the Christian is not under law as it relates to Mosaic legislation, and the Christian is not under law as if law were the dynamic of our sanctification. That’s what he’s saying.

“Oh, well,” says somebody. “Okay, I’ll give you that. But what about John chapter 13, where Jesus seems to be setting aside the law?” Remember: “I have just got a new commandment for you that I give to you, that you love one another,”[6] and so on. And they say, “See? That’s the kind of thing we like. That’s what we can deal with.”

Do we think for a moment that Jesus is setting aside the moral law so that his followers can live free of its demands? No! No, the newness that he’s referring to is the newness found in loving one another in a way that is only possible now in the discovery of how Jesus loved his disciples: “I want you to love other people the way that I have loved you.” Well then, how will I know what it means to love other people?

And so, far from setting aside the law, the Lord Jesus in his ministry underscores its abiding relevance and its application. “Do not think,” he says—Matthew 5—“that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”[7] “So then, we can safely reject the notion that the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament have been reduced to just two in the New.” Again, that’s what people say: “Well, there used to be Ten Commandments. We used to have that kind of thing. We used to write them up on the wall, you know, in the old day. But now that we’ve moved beyond that…”

Explain to me why there is such lawlessness in contemporary evangelicalism. Explain to me why it is that we have done such a horrible job in dealing with the matter of sexuality as expressed in a form of perversion. And I’ll tell you what the answer is: because we’ve done such a horrible job of dealing with the matter of sexuality in the teenage population of our congregations. And the existence of premarital sex is directly related to the absence of the strident, clear parameters of God’s law. It’s there!

And here we find ourselves. All the Law and the Prophets, he says, hang on these two commandments. In other words, Jesus is providing a summary of the summary. The summary is in the Ten Commandments, and the summary of the summary is in the Great Commandment, which we’ve just read here in Matthew chapter 22—the first table of the law expounding love for God and the second table of the law expounding the nature of what it means to love our neighbors.

Far from setting aside the law, the Lord Jesus in his ministry underscores its abiding relevance and its application.

Now, the wonderful, liberating aspect of this is that as the followers of Jesus, we’re not left to try and figure out on our own what love will look like. You see, law is guidance in loving. Now, I may be influenced by other factors—I’m not sure—and I certainly don’t want to be judgmental in my observations, but it seems to me that contemporary church life is awash in sermons that appeal to the listener’s sense of well-being: “Whatever else happens, make sure that they are feeling comfortable and that they can leave comfortable and that there will be nothing that will make them distinctly uncomfortable at all.” And as a result of that, much of the cut and thrust of the law as it points ultimately to the gospel is lost. Congregations are quite prepared to be coaxed, but they are not prepared to be issued with calls to duty. (So glad to be able to say “duty”! In America, they call it “dudy.” When they broke away from us, they should have just said, “And we don’t speak English either.” It would have been far truer. I say it with great respect.)

David Wells in one of his books observes that we’re looking for “a God that we can use rather than … a God that we must obey; … a God who will fulfill our needs rather than a God before whom we must surrender our rights to ourselves.”[8] Packer, when he writes along these lines, he says this “is the root cause of our … moral flabbiness.” “The root cause of our … moral flabbiness” is “we have neglected God’s law.”[9] Seems to make sense, doesn’t it?

Newton, writing—that’s John Newton—writing to a correspondent, suggested that “a misunderstanding of the law of God lies at the root of most mistakes in the Christian life.”[10] “A misunderstanding of the law of God lies at the root of most mistakes in the Christian life.” In fact, when I read that by Newton, I think, “Maybe Packer copied that from Newton.” I can’t imagine Packer copying anything from anybody, can you, at all?

Now, “the law sends us to the Gospel that we [might] be justified,” said Bolton, “and the Gospel sends us to the law again to inquire what is our duty [in being] justified.”[11] The law sends us to the gospel in order that we might be justified, and the gospel returns us to the law so that we might discover what our duty is as living as those who are justified—so that the tram lines, if you like, are established there in God’s moral law, and the engine of our lives runs on those tram lines, and the Holy Spirit empowers us in order that we might run along those tracks, not that we might run all over the place and redefine marriage and redefine our view of this and redefine whatever we want to do. Not for a moment! No, God loves us far too much to allow us to do that.

That would be like a god who, as a terrible parent, said, “Well, you just go out and do anything you want. It doesn’t matter. Just go on the basis of how you feel about everything, and we’ll talk about all that later on.” No parent is going to do that with a genuine love for their child, for their son or for their daughter. No: “These things are to be upon your hearts. You shall bind them around your wrist and strap them on your forehead, and you will teach them to your children when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you get up.”[12] Why? In order to restrict and spoil their lives? No! In order to say, “God made you for this very purpose; God has written this into your DNA”—so that even those who make no pretense of a knowledge of God themselves have the moral law of God in part impregnated in their very being. That doesn’t mean that they then go to love God. No, that often… It doesn’t end in piety. It more often than not ends in idolatry. But the reason that all of that happens is because men and women are made in the image of God.

Now, I should move on to part two, I think you perhaps agree. But let me give you Dale Ralph Davis, if I have him with me, because I think Davis was probably… And you’re not supposed to say things like this, but it never stopped me before. We know Ralph, don’t we? But this sounds a lot like what I just read from John Murray. I mean, it’s got a Dale Ralph Davis twinge to it, but it’s good. But it’s very good. That’s why I’m reading it. I’ve had this in my book for a very long time. Davis:

I know some Christians have allergic reactions when [they are] told they are subject to [God]’s moral law in Exodus 20. This, they fear, is legalism and an effort at salvation by works. But that fear misunderstands the function of the ten commandments. The law … comes in the context of grace …. Yahweh lays down the pattern in … Exodus: he delivers his people …, then he demands …; he works his redemption before he sets down his requirements. He first sets Israel free and then tells them how that freedom is to be enjoyed and maintained. Glad obedience to [God]’s moral law is simply our “logical” act of worship.[13]

What It Means to Love God

So, you say, “Well, that was a very long introduction to our text.” I acknowledge that. It’s more than an introduction. It is the first point—and only two to go.

Back in Matthew: “But when the Pharisees heard that he’d silenced the Sadducees”—which must have made them very happy—“they gathered together.” And then one of their bright boys, he decided he would ask him “a question to test him.” And, of course, that gives rise to the answer that Jesus provides: “First of all, you will love God.” “You will love God.”

Now, he says that to a group of people who were very, very particular about obeying rules. They were pharisaical in that. They had, we’re told, some 613 of them; 248 were reckoned to be positive and 365 negative. So they weren’t content just with Ten Commandments. They wanted to take it up a couple of notches, up to 613.

The problem, of course, as becomes perfectly clear when you look at the surrounding context into Matthew 23, 23:28—“You also are outwardly appearing to be righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”[14] So Jesus is putting his finger on that: that they were masterful at an external show, but an external show was all that was there. Because without love for God, the appearance of religion was an empty form. Without a genuine, heart-renewing love for God, the appearance of religion was vacuous.

Now, let me just say a word to those of us who are dreadfully concerned, and rightfully so, for our children and our grandchildren. Without causing undue harm to anybody, it is my observation in some forty-five years in pastoral ministry that parents have the capacity to turn their children into pharisees; they do not have the capacity to see them regenerated by the power of the Spirit of God. It is not sufficient for them simply to have become conforming to the standard of practice in whatever congregation in which we find ourselves. Only God opens blind eyes. Only God softens hard hearts. That is not an argument about doing anything less than what we’re doing, but it is to acknowledge the fact that what Jesus said to them is true of us. It’s true of parents. It’s true of elders in churches, who are very, very good on the externals. And Jesus says, “Well, your problem is actually on the inside, because loving God starts with inward cleansing.”

He’s also been making that clear. Again, you have to go into chapter 23 in order to get this. “First,” he says to them, “clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside [may also] be clean.”[15] So loving God starts, Jesus says, with a cleansing that only God can perform, with a cleansing that is on the inside. We all know what it is to be able to put on a show, to say the things that need to be said, or to not say them. But God searches our hearts, and he knows us, and he knows whether there’s a genuine reality in this or whether it’s just a passing show. They had rules. They had rituals. They looked the part, and they liked the fact that they looked the part. But what they loved was something more than their love for God. We might say that they had actually made an idol of their religion. We might say that they had made an idol of their Reformed soteriology. We might say that they had just made an idol of that which, in the providence of God, is an indication of divine blessing.

If you think about this—and I know you do think—when Jesus says to his followers in such dramatic terminology, he means what he was saying. We don’t do this at the moment. I don’t think anybody’s got the courage, really, to give much of a talk on this: “[The] great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he can[’t] be my disciple.”[16] Really? I’m devoted to my wife. We’ve been married for forty-seven years. But I’m not to love her more than I love Jesus. I love my children. I want the best for them. So do you. But I’m not to love them more than I love Jesus.

And “the higher the position something occupies on the scale of divine blessing, the more subtle [is] the temptation to worship it.”[17] To worship it. Some brother was mentioning it would be good to reconvene an evening service here and there. It’s virtually gone. It has to do with a number of things. It has to do with football. It has to do with children’s sports. It has to do with the pastor’s ego. It has to do with a whole ton of things. We recognize that. But it has to do, ultimately, with forms of idolatry that stand and stare at us and convict us—those of us who want to be able to explain that the Great Commission is to go into the whole world, and the Great Commandment is that we’re to love God with all our hearts and all our soul and so on.

C. T. Studd—C. T. Studd, remember, great cricketer for England and wealthy man—gave away a fortune before he went off to fulfill the Great Commission. He kept back about a hundred thousand dollars—a hundred thousand pounds at the time, which would be a vast sum of money at the moment—but he kept it back for his wife. His wife found out that he kept it back, and she was annoyed with him. And she gave the hundred thousand to Booth of the Salvation Army, saying to her husband, “Oh, you think God can look after you, but when you’re gone, he can’t look after me? You can give it away, but I need it? Give it away!” She was giving him his own medicine, because he had said to her, you know, “In your Bible study, in your devotion, in your private prayers, I want you to include this little poem. In the morning as you have your quiet time, this is what I want you to say: ‘Dear Lord Jesus, you are to me dearer than Charlie ever could be.’”[18] I’m dealing with a friend back in the States in the loss of his wife—such a crumbling, such a decay, such a sadness, most of it understandable, but part of it beginning to ring a bell here. Maybe he should have been saying that little prayer for himself. “You shall have no other gods before me.”[19] Why? “That’s what I want.” That’s the negative. The positive is in Deuteronomy 6: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul,”[20] and so on.

It is the work of the Holy Spirit that sheds God’s love abroad in our hearts, so that faith in Christ is the true spring of the love of God.

You see, the point in it all is, of course, that God had promised a new covenant. He had promised his people that he was going to put a law within them, and he would write it on their hearts—in other words, that he would fashion their hearts, if you like, as a perfect mechanism for receiving and obeying and loving God’s law and God’s Word. The basis upon which he was going to do this was on account of his divine dealing with sin. Jeremiah, who speaks of this in Jeremiah 31: “I will put my law within them, … I will write it on their hearts.” How is that going to happen? “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”[21] In other words, the basis upon which all of that divine blessing falls is on account of his divine dealing with sin.

Motyer, in his own little witticisms, reflecting on that, says how the Lord proposes to do the work of forgiveness Jeremiah doesn’t say. Maybe he felt that Isaiah had already said all that was needed to be said on the point: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”[22] And in Jesus the blood sacrifices, with all their blessedness for forgiveness and for atonement, were made and were consummated and were ended. Hence we’re able to say, “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins”[23]—so that the fountain from which our love to God flows is the love of God to us.

So unless we have been embraced by the love of God, then there’s no real idea possible of love flowing from us. Unless it flows to us in the gospel, it will not flow from us in our lives. It doesn’t. “This is love, not that we … loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”[24] “We love because he first loved us.”[25]

Listen to how Sinclair puts it: “The law-maker became the law-keeper, but then took our place and condemnation as though he were the law-breaker.” In him requirements have been met, “fulfilled in him, its prescriptions fully obeyed, its penalties finally paid. All that remains is for this to be imputed to us in justification and imparted in us in sanctification through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.”[26] It is the work of the Holy Spirit that sheds God’s love abroad in our hearts, so that faith in Christ is the true spring of the love of God. Faith in Christ is the true spring of the love of God—that we fall in love with Jesus, that he comes and pursues us.

I’ve found a friend, O such a friend!
He loved me ere I knew him;
He drew me with the cords of love.[27]

It always surprises me when people say, “Oh, you know, this idea that God loved us before we would ever love him—I don’t like the sound of that.”

I always say the same thing to them: “Imagine… Are you married?”

They say, “Yes, I am.”

“What if you told your wife that before ever you met her, you had seen her in the quadrangle, or you’d seen her in the common room, and you set your love upon her, and you began to love her without even knowing her? Do you think your wife would be annoyed with you?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I think she would be pleased.”

I said, “Exactly.”

What are you worried about? That God loves you with an everlasting love? That he chose you before the foundation of the world?[28] That

Unnumbered comforts to your soul
His tender care bestowed
Before your infant heart conceived
From whom those comforts flowed.

When in the slippery paths of youth
With heedless steps I ran,
Your hand unseen conveyed me safe,
And brought me up to man.[29]

What kind of love is this, seeing nothing in us and yet loving us? Don’t get me started quoting hymns; I’ll be here all night. But

The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell. …

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean[s] dry,
Nor could the [sky] contain the [scroll],
Though stretched from sky to sky.[30]

This is what we’re talking about here. Unless it is ours by grace, through faith, it is a call to put on a mask for your own Christian form of Halloween and pretend it. You may not be regenerated. You may not be converted. You may be here because you’re interested in theology. You may be here for a million reasons. But I say to you, young or old: God’s love is a pursuing love. God loves saving people. And when that saving love of God takes hold, then he says, “This is what the Great Commandment is: to love him with all your heart.” With all your heart. The heart is the central control system of our lives, isn’t it? It’s not just an emotional thing. It involves our minds, our will, our emotions. From the heart “flow the springs of life.”[31] “Out of the abundance of the heart [the] mouth speaks.”[32] Remember those dreadful Valentine cards? “My love is like a cabbage divided into two; the leaves I’ll give to others, but the heart I’ll give to you.” Oh, come on! Please, don’t send that to me. That’s terrible stuff! “No, I want all of you,” he says. “All of you.” No hidden departments, no secret closets.

Love him with all your heart, with all your soul—synonymous with the spirit, isn’t it? The seat of our emotional-spiritual exercises is our souls. In the garden of Gethsemane, Christ’s soul was “very sorrowful.”[33] The psalmist says, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?”[34]

All my heart, all my soul, all my mind. You see, cognition or recognition, by God’s enabling, then is the ground of our emotion. “’Tis what I know of thee, my Lord and God, that fills my [heart] with [praise], my lips with song.”[35] “’Tis what I know of thee. I don’t know how I’m feeling, but it’s what I know. In fact, I’m not feeling good. I’m disappointed. I’m concerned and stressed. My family’s in disarray. I’ve got problems beyond expectation. I’m a mess! Tis what I know of thee. I want to love you with all my mind. I want my mind to be brought under your jurisdiction.”

The love of God is not a mere feeling. I think it’s wrong, actually, to consider these things almost in separation. What is being said by Jesus is this: The totality of our love is in response to the prior love of God—not a mere feeling but a love which decides, a love which acts, a love which does.

What It Means to Love Our Neighbor

Well, that takes us to part three, and we need to say something here about this second aspect of it, as it were. The whole man is the object of God’s divine love, and therefore, it is the whole man that is claimed by God himself. This character here, this lawyer—probably one of their brightest—was put forward to ask him the question, I would guess. And it wasn’t because he needed an answer. It was because he was testing Jesus. And Jesus answers with great clarity: “This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s the conflation of Leviticus 19[36] and Deuteronomy chapter 6. You can look it up later on.

And let’s just say again, so we don’t miss out on this: Love does not replace the commands. Love provides the motivation. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Well,” you say, “how am I going to love my neighbor?” You can’t be long in pastoral ministry before somebody comes and tells you, “You know, I’ve got a dreadful problem. My wife or my husband is a pain in the neck.”

“Oh,” I said, “how big of a pain?”

You say, “Well, a pretty big pain.”

I say, “Well, tell me. How would you say your marriage is?”

“Oh, it’s not so good.”

“Do you think it’s worse than you expected?”

“Oh, yeah. I think it’s definitely worse.”

I say, “Well, that’s good. I’m glad you mentioned that, because you signed up for worse. You signed up for worse. You said, ‘For better or for worse.’ Now you’re here to tell me that it’s worse? That’s okay. You signed up for worse. We can work with this.”

“Oh, no, but that’s not it. Because I met a lady at the office, and she’s not at all like my wife. No, she’s very amenable. My wife tends to be a little snarky at times, and this lady is just much nicer. She never says any of these things to me at all. And when we have coffee, as we’ve begun to do…” And before you know where you are, you’re right down the Royal Road. And the person’s going to play his ace card, which is, of course, “God wants me to be satisfied. God wants me to be healthy, and he wants me to be happy, and he wants me to live in love. And since I can’t live in love within the present context, I’m sure that he would be much happier if I lived over here with Mrs. X.” Absolute rubbish, all lies of the devil, spat out in secular culture and reinforced by lousy preaching. And before you know it, you’ve got a great disaster on your hand, and so does that family. No, love does not replace the commands. It provides the motivation.

So, if we want to know how to love our neighbor, we don’t have to make it up. No! Do you want to know how to love your mom and dad? Do what they tell you. Ha! “Oh, no. It can’t be that straightforward, is it?” Yes, it is, actually. Honor them.[37] Honor them. When they’re crusty, when they’re old, honor them. Do you want to know how to love the people up the street? Don’t kill ’em![38] You see… Okay, we can leave that alone. You want to love your next-door neighbor? Don’t go in his house and steal his tools out of his garage. “You shall not steal.”[39] You want to know how to love your neighbor? Don’t tell lies about him at the local golf club.[40] “Oh,” you say, “this is pretty straightforward.” Do you want to know how to love the guy next door? Don’t covet his car. Don’t covet his wife. Don’t covet.[41] See, covetousness is really hard, isn’t it? ’Cause nobody can see it except God. So I could appear to be really loving people, ’cause I didn’t kill ’em. I haven’t run away with the lady next door. But I may have a dreadfully covetous heart. “Whoever loves God must … love his brother [also].”[42]

Well, I think we should get close to wrapping this up, don’t you? I’m beginning to feel that way myself. Some of you are moving into the second and third stages of anesthesia. I can see you just as I’m speaking. Maybe we just say this as we move to… You can put your tray tables up and bring your seat into an upright and locked position, ’cause we’re now going to land. We’re moving in the landing direction.

When this is recorded for us in one of the other Gospels—maybe Luke (I can’t remember; might be Mark, but you can find that for yourself as homework)—Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan, remember? A man, seeking to justify himself, said, “Well then, who’s my neighbor?”[43] Jesus has told them: “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And the man, seeking to justify himself, said, “Who’s my neighbor?”

Now, what he was trying to do there was draw a circle round his area of influence and responsibility. As soon as he could just find the people that he had to be nice to, then he’d be nice to those people and didn’t need to be nice to anybody else at all. That’s when Jesus tells the story. He tells a story that sticks it to the scribes and the Pharisees. Because the religious leaders had status. The religious leaders legitimized themselves by their work on the temple. The religious leaders were regarded as models of exemplary piety. And their actions would be regarded as self-evidently righteous, no matter what they did.

So Jesus says, “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his raiment and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance a priest came down the road.” (Don’t you love that? “By chance…” That’s for your homework as well. I’ll leave that with you. “By chance a priest came down that road.” Contingency is under God’s sovereign plan.) “By chance a priest came down that road, and he had a look at him, and he buzzed by on the other side.” Because if he stopped, then he’s going to get all messed up, especially if he touches him. And then that’ll spoil him, and he will be out of commission for ten days or two weeks. “Likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place, he had to look at him as well, but he said, ‘Nah, I’m not going to touch that.’ But a Samaritan…” Oh, their ears must have gone up then! “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion on him. And he came to him, and he bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and he set him on his own donkey and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And on the morrow, when he departed…” This is King James Version, really, isn’t it? “And on the morrow, when he departed, he gave to the innkeeper a supply of money, and he says, ‘Look after this chap. And if what I’m leaving you now is insufficient to cover it all, then I’ll deal with it when I come back.’” And Jesus turns, and he says, “Now, which of these guys was the neighbor?” The guy couldn’t even get the word Samaritan out of his mouth; he says, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus says, “Well then, I want you to go and do likewise.”[44]

The law is free, in Christ, to become to us a means of grace, a minister of life to those who have set their feet in its paths.

You see, the action of the Samaritan is not the way to life. The action of the Samaritan is to be the way of life of those who love God with all their heart and their soul and their mind. Because we remind ourselves—we have to remind ourselves. I found myself, because I knew I had to speak about this tonight—I was in a situation today where somebody was dealing with a cash register. It seemed to me that she’d never seen a cash register before in her life. I mean, she punched so much stuff I hadn’t a clue whether I would ever get out of the place at all. But there she was going. And my instinctive reaction was “Oh, why can’t you figure the thing out? I mean, this…”

And then the Lord says, “No, no, no. That lady was made in God’s image. She was made in God’s image.”

“You mean I’ve got to love her like my neighbor?”

“Yeah, you’ve got to repent of the fact of your initial reaction.”

Where would we be tonight but for the grace of God? Some of us might be out there with one of those newspapers, trying to sell it for three pounds. There’s no saying where we would be. So Jesus is laying this down for his followers, so that if you think about it, in our churches, if you think about going out with the Great Commission, we go out with the great news that God reconciles sinners to himself, and we go out with an overflowing great love for God, which reveals itself in the love for our neighbors.

The real question is: Am I a neighbor in the way that God wants me to be? I have to confess that when I read that story of the Good Samaritan, I think I see myself much quicker in the priest or in the Levite, reminding me that I am consistently in need of God’s pardon, that I am a lawbreaker—that were it not for the fact that Christ has paid it all, fulfilled it all, done it all, and comes by the Holy Spirit to empower our lives so that we might love God in this way, that we might love our neighbor in this way, that we might pursue these things. Jesus fulfilled the command perfectly. Jesus silenced the law’s condemnation. And therefore, the law is free, in Christ, to become to us a means of grace, a minister of life to those who have set their feet in its paths.

Alec Motyer again has a wonderful little bit I can’t remember—it’s in Look to the Rock—where he says, “You see, in Jesus, what happens is that the prohibitory ‘You shall not…’ becomes the promissory ‘You shall not…’”[45] “You shall not.” “You shall not.” Why?

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.[46]

And when Jesus gets a response to it… It was in Luke, I think. The parable’s in Luke. In Mark’s Gospel, when the response comes back from the Pharisee, he gets the question right. And Jesus says to him, remember, “You[’re] not far from the kingdom.”[47] “You[’re] not far from the kingdom.” In other words, he was convinced, but he wasn’t converted.

You may be here tonight, and that’s just you: “I do believe these things about God’s law, and I do believe that I should be that, and I might be the next thing. But the gap between what I know and what I am is so vast.” You’re not far from the kingdom. And the invitation of the King is the invitation to come and rest in him and trust in him so that out of his immense love our love for God may flow—and our love for our neighbors also.

Let us pray:

O Lord God Almighty, we bless you for the gift of this day, for the lessons that you have been teaching us from your Word and from one another as we have sought to exhort and encourage one another. We pray, Lord, that your Word might find a resting place in our hearts; that you will banish from our recollection anything that is just unclear and unhelpful; and that beyond the voice of a mere man, that we might hear the voice of Jesus—that we might be able to say,

I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“Come unto me and rest;
Lay down, O weary one, lay down
[Your] head upon my breast.”

That we might be able to say,

I came to Jesus as I was,
[And] weary and worn and sad,
[And] I found in him a resting place,
And he has made me glad.[48]

Grant as we go out from here, gracious God, that the joy of the Lord may be our strength,[49] that you will watch over and between us,[50] that you will guard and guide and keep us, as you’ve promised to. And we do pray that as we think about the work of this particular church in the vastness of this city, that you will bless and prosper those who serve you here so that in the fulfilling of this Great Commission they might be living in the light of this great command to the glory of your name.

And may grace and mercy and peace from the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit rest upon us and remain with us, now and forevermore. Amen.

---

[1] Psalm 90:2 (ESV).

[2] See 1 John 3:2.

[3] Martin Luther, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1535), trans. Theodore Graebner.

[4] “The Sanctity of the Moral Law,” in Collected Writings of John Murray, vol. 1,The Claims of Truth(Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976), 198.

[5] Romans 6:14 (paraphrased).

[6] John 13:34 (paraphrased).

[7] Matthew 5:17 (ESV).

[8] David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 114.

[9] J. I. Packer, “Our Lord’s Understanding of the Law of God,” in The Word of the Lord: Campbell Morgan Bible Lectures (Basingstoke, England: Marshall Pickering, 1988), 111.

[10] Sinclair Ferguson, “The First and Most Broken Commandment,”Desiring God, April 13, 2021, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-first-and-most-broken-commandment.

[11] Samuel Bolton, The True Bounds of Christian Freedom (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994), 71.

[12] Deuteronomy 6:6–8 (paraphrased).

[13] Dale Ralph Davis, 1 Kings: The Wisdom and the Folly (Fearn, Great Britain: Christian Focus, 2002), 83n5.

[14] Matthew 23:28 (paraphrased).

[15] Matthew 23:26 (ESV).

[16] Luke 14:25–26 (ESV).

[17] Ferguson, “First and Most Broken.”

[18] C. T. Studd, quoted in Norman P. Grubb,C. T. Studd: Athlete and Pioneer(Harrisburg: Evangelical Press, 1933), 91. Paraphrased.

[19] Exodus 20:3 (ESV).

[20] Deuteronomy 6:5 (paraphrased).

[21] Jeremiah 31:33–34 (ESV).

[22] Isaiah 53:4 (ESV).

[23] William Cowper, “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” (1772).

[24] 1 John 4:10 (ESV).

[25] 1 John 4:19 (ESV).

[26] Sinclair B. Ferguson,Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification(Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2016), 179.

[27] James Grindlay Small, “I’ve Found a Friend” (1863).

[28] See Ephesians 1:4.

[29] Joseph Addison, “When All Thy Mercies, O My God” (1712). Lyrics lightly altered.

[30] Frederick Martin Lehman, “The Love of God” (1917).

[31] Proverbs 4:23 (ESV).

[32] Luke 6:45 (ESV).

[33] Matthew 26:38 (ESV).

[34] Psalm 42:5 (ESV).

[35] Horatius Bonar, “Not What I Am, O Lord, but What Thou Art” (1861).

[36] See Leviticus 19:18.

[37] See Exodus 20:12.

[38] See Exodus 20:13.

[39] Exodus 20:15 (ESV).

[40] See Exodus 20:16.

[41] See Exodus 20:17.

[42] 1 John 4:21 (ESV).

[43] See Luke 10:29 (paraphrased).

[44] Luke 10:30–37 (paraphrased).

[45] Alec Motyer, Look to the Rock: An Old Testament Background to Our Understanding of Christ (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 135. Paraphrased.

[46] Romans 8:3–4 (ESV).

[47] Mark 12:34 (ESV).

[48] Horatius Bonar, “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say” (1846).

[49] See Nehemiah 8:10.

[50] See Genesis 31:49.