(All scripture references are NASB and all references to “Law” are Torah (Mosaic law) unless otherwise noted. I usually capitalize “law”, only because I am using it as a proper noun, not as a special status.)
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” - Romans 5:8
“In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” - 1 John 4:10 (emphasis mine)
The Greatest Commands in the Law
When the Pharisees came to Christ in Matthew 22:34-40, they asked this question: “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” Notice the context of “Law” here. We all know His answer - love God in a pure way and your neighbor as yourself.
This sounds great, however, many have tried and everyone has failed miserably.
In Mark's recollection of the event, the person asking the question affirms Christ's answer, and Christ indicates he is “near the kingdom”. But being 'near' is not enough.
Take a moment and ponder why Christ would have said that? What about this religious ruler's statement would have him 'near' the kingdom, but still would not get him in?
Consider that most of the Pharisees and other Jewish religious elite apparently did not even recognize those as the greatest commands.
They were all about keeping the whole Torah and going even beyond it with their “rules for the rules”. They called their extra rules “fences”, because they were so dedicated to keeping Torah that they wanted to stay one step away from breaking it.
Perhaps, they did not consider any commands 'greater' than the rest, as they had found 'loopholes' and other ways to 'keep' them all.
They certainly often majored on the minor, as they tithed their mint and cumin, yet Christ said they neglected 'weightier matters' of the Law.
Certainly they rarely, if ever, actually asked Christ a question because they wanted answers. Normally, they were trying to trick Him - this was most likely the same situation.
Admitting 'Love' is the Greatest Command is a Start
For this man to admit that the two “love” commands were the greatest meant his mindset was headed towards a “kingdom of God” place. Christ is essentially saying this is a good start, but the man was not quite there yet.
So, what was missing? And if these two greatest commands are not enough to get you into the kingdom of God, then why do they continue to be preached to this very day as if they could (or perhaps keep you in, or be the way to please God.)
Remember, the Law is not of faith, and only faith can please God. (Galatians 3:12 and Hebrews 11:6)
You see, from my analysis of some of the questions coming from these religious folks in Christ's day, it seems they recognized even their stringent Law keeping would not get them into the kingdom, and this secretly freaked them out.
Yer, they still would not come to Christ. Their stubborn self-dependance prevented them.
What Kind of Love gets you into the Kingdom of God?
I agree with Christ that to enter the Kingdom we must love God perfectly. I mean, who is going to argue with Jesus Christ? Well, besides the Pharisees and other religious folks.
Actually, as Christ puts it in Matthew 5:48, you need more: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (ESV)
So, not only should you love perfectly, you must literally be perfect in everything you think, do, or say. Christ was not being hyperbolic. When faced with this standard, what is one to do?
Well, logically, the only answer is to give up trying to do it, and throw yourself on the mercy of the standard bearer. But that was not a concept for most of these religious folks.
You see, while the religious ruler's admission of the love commands as the greatest was a start, his problem was he still thought he could keep them. He did not understand that he had already failed. Admitting your failure is the next step towards the kingdom of God.
And, if you are already in the Kingdom, then maintaining that attitude of dependence is the currency of living in the Kingdom well.
So, How do We Love Perfectly?
The big question then is how do we obtain this kind of love?
One thing to dismiss immediately is whether a partially pure love will work, it won't. We need love that is consistently pure from start to finish. Only a God-like love works for God.
We must love as the Trinity loves.
And another thing to dismiss is that we can fail at this purity of loving God and still get into the Kingdom. Once you fail, then your love is tainted by failure. It is no longer pure. You cannot undo the failure at loving.
So, now we are in a pickle. We have a choice ahead of us. How do we resolve this quandary?
We have already failed at loving in this way, we have broken the greatest commands of God's Law over and over, and continue to do so. So, what can we do?
We Must Receive Love as a Gift
That is why we must receive God's love as a gift. We need Romans 5:5: “and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” As believers, this has happened.
Notice the word 'given'. We were given the Holy Spirit as a gift, we did not earn Him. Thus we have His love as a gift.
Because we are actively and permanently indwelled by the Holy Spirit, intimately joined to Him, we have all of Him and His attributes as a gift of our salvation, including love.
Christ made this clear even before Paul the Apostle and John in his epistle did.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” - John 13:34 (NKJV)
Notice carefully the word “new”. Christ did not use this flippantly (there is certainly nothing about Christ that one could ever consider flippant anyway.)
How and why is this new? The Law already had very similar commands, why did they need to be replaced with a 'new' one?
Progressive Revelation of Scripture
I'm not going to get into scripture on this topic (Hebrews 1 is the best start), but basically anyone who studies scripture must understand that, while God's nature does not change, His revelation of that nature to humanity is progressive.
This is not only revealed from scripture itself, it is also purely logical.
This means if we have a concept of God (theology) from the Old Testament, and then some additional revelation in the New Testament changes that concept, then the later revelation is closer to the truth than the previous (for us, not for God).
Why God chose to do it this way, and why he used humans to communicate in various and 'sundry' ways, I do not know. My best guess is the “weakness of the flesh” as Paul often says when discussing a concept in a 'human' way.
Since the incarnation was required to link God and humanity, perhaps a human link was required to communicate in general. I don't really know, other than this is the way it is.
Since our entire Christian life is about learning God's truth and applying it to our mindset, this concept is important.
Specifically, if we hold a mindset about God, and Jesus Christ doesn't match that concept, then we must reconsider. Jesus Christ is the perfect revelation of God's nature as He is God in the flesh (John 1; Hebrews 1).
Same for other concepts from earlier in scripture revelation that end up changing later. There is no conflict in scripture, only updated revelation as God determines the time is right for humanity.
And all of this is predicated by the fact God has mercy and grace in abundance for us if we are wrong, or don't have the complete picture. So, there should be no stress about being wrong!
In my next article, I will discuss the “love” chapter (1 Cor. 13) which confirms that we absolutely do not have the full picture. Since scripture is clear that we do not, why do we stress so much about being wrong?
Being wrong and learning is called growth.
Even the Gospels are not Full Revelation
The same holds true for the 'gospels'. If we see a concept in the gospels (or even in Acts for that matter), and this concept is clarified in the epistles, then we should go with the clarification, not the original concept.
The 'new covenant' could not be enacted until Jesus died. So, there was no indwelling Holy Spirit, etc., until the covenant between God the Father and Christ had been enacted. (See Hebrews 6:13-20)
Christ was Born Under the Law
“But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law…” Galatians 4:4-5a (emphasis mine)
Thus, Christ acted and spoke as “one under the Law”. While, of course, He spoke prophetically about the gospel and how to get into the Kingdom of God, it had not been enacted yet, so not everything He spoke was literally the “gospel”.
This is an often neglected concept. Christ often taught the 'true' standard of the Law in order to fight the exact struggle the ruler had above where he thought he could keep the Law. Only Christ could be perfect.
The “red letter” words of Christ must be “rightly divided” along with all of scripture. Are we interpreting them in context and for their intended audience?
Are Believers Forgiven only as well as they Forgive?
Speaking of forgiveness, please forgive my sidetrack, but I feel it is important, both in it's own right, and for my topic.
An example is Matthew 6:14-15. In this passage, Christ is making a clear statement. The question is whether this revelation is altered later and thus has a different purpose in it’s original iteration.
“For if you forgive other people for their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive other people, then your Father will not forgive your offenses.”
We must ask, is this the gospel? Do we only get forgiven as well as we forgive? Yet, this is clearly what Christ is saying. Contrast that with the following verses:
Colossians 3:13 - “bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you.” Ephesians 4:32 says the same thing.
Notice that our motivation to forgive is because we have already been forgiven by the Lord. This is totally different from what Christ said. Our ability to forgive is based in our forgiveness from God; our forgiveness from God is not based in our ability to forgive.
Colossians 1:4,14; Ephesians 1:7; many verses in Acts, and the entire theme of Hebrews is that Christ died once for all of our sins for all time. This is gospel 101. Yet, this is not at all the message Christ revealed.
We cannot water down Christ's words.
I am convinced that Christ was preaching to an audience of unbelieving Jews under the context of “keeping Torah to get into the kingdom”. Thus, His statement makes perfect sense with that audience, and in that context.
I am using this as an example, and I don't have the space to articulate, but if you want to understand more about why the discrepancy, I recommend the following sermon series: The Killer Message
What is the Love Clarification?
My whole point is to show that Christ's statement about the “new command” is clarified even further later in the epistles. So, Christ Himself replaced the greatest commands in the Law with a “new command”, and then later, John clarifies this.
I wanted to emphasize this in this series on love because it is truly the foundational understanding of the purpose of God's love and how it impacts our daily lives.
This is also known as the “Law of Christ” (one of the many “laws” in scripture). But if we are not careful, we will turn this law into something that is not really “new”.
(If you want a decent discussion of different 'laws' in scripture, I recommend What is the Law In the Bible?)
One of the confusing aspects concerns the word ‘as’. As it can mean several things, picking the incorrect meaning here can confuse the issue.
Much of the teaching I have heard on this goes something along these lines, “You better love everyone like Christ loves them, or else…” But once we get clarification from the epistles, this line of reasoning no longer fits.
1 John 4:19 makes this pretty clear - “We love, because He first loved us.” (emphasis mine)
Thus, we see that when Christ says “as I have loved you”, He means “because”.
The point is not that we try to mimic Christ’s way of loving in some copy cat fashion, because that would be doomed to failure, and push us into flesh power to try and love in a certain way. This would not be 'new', this would be no different from the commands of the Law.
Though Christ was “tempted in all ways like we are”, and thus His experience on earth was genuine, every relationship we have is different, and often requires unique ways of loving. Thus, we have a living Christ within to guide us, we are not purely trying to imitate His historical actions like a robot.
The point is that we love as an outflow of our dependence on Christ’s love. Because He first loved us, and deposited His love within us (by depositing Himself within us), now we have the gift of God's love as an integral part of our identity.
Thus, we don't have to try super hard to be loving. Our natural way of being is loving. It is when we try really hard that we begin to walk by the flesh and use flesh power to love. And that will never be the genuine love of God, it will be a substitute.
But we humans love to over complicate things and make them harder than necessary.
When we realize that our natural way is love, (only because of Christ within, not due to anything of ourselves), then we will begin to see the temptations of the flesh and the enemy more clearly.
The way of flesh will never sit well with a true believer. It is not ‘natural’ any longer. Anyone who tries to sell that a believer wants to sin simply doesn't understand the gospel.
The enemy wants to convince us that we want what he is selling in our mind and from the world. Only an understanding of how Christ has changed our very being will help us see through these lies of the enemy and resist them.
We are “partakers in the divine nature” and “love Christ with an incorruptible love” (2 Peter 1:4 and Ephesians 6:24) because our hearts are filled with His love through the Holy Spirit. (Romans 5:5)
We can either walk by sight, only viewing our identity through our stumbles, or we can walk by faith, believing these truths about our identity that God has spoken.
As we believe by faith that God has given us Christ, and thus the love of God, at our core, then those things that do not match begin to become obvious. They will not sit well within us at all. And if we give into them, we will be most miserable.
True Obedience flows from Trust
We can trust Christ within, that is my entire goal of all my writing. Learn how to trust Christ within. Learn what this looks like for you. There is no script. But our Creator and Lord is powerful within you. Trusting Him will never fail you.
I think this quote from Wayne Jacobson is appropriate. I have not read the book (perhaps I should), but I agree with this quote:
“One can obey God and yet not trust Him, and in doing so miss out on a relationship with Him. One cannot, however, trust God and be disobedient to Him.” (Wayne Jacobson, He Loves Me: Learning to Live in the Father's Affection, Windblown Media: Newbury Park, CA, 2007, p.88)
Think about this. We often hear the message that we need to “obey God”. Yet, true obedience flows from trust in Him, not simply keeping His rules. Paul calls this the 'obedience of faith', which I hope to write about at some point.
This applies to love in the same way. We cannot will ourselves into loving God's way, we must trust and depend on Christ's love within us to flow out. Willing ourselves to love out of obligation or duty blocks this natural outflow and replaces it with flesh powered 'love'.
We have the love of Christ in our hearts because He is there. Can we learn to trust that? If we want to truly obey the “law of Christ”, then we must.
I hope this encourages you to stop trying to love and start trusting the love Christ out within you. We will not do this perfectly, but as you begin to have this mindset, it will be obvious when this happens.
When you find yourself thinking and acting in a self-sacrificing way within a human relationship, and this is something that you only realize after it happens, it is a mind blowing experience.
As Andrew Farley puts it, this is not following rules, it is letting Christ rule.
But welcome to the power of the Holy Spirit, and the indwelling of Christ and His love within you. It beats every other way to live.
Another Perspective on this Same Topic
I highly recommend the following article which also discusses the “law of Christ”. Perhaps if my write up is not clear in some way, then this will clarify:
Have a great week as you set your mind on the love of Christ that is filling your heart!