The Great Commandment ...

I want to start out this week by saying thank you to all those who helped with the funeral on Wednesday for Boris’ son.

Nearly 100 people came to pay their respects to Ivan San Andrés and the family that mourned him. A large percentage of those attending did not speak English, and we were blessed to have the pastor of Boris’ other church here to serve as a translator and to share the eulogy, since he had served as Ivan’s pastor.

I will tell you that it was pretty amazing to stand with him on that platform in the sanctuary and listen as he translated the message that I preached to this crowd.

But what was even more amazing is what happened right here in the fellowship hall. Watching a small group of people from Liberty Spring Christian Church share the love of Christ by serving others was inspiring to me.

And more than a couple of our guests came up to me and said how much it encouraged them to see our church being so generous.

I have said many times in recent months how wonderful it is to see this church becoming known for its generosity and love, and it makes me especially proud to be your pastor when I hear others acknowledge the same things that I have been seeing.

And so, as I considered these things this week and looked at my preaching plan for the coming weeks, I noticed that next Sunday is the day before Valentine’s Day, and it occurred to me that a couple of messages on love would be a good segue into our planned series on the church.

Now, as you can imagine, “love” is a pretty broad topic. It’s very easy to get lost in the reeds while trying to narrow it down for a two-message series.

I could spend literally months, for example, talking about the concept of love that Jesus introduces in His “new Commandment” in the Upper Room Discourse of John’s Gospel.

I could spend weeks working us through Paul’s “love chapter” in 1 Corinthians.

But Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record one compact little incident during the life of Jesus that actually lends itself very well to a two-week study, and His teaching in that little incident is all about love, so it fits perfectly.

We’re going to take a look at Matthew’s version of this incident, and you can find it in verse 34-40 of chapter 22. Please go ahead and turn there if you have your Bibles. Matthew 22:34.

Now, as background for this passage, you should know that this takes place during the last week of Jesus’ life. Earlier in the week, He had entered the city of Jerusalem on a donkey, and the people had lined the road into the city, shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.”

This was the traditional greeting and salutation for a newly crowned king in Israel, and so there were theological, prophetic, and political implications to what they shouted as Jesus rode into Jerusalem.

Later, Jesus had gone into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and those who were selling sacrificial doves to the poor.

And then, the next day, when He had gone back into the temple to teach, Jesus was approached by the chief priests and elders, who demanded to know by whose authority He was doing the things He had done.

He responded with a parable about an absent landowner who sent his son to collect the produce of his vineyard. When the son arrived, he was killed by the people the landowner had left in charge of the vineyard.

Now, the chief priests and the Pharisees were often pretty dumb when it came to understanding Jesus’ parables. But they did understand that they were the murderous keepers of the vineyard in this parable.

They didn’t really like being characterized that way, but they were afraid to confront Him directly, because Jesus was popular among the people.

So they began to plot to trap Him in something He said. First, they asked Him whether or not it was lawful to pay the Roman poll-tax.

When they couldn’t trip Him up with that loaded question, one of the Sadducees came and put forward the riddle about marriage in heaven. But that didn’t go the way they had hoped, either, because Jesus responded that they didn’t understand either the Scriptures or the power of God.

And so, the Pharisees thought they would take one more crack at tripping Jesus up, so they sent a lawyer to talk to Him.

Perhaps I should pause for a moment and let you think of your own lawyer joke to insert here. I’m simply going to ask whether anybody is surprised a lawyer was chosen for this task of trying to trip Jesus up.

Anyway, here’s where we pick up in verse 34.

Matthew 22:34–40 NASB95

But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing 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 foremost commandment. “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

So, today, we’re going to concentrate on verses 37 and 38, the great and foremost commandment. Next week, we’ll take a look at the second that is like it.

What is the great commandment in the Law? How would this lawyer and the Pharisees who sicced him on Jesus have expected Jesus to respond? Or, more to the point — how were they expecting to trap Jesus with this question?

I think what we can surmise about this question is that they didn’t really care how Jesus responded to the question.

In other words, if He had simply replied that the first commandment — You shall have no other gods before me — was the most important, they’d have said, “Aha! So the others aren’t important, then, huh, Jesus?!” And they’d have replied the same if He’d pointed to any of the other 10 commandments.

They weren’t looking for truth from Jesus or to gain real understanding from Him. Instead, they just wanted to trap Him and find some point of leverage they could use against Him in front of His many followers at this time.

In fact, if they were being honest — which they hardly ever were — the Pharisees would likely have agreed with Jesus that “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” was, indeed, the great and foremost commandment.

This commandment came from the Book of Deuteronomy, and it was considered so sacred that devout Jews, like the Pharisees, would recite it as a prayer twice a day, in the morning and in the evening.

You may have heard this prayer referred to as the Shema, which is a Hebrew word meaning “listen” or “hear.”

Turn to Deuteronomy, chapter 6, and we’ll take a look at the first part of this prayer, which includes texts from both Deuteronomy and the Book of Numbers.

We’ll pick up in verse 4.

Deuteronomy 6:4–5 NASB95

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Now, let me give you some context about these words of Moses to the people of Israel.

The Book of Deuteronomy is structured as a treaty between God and His people, Israel, before they move into the Promised Land.

It starts with a reminder of all that God has done for them. Then, it moves into a series of commandments from God, their King. And, finally, it outlines a series of blessings the people can expect for keeping His commandments and curses they can expect if they rebel against Him.

In chapter 5, we see that Moses repeats the 10 commandments that God had given 40 years earlier in His own handwriting on tablets of stone.

There are many other covenant stipulations and commandments listed in Deuteronomy and Numbers, but the 10 Commandments are the essence of all those other commandments. In other words, all the other requirements for them flow out of the 10 Commandments.

Likewise, the portion of the Shema that Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy, chapter 6, can be seen as the essence of the 10 Commandments themselves. In other words, keeping the 10 Commandments would be a natural result of loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

In fact, there’s a sense in which the Shema is simply a commentary or expansion on the first of the 10 Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”

Do you see that? If you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, you won’t have any other gods before Him. You won’t put anything else ahead of Him. Not wealth or power. Not fame or fortune. Not nation or family. Not even your own self.

So this commandment that Jesus quotes from the Shema is first in the sense that it restates the first of the 10 Commandments, and it is foremost in the sense that it distills all of the 10 Commandments to their very essence: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

But what does that mean, really? What does it mean to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind?

Well, the short answer is that it means to love God with everything that you are, to love Him with all your essence and expression.

In the Old Testament, the heart was the seat of intellect. The soul was the seat of the will. And strength or might, as it appears in verse 5, referred to one’s physical capabilities.

By Jesus’ time, Greek understandings had taken over, and the mind was now the seat of intellect, with the heart the seat of emotion. So Jesus was saying the same thing that Moses had said in Deuteronomy, but He was simply using updated language.

But the love that God was commanding here through Moses wasn’t primarily an emotional thing. Rather, it was an obligation that came from the recognition of who God is. That’s the point of verse 4.

There have been many different translations of the second part of that verse, but two of them tend to rise above the rest. The first is the one that appears in the NIV: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

This translation stresses that Israel’s God, Yahweh, is unique and that worshiping Him required them to exclude worship of other gods.

The second translation that rises above the others is “The Lord our God is one Lord.” This translation speaks to the fact that God is consistent in His purpose for His creation, and it also is the basis for the argument that God was revealing His trinitarian nature even in the Old Testament.

God is one in three persons. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are never at odds with each other.

God has existed eternally as one God in three Persons united in perfect fellowship, perfect love, and perfect harmony of purpose.

As Eugene Merrill puts it: “The Lord is indeed a unity, but beyond that he is the only God.” [Eugene H. Merrill, Deuteronomy, vol. 4, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 163.]

And because these things are true about God, we have an obligation to love Him with all our being.

Look at the first part of verse 4: “Hear, O Israel!” The word that’s translated as hear, shema, has the sense not just of “listen,” but “listen and obey.”

In other words, to hear God’s commandment without following it is really not to hear it at all.

So, we might paraphrase these two verses like this: Listen and obey, Israel! Yahweh, your God, is perfectly consistent in Himself and in His purposes, and He is the only God there is. Therefore, you should put Him before everything else in your lives.

And when you think about it, isn’t that what love does? When you really love someone, don’t you put their needs ahead of your own? Don’t you seek for their good, even if you to have to sacrifice something to do so?

Think of parents and their children. I saw a tweet the other day where a kid asked his father why they don’t have more money. The father didn’t say how he actually replied, but he wrote that he WANTED to say: You, kid; you’re the reason we don’t have more money.

Loving a child is all about sacrificing things in your life so they can have what they need to grow and flourish in their own lives.

The very heart of loving a spouse often comes down to something similar: choosing their happiness over your own selfishness.

This is the very essence of what it means to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind: Choosing to put God ahead of yourself, choosing to pursue His righteousness, instead of chasing after the fleshly things that might make us feel good in the moment.

Now, the people of Israel weren’t very good at doing this. The Old Testament is full of examples of how they pursued their own selfishness, how they followed false gods, and how they suffered God’s wrath for turning from Him.

But we’re not very good at it either. Jesus said, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” And chief among those commandments was this: “Love one another, as I have loved you.”

But when it comes down to sacrificing the things that we want in order to benefit someone else — maybe even to benefit the people who hate us and treat us badly — all too often, we fall back into selfishness.

And that’s not love.

But Jesus did what we could not do.

He loves God with His whole heart. In other words, He was completely submitted to God. He loves God with His whole soul, having been ready to give His very life when it was God’s will that He do so. He loves God with His whole mind, giving up His claim to worldly power and even to the comforts of this world. [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Mt 22:37, quoting Kingsbury.]

And, because He did what we could not do, Jesus went to the cross as the spotless Lamb of God, the sinless one who had no need to atone for His own sins and could therefore become the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

The innocent one died for the guilty ones. He did what we could not do, and He took the punishment that we deserve so that we who were dead in our trespasses could have eternal life through faith in Him.

And all of this is the direct result of God’s grace.

Now, grace isn’t a term that often appears in the Old Testament. But it is wrapped up in the word chesed, which is one of the Hebrew words for love and the one that appears most frequently there.

Chesed is hard to translate. The King James Version and the NASB normally translate it as lovingkindness. The ESV normally translates it as steadfast love. Other versions sometimes translate it as mercy. But perhaps the best translation is loyal love.

In something like two-thirds of its appearances, it describes the loyal love that God has for His people. And the grace part of it comes into play because God continues to demonstrate this loyal love for them, even when they do not show Him loyal love in return.

“God’s ‘loyal love’ alone forms the basis of the relationship,” because His loyal love is rooted in His character. [Benjamin I. Simpson, “Love,” ed. John D. Barry et al., The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).]

This is part of what the Apostle John was getting at when he wrote, “We love, because He first loved us.”

This is why the Apostle Paul could write:

Romans 5:8 NASB95

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

When God replaced the tablets of the law that Moses had broken after he saw the people of Israel worshiping an idol, God came down in a cloud and stood before him, and He described Himself to Moses as a God of chesed and grace.

Exodus 34:6–7 NASB95

Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”

He is compassionate and gracious. He is slow to anger. He abounds in loyal love and truth, and His loyal love extends to multitudes. He forgives sin, but His perfect love includes perfect justice.

This is the God whom we are obliged to love with all our heart, soul, and mind. This is the God we are called to put before everything else in our lives, including ourselves.

And when we understand the character of God, we are forced to answer this question: How could we not love Him with every part of our being? Why would we ever think it’s OK to hold back in our love for Him when He held nothing back from us, not even His own Son?

This week, I want to challenge you to consider your love for God. Is there some part of your life that you haven’t surrendered to Him? Is there something you continue to hold onto, something that’s too precious to you to give Him?

Have you submitted your will to Him to make you into the person He wants you to be — to do the work He has set aside for you to do? Have you placed your welfare and your very life in His hands? Are you willing to set aside your own comfort for His will and His plan?

This week, I want you to think about what is holding you back from loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. The blessings you will experience in that kind of relationship with Him are beyond what you can imagine.