THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT Mark 12:28-34; Matthew 22:34-39; Luke 10:25-28

Transcription

1 1 THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT Mark 12:28-34; Matthew 22:34-39; Luke 10:25-28 God is the reason for loving God. 1 --St. Bernard of Clairvaux The true measure of loving God is to love Him without measure. 2 --St. Bernard of Clairvaux I believe that the curse of modern Christianity is halfheartedness. While as Bible believing Christians we abhor such sins of the flesh as sexual immorality, drunkenness, stealing, lying, etc., yet we somehow do not see the sins of the spirit as being so serious. Have you ever heard of anyone confess the sin of half-heartedness? THE SUPREME COMMANDMENT The following incident tells us about the importance of wholeheartedness. Jesus had silenced the Sadducees who were trying to trap Him in asking about the resurrection. Matthew tells us that the crowds were astonished at His teaching (Mt 22:33). This evidently challenged the Pharisees who in turn appointed one of their own leaders, an expert in the law, to test to trap Jesus (Mt 22:34-35). Mark tells us the following story: One of the teachers of the law came and heard them [Jesus and the Sadducees] debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked Him [Jesus}, Of all the commandments, which is the most important? The most important one, answered Jesus, is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Well said, teacher the man replied. You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but Him. To love Him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, You are not far from the kingdom of God. And from then on no one dared ask Him any more questions (Mk 12:28-34).

2 2 This question of which commandment was the greatest was a frequent subject of debate among the scribes. The Jewish scholars had counted the commandments in the books of Moses and found their number to be 613, of which 365 were negative and 248 positive. Much time and thought was spent on evaluating the relative significance of these ordinances. The question that perplexed them was, Could all the commandments in the law be summed up in one, or could the more important ones be picked out? Jesus answered the question of which commandment is the greatest by quoting the Shema ( Hear! ) of Deuteronomy 6:4-5: which pious Jews recited at least twice every day. It states, Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. To this day this confession of faith begins every synagogue service. Notice here that Jesus adds, as does the lawyer in Luke 10:27, to what was stated in the Old Testament that God is to be loved with the mind as well as with the other human faculties (Mk 12:29). To emphasize the importance of this first and greatest commandment Moses declares, These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates (Dt 6:6-9). What does it mean to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength? It means we are to love God with everything we have and everything we are. Everything! HEART In Scripture the heart is a very inclusive word that means the center of man s inward life. It includes the emotions, the reason and the will. To love God with all our heart, therefore, means to love Him with our whole being. Solomon refers to the heart as the wellspring of life (Pr 4:23), that is, the whole inner person. SOUL The soul is usually used in the sense of the immaterial, invisible part of man. It includes our personality and most of the time, our spirit as well. It is believed that here the emphasis is on the emotional part of man since the other words used seem to cover the other parts of man s personality (Ps 35:9; Mt 26:38).

3 3 Paul opens up his heart to the Corinthian believers and challenges them to do the same: We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange I speak as to my children open wide your hearts also (2 Co 6:11-13). To love God with our soul, therefore, means to love Him freely and unreservedly with our emotions, our affections. Music is one of the best ways to express such love. MIND In Scripture the mind denotes the source of thinking, reflecting, perceiving, knowing, and understanding. To love God with all our mind means to love Him with all our intellectual ability, that is, to become a student who really takes an interest in God and His Word. It means to be teachable. We are to have an intellectual curiosity about God and His ways. There are some people who don t ask about God, don t talk about God, and maybe don t even think about God unless they really have to. Their interest in God seems merely like a chore. This is intellectual laziness. And by being intellectually lazy many follow God with a mindless, naïve devotion that easily leads to other gods. Our thought life is to be conformed to God s thoughts. Paul put it: For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Co 10:3-5). God deserves nothing less than minds that are disciplines to think His thoughts after Him! STRENGTH The word translated strength here means physical strength or might and ability. To love God with all our strength, therefore, means to love Him with all our physical resources and all our ability, that is, every endowment, any athletic or musical talent, any capacity. All that God has given us is to be dedicated to Him and used for His service. Our wills are to conform to His will and our energy is to be spent in promoting and building His kingdom. Only one life will soon be past, Only what s done for Christ will last.

4 4 Paul was able to testify: We proclaim Him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. To this end I labor, struggling with all His energy which so powerfully works in me. I want you to know how much I am struggling for you and for those at Laodicea, and for all who have not met me personally. My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (2 Co 1:28-2:3). We are to take our longing, and long for God; take our riches and give them to God; use our eyes to see the beauty that God has created and appreciate our Creator. With our heart and soul and mind and strength, with all our needs and struggles and joys and energy, we are to turn toward God. To love Him with our whole being is to be preoccupied with Him. We must let God be God. This means that when He doesn t make any sense, that we put our hand of faith in His hand of faithfulness and continue to trust Him. Jim Elliot was a missionary who was martyred by the Indians of Ecuador.His statement illustrates the wholehearted, passionate love we are to have for our Lord: God makes His ministers a flame of fire. Am I ignitable? God, deliver me from the dread asbestos of other things. Saturate me with the oil of thy Spirit that I may be a flame. Make me thy fuel, flame of God. (Emphasis added) THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT COMMANDMENT You only love God as much as the person you love the least. 3 Dorothy Day The love of our neighbor is the only way out of the dungeon of self. 4 George MacDonald Although Jesus had not been asked as to which was the next most important commandment, He saw the second as being so inseparable from the first commandment, that He expressed Himself further by quoting part of Leviticus 19:18 which states, Love your neighbor as yourself. The preceding portion of the verse as well as the previous verse (v. 17) and two verses toward the end of the chapter (vv ) are all related to this command. These verses state:

5 5 Do not hate your brother in your heart.... Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.... When an alien lives with you in your land, no not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord your God (Lev 19:17-18,33-34). This two-sided commandment, says Matthew, is the foundation of all of the law and the prophets (Mt 22:40). THE INSEPARABLE NATURE OF LOVE John writes about the inseparable nature of our love for God and His people. He says: Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love each other, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.... We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, I love God, yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: whoever loves God must also love his brother. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves His child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God; by loving God and carrying out His commands. This is love for God: to obey His commands (1 Jn 4:7-12,19-5:3). Love toward neighbor, who is made in God s image, flows forth from love toward God (Mt 5:43-48; 7:12; 19:19). If we love God we automatically love His people (1 Jn 4:21), and the test of our love for people is that we love God by carrying out His commands (5:2). The thermometer of our love for God then, is our love for fellow human beings. The neighbor, the person we have the least love for, is how much love we have for God. THE GOOD SAMARITAN The Parable of the Good Samaritan is used by Jesus to illustrate who our neighbor is and what it means to love that neighbor. In this story we see that love is color-blind, race-blind, and class-blind.

6 The Samaritan, though despised by the Jews because he was a half-jew, did not allow prejudice to stand in the way of helping someone in need. Here we have a despised Samaritan caring for a prejudiced Jew, normally his enemy. 6 Not only is love blind to color, race, and class, it is also blind to cost. The only thing that mattered was seeing the needy person completely taken care of (Lk 10:35). Martin Luther put it, Faith like light, should always be simple and unbending; while love, like warmth, should beam on every side and bend to every necessity of our brother. To love our neighbor as ourselves means to take as much interest in his wellbeing as our own. We are required to love him not vaguely or emotionally, but in very definite, practical and realistic ways. These two commandments, then, summarize all that God expects of His people. Mark records the fact that this Pharisee who was testing Jesus recognized the preeminence of these commandments. For he responds to Jesus answer by saying, You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but Him. To love Him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices (Mk 12:32-33). Mark says that Jesus saw that he had answered wisely and therefore said to him, You are not far from the kingdom of God (v. 34). THE PREEMINENCE OF LOVE This expert in the law evidently had already learned the preeminence of love over sacrifice. Probably the three clearest expressions of this is found in the books of 1 Samuel, Psalms and Hosea. Samuel states, Does the Lord delight in burnt offering and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams (1 Sa 15:22). Obedience, not sacrifice, is the true test of love. Passionate, wholehearted love is what God deserves! Compassionate love is what our fellow human beings deserve!

7 7 NOTES 1 St. Bernard of Clairvaux: On Loving God loving.html (2/25/2011), Page 1 of 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Famous Catholics Dorothy Day (3/15/2011), Page 2 of 3. 4 loweryjes: self-love vs. others-focus (3/15/2011), Page 1 of 5.