Mark

Mark, #42

June 15, 2008

THE TWO GREATEST COMMANDMENTS

Mark 12:28-34

Mark 12:28-34 NIV

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

[29] "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. [30] Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' [31] The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

[32] "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. [33] 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."

[34] 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.

If somebody asked you to explain Christianity to them while they were standing on one foot, do you think you could do it?[1] When I was in the Air Force, and thinking about how to explain my faith to my fellow officers and airmen, I developed a very nice presentation that started with Genesis and went through to Christ’s resurrection and what we need to do about that. I practiced it a couple of times, just to make sure I had it down, and it only took an hour! Needless to say, I very seldom (never!) had the opportunity to share all of that with anybody. It’s a good thing to be able to explain our faith in detail, but it’s also good to be able to state the heart of the matter very concisely. If you were asked to explain your faith in two sentences, what would you say?

Well, having just heard Jesus answer that same question, I hope you would say what He did: the two greatest commandments are to love God and love our neighbor. As Brian Day said this past week in staff meeting, “It’s not complicated!” It really isn’t. We sometimes try to make it complicated, and it is certainly easier to say than to do, but the heart of our faith is just this: love God; love your neighbor.

I. What’s Most Important?

The context of this passage is this: When we think of Old Testament commandments, we probably think of the Ten Commandments that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai. But by Jesus’ day, the Jews, especially the teachers of the law, had scoured the whole Old Testament and found 613 specific commands.[2] Mark 12:28-34, “One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, ‘Of all [613] commandments, which is the most important?"

There were two schools of thought among the rabbis of that day—one group believed that some of the laws of the Old Testament were more important than others, and that they could all be ranked according to their importance. The other group thought that all the laws were equally important, since they all came from God, and they resisted ranking them in any way.[3]

We have a similar kind of difference among Christians today. Some want to say that everything in Scripture is of equal weight, because it is all God’s Word. For example, one denomination I know takes the Westminster Confession, and says that everything in it is equally important, and you have to believe every statement. Others, like our denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, say that some doctrines are more important than others, and we have collected them in a document called The Essentials. If you want to be a pastor, or an elder, or even a member of an EPC church, you have to agree to the Essentials without mental reservations. But other doctrines we can possibly agree to disagree on, because we believe they are somewhat less important. The motto of our denomination expresses this nicely: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” This came out of the Reformation, and I think it is a really good way to think about doctrine. For example, some churches insist on holding a pre-tribulation, pre-millenial view of the end times; it doesn’t seem to me that Scripture is all that clear on the exact order of things at the end, so I am uncomfortable with making that an essential. I talked one time with a pastor who was new to town, and was showing him our statement of Essentials, which has eight points. Later, he sent me their statement of faith, and it had 27 points, all of which they believed were essential. In fact, he told me, his own mother did not qualify for membership in his church because she didn’t believe all 27 points!

So that’s the kind of difference that was going on in Jesus’ day, and the man who asks this question obviously believes that some commandments are more important than others. Which, one, he says, is the most important? Can you identify one of the 613 specific commands that is more important than all the rest?

Without any hesitation, Jesus says, Yes! Yes, I can.

II. Love the Lord Your God Mark 12:29-30; Deuteronomy 6:4,5

Mark 12:29-30, "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. [30] Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'” This is a quote from Deuteronomy 6:4,5, which was something devout Jews of the day recited at the beginning of every worship service in the synagogues. It’s called the Shema, because shema is the word for “hear”, the first word in this passage. This passage from Deuteronomy, plus a few others (Deut 6:4-9, 11; 11:13-21; Num 15:37-41) were also written on slips of parchment and carried in little leather boxes called phylacteries, which were worn on the forehead and wrists of devout Jews when they prayed. And these verses were also contained in little boxes called mezuzahs, which were placed on doorposts of the Jews’ houses. So this commandment that Jesus cites was very familiar to every Jew. It formed the foundation of their faith.

A. The Lord is one cf. Genesis 11:1; Ezekiel 37:22

This declaration was a profound statement of monotheism, and this is what distinguished Israel from every other nation they had ever heard of. All the other nations around them were polytheistic, worshiping multitudes of gods, typically associated in some way with some aspect of the creation. But the Jews were different: they worshiped just one God.

But this word “one” is interesting. The Hebrew word is echad. It can mean one thing that is composed of several other things. For example, Genesis 11:1, describing human society before the tower of Babel, literally says, “Now the whole earth was one lip and one (set of) words” (NASB). Well, obviously, there wasn’t just one lip, or one word. These phrases are meant to describe a situation where everybody spoke the same language, but clearly, there were many people doing that and they used many words. Ezekiel 37:22 is another example of this use of the word echad. It’s a promise that God will one day unite the two kingdoms of Jews, and He says, “I will make them one nation in the land, …they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms.” One nation is composed of many different individuals.

So when God says that He is “one”, it fits perfectly with the doctrine of the Trinity: One God, existing in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Jews didn’t know that at the time the law was given, certainly, but Jesus taught a lot more about it. He told us to baptize people in the (one) Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is just one God, but He is a unity composed of a plurality. I don’t pretend to understand this, but I know that if you study the whole Bible, asking what it teaches about the nature of God, you will come up with the doctrine of the Trinity.

There is just one God, and we are to love Him with everything in us.

B. With all your heart, soul, mind, and strength

1. Emotions

The Bible does not give a neat and tidy analysis of the different parts of human nature, but it does use different words to express the totality of who we are. The heart and soul were seen as the seat of our emotions and will. We are to love God with our emotions. So let me ask you: how fully are your emotions engaged in your love of God? Some of you obviously feel something when we are worshiping, because I can see it on your faces, in your body language. But some of us seem to be more like the ones somebody described as “frozen chosen” Presbyterians. Folks, God loves us with a passionate, fierce, jealous love, and we ought to respond to that with our whole being, including our emotions. In our church, no particular expressions of emotion are either required or forbidden. You don’t have to show anything, but you may show anything you want in your love for God. I would encourage you to experiment with some new ways to express your emotional love for your Savior. The psalms mention things like raising our hands, falling on our face before God, standing in honor of Him, singing, kneeling, dancing, and so on—and that’s obviously not a complete list. But all those things and more are perfectly acceptable to God and to us.

2. Will

And then there is our will, our decision-making faculty. Do we put that at the service of our Lord? In other words, do we consistently make decisions that honor Him? Even when they go against the grain of our culture, or our own selfish desires? I think this particularly applies to the use of our time and money. We all have limited amounts of time and money, and how we use those resources is a reflection of our values, of what’s important to us. Have you made decisions about your time, your daily and weekly schedule, that indicate that you love God more than anything? When do you spend time with Him? How much time do you spend with Him? Do you ever get away with Him for extended periods? How important is it to you to be in church on Sunday? I know some Christians who think once or twice a month is plenty—that says something about how important the Lord is to them.

And what about the use of your money? There are endless ways to spend it, and always a limited supply. What kind of decisions have you made about your money that show God how much you love Him? These decisions, these acts of the heart and soul, will sometimes cramp our style. They may interfere with something else that we would really like to do or to have. But they are concrete ways that we show God we love Him.

3 Intellect

“Love the Lord your God with all your mind.” We are not to be intellectually lazy, but we are to use the minds God has given us to search out the Scriptures, to think carefully about how God relates to every area of life. We all have different intellectual abilities, but we all need to push ourselves to learn what He has said to us, to understand God better, to memorize His Word, etc. Christians in our culture are often viewed as having had frontal lobotomies, because we believe things that cannot be proven scientifically. That means that we have to work all the harder to show that we are not stupid, that we have good minds and we know how to use them. Chris Perciante is encouraging us to not only think about what we want to communicate to our friends and neighbors, but how we say it as well. Loving God with our minds means finding new, creative ways to share His love and truth with others.

4. The physical dimension 1 Cor 6:19,20

And then, “love the Lord with all your strength.” This reminds us that Paul said our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit, and that we should seek to glorify God in our bodies (1 Cor 6:19,20). That means that we take care of them, don’t eat things that are not good for us—or too much of anything—that we exercise properly, and get good rest—all because the God of the universe lives in our physical bodies. To love God with all our strength also suggests that whatever we do, we should do it as to the Lord, often with great effort, because He is worthy of that.

We saw last week that love is measured by our actions. You can say you love me, but if you don’t act like it, it’s just so much hot air. The same is true with our relationship with God. If you were arrested for being a lover of God, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Are you loving God with your emotions, your will, your mind, and your body? We were made for Him; we exist for Him, not for ourselves. Let’s love Him with everything in us.

And then Jesus went on to give this man a second commandment as well.

III. Love Your Neighbor Mark 12:31

A. As yourself

Mark 12:31, “The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

First, we have to look at this little phrase, “as yourself” because it has often been misunderstood. Years ago, a famous preacher whose church services are on television wrote a book, which he touted as the second reformation (!), claiming that Jesus here taught us to love ourselves. It was a whole treatise on the need for a good self-image.

Well, I’m all for having a good self-image, but Jesus did not command us to love ourselves. His point was that as sinful beings, we naturally look out for Number One. We always and naturally do what we believe is best for ourselves. We care for ourselves, protect ourselves, feed and clothe ourselves, make sure we have housing, and do whatever else is in our own best interest. And in a sense, that’s the definition of love: doing what is best for the one you love. So, He says, turn that same concern that you have for your self around, and direct it toward the best interests of your neighbor.

Another way to say that is that we need to love others the way they need to be loved.

1. The way they need to be loved The Five Love Languages

Don't just do for them what we might like. It does not say, "Love your neighbor as you would like to be loved," but “love your neighbor the way you love yourself.” The way you love yourself is by doing what is best for you. For example, a man may logically conclude that since flowers wilt and die so quickly, it would really be more loving to get his wife a nice painting of flowers for the wall instead. Or he may think that because his wife is on a diet, therefore she will certainly not want chocolates for Valentines Day. All these things may be very much in line with his own thinking and needs, but completely miss hers.

The principle is, love others the way you love yourself. How is that? We intuitively know what it is we need and want, and do whatever it takes to get it. We are to do just that for others: to figure out what they need and want, and to do that for them. This requires getting into their life, seeing the world from their perspective, looking out at things from within their skin, as it were.

Gary Chapman wrote a profound book called The Five Love Languages, in which he says that each of us has a preferred “language” by which we express love. There may be others, but the five languages that he identifies are words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, gifts, and acts of service. So let’s say your love language is words of affirmation, but your neighbor’s love language is acts of service. You can applaud and affirm and compliment that person all day, and they won’t know you are trying to show them you love them. You may as well be speaking Greek, because you’re not speaking their language. You always love yourself using a language you can understand, and when we love our neighbors, we have to use a language they can understand.

So now we understand what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves. The next question is, Who is my neighbor?

B. Who is my neighbor? Luke 10:25-37; 1 John 3:16-18; 1 John 4:21

Many times, we in this church, and indeed, most Christians, define our neighbors the same way the Jews of Jesus’ day did—as our fellow believers. Over time, our social lives tend to shrink to a relatively small circle of friends, all of whom are followers of Christ. In Luke 10, somebody asked Jesus this very question—“Who is my neighbor?”, and in reply, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. You know the story—a Jewish man was walking on the road to Jericho. On the way, he was robbed by thieves, beaten and left for dead. A priest came by, but crossed over to the other side of the road and passed by the man. A Levite did the same thing. But then a Samaritan came along, and you remember that the Jews hated the Samaritans—there was really strong racial and religious prejudice between them. But the Samaritan stopped, bandaged up the man’s wounds, put him on his donkey, took him to the closest inn, and paid for him to stay there while he recovered. The Samaritan acted like a neighbor to the Jew, so the Samaritan was a neighbor. “If [neighbor] can include the hated Samaritans, it must include all men.”[4]

This is really relevant to us. Who is our neighbor? Certainly it ought to include those who live in our physical neighborhood, the people who live near us. It also includes people we know from our recreation and entertainment, people we work with, and certainly our relatives, even if they do not follow Christ. And it also includes people with needs, like that Jew in the story Jesus told who was wounded by the side of the road. Last week, we saw Jesus’ heart of compassion for the poor and needy, and His exhortation to us to care for them. So this week, as you go through your days, I want you to actually notice the people you pass. What do they look like? What kind of people are they? What are their needs, their hopes and dreams, their values? Jesus loves every one of them, and He is asking us to love them as well. What would that look like?

Here’s one place to start: Call somebody you know who does not know the Lord, and invite them to do something fun with you. Just reach out to them, have them over for a BBQ, plan to go to a Rockies game (they’re actually starting to win some, so it might be even more fun!), take your families on a picnic together, go to a movie, etc. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s fun. But it is the first step in moving toward them in love.

IV. The Link Between the Two Commands

I find it extremely significant that the man asked Jesus for one command—“which is the greatest?” But Jesus refused to give him just one. He gave him the first command—the most important one, and there was no question about what that would be. Love the Lord your God with everything in you! But Jesus would not leave it there. He insisted on giving a second command as well, which only serves to draw more attention to the second one, because He was only asked for the first one.

A. Two tables of the Law Exodus 20:1-17

It turns out that these two commands sum up the two tables of the law in the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments all have to do with our relationship with God.

1. You shall have no other gods before me

2. You shall not make any images or idols

3. You shall not take the Name of God in vain—you must not use it in an empty way, not referring to Him.

4. You shall keep the Sabbath, one day in seven, in which you will worship God and do no work.

When Jesus says the first commandment is to love God with all that is in us, that’s a good summary of these four commands.

The next six Commandments all have to do with our relationships with other people:

5. Honor your father and mother

6. You shall not murder

7. You shall not commit adultery

8. You shall not steal

9. You shall not lie

10.You shall not covet.

If we love our neighbors and our parents, we will naturally keep all these commandments as well. So at one level, the two greatest commandments Jesus gives are merely summary statements of the Ten Commandments that God gave 1400 years before that.

B. Love me, love my kids 1 John 3:16-18; 4:21

But there is an even closer link between the two great commandments. The apostle John wrote in his first letter, 1 John 3:16-18, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. [17] If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God (God’s love) be in him? [18] Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” And again in 1 John 4:21, “And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

People are created in God’s image; we are His own creations, and He loves us all as such. Just like you love your own children, God loves everyone on earth. And when we mistreat His children, God is a lot like a mama bear when you threaten her cubs—He is really, really unhappy about that! How can you say God’s love is in you if you don’t love who He loves? As parents, we feel that way—we say, “love me, love my kids”. As we saw last week, we can give to Jesus by giving to those in need; we can love God by loving the people He created and loves. These two commands are really not two—they are just the two sides of the one coin.

C. Earn the right to be heard 1 Cor. 9:19

I think in our culture, many people (falsely) believe they know what Christianity is all about, and they are really defensive about religion. The topic is off-limits for many people. They don’t want us “shoving our religion down their throats”. And why would we want to do that, anyway? We don’t like it when a pushy person of another faith just won’t take “no” for an answer. That’s not loving.

It is more true today than ever before that “people don’t care how much you know (about the Bible) until they know how much you care (about them).” We have to earn the right to be heard by being their friend, by showing that we genuinely care about them, by serving them and meeting their needs when we can, by being there for them in the hard times of life. Paul said in 1 Cor. 9:19, “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.” He saw it as his responsibility to serve others to the extent that he thought of himself as their slave. That attitude will earn the right to be heard.

So let’s make it practical. Think of a neighbor (that could be anyone in Loveland) who is not yet a follower of Christ. How would they like to be loved? What things are important to them? What is one concrete thing you could do for them this week?