The Great Commandment

When Jesus is asked about our obligation before God, He lists the things everyone already knew, but He added one more requirement. When Jesus summarizes the Shema, He said, you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of our soul, all of our strength, but with all of our mind, the fullness of our understanding. The Christian faith is an act of faith. We're called to love our neighbor, mortify sin, and fill our minds with the things of God. And not just when we first become Christians. This is a lifelong pursuit.

So let's join Dr. R.C. Sproul on this Lord's Day edition of Renewing Your Mind as he preaches from the Gospel of Mark. In past weeks we've looked at the different subgroups among the Jews who brought interesting questions before Jesus. First of all, we saw the Pharisees who on this occasion were united with the Herodians to try to trap Jesus on questions of tax.

And then last week we looked at the plot of the Sadducees to trip up Jesus with reference to His views regarding the resurrection of the dead. Now that third group that was distinctive that we meet throughout the New Testament was that group called the Scribes. They were the theologians, the experts in biblical interpretation among the Jews, and we note that on this occasion there's not a delegation from the Scribes accosting Jesus, but only one of them who raises a question.

And we note this other difference that his question presumably is not dripping with venom or vituperation. He's not hostile, but he comes because he's been profoundly impressed as he listened to the way in which Jesus handles the interrogation by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And so we read in Mark's Gospel these words. One of the Scribes came, having heard them reasoning together and perceiving that He had answered them well, asked Him, Which is the first commandment of all? Now the question is not a question of temporal chronology. Jesus is not being asked, What was the first commandment that God ever gave?

That's not the question. When He says, What is the first commandment, it's not the question of chronology but the question of priority. He's asking, What is the single most important commandment that God has ever given to this world?

What does He say? What commandment sums up the whole duty of human beings before their Creator? And what is in view here is not simply a question about what the sum and substance is of obligations of members of the household of Israel or then later of the Christian community, but rather of the entire world. What is the chief duty of every human being created in the image of God? Now there are many times in the Old Testament where people gave executive summaries of our chief obligation to God. We remember Mike is saying, What does the Lord require of thee but to love mercy, to do justly, and to walk humbly with thy God? And elsewhere, the just shall live by faith. Rabbi Hillel, who taught twenty years before the ministry of Jesus, summed it up this way when he said, What you would not want done to you, do not do to your neighbor. Now what you see there, and here there obviously is the golden rule, in this case articulated not in positive terms as Jesus did, but in terms of a negative prohibition. Don't do to your neighbor what you don't want to have your neighbor do to you. And then Hillel added to this, This is the essence of the law.

Everything else is mere commentary on it. And so there were these attempts to sum up the whole duty of man in one single sentence. And so when Jesus is asked to do this, He directs the attention of the scribe back to the most fundamental summary of obligation that God gave to His people in the Old Testament. He takes them back to the Shema, which is found, of course, in Numbers chapter 6. And before I read the Shema to you, let me read the few verses that begin chapter 6 of Deuteronomy as the introduction to it. We read, Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, you your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, that your days may be prolonged.

That's the preface. And then comes the divine summons, the call as it were to solemn assembly, with the use of the Hebrew word Shema, which means hear or listen, give ear to what I'm about to say. And so the summons goes like this, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and with all of your soul, and with all of your strength. And so Jesus directs the attention of the scribe back to this foundational obligation that God imposed upon His people in the Shema. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength.

Now there are a couple of things before I try to unpack that that I'd like to observe in passing. When the Shema was uttered and the call was given for affection to God, it is announced that the object of the affection that is to come from the heart, and the soul, and the strength is not to some impersonal cosmic force, some unnamed, unknown higher power. It starts with an assertion about the identity of God.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one, the Lord Yahweh, the Lord who has a name, the Lord who has a personal history with you, who's brought you out of the land of Egypt. I'm reminded of an incident that took place in the early years of my college teaching when I was teaching a college course in theology, and just as the bell was ringing to begin the period, this girl came in the doorway, and she was glowing. She had this big smile on her face, and she was followed closely by a young man. And as the girl entered into the classroom, there was some blinging going on as she sort of walked in like this, like her arm were broken, but really that she might display the diamond ring that was on her finger. And I stopped her. I said, Mary. I said, Is that a diamond ring I see on your hand? And she allowed that it was. And I said, Does that mean that you are engaged? And she was happy to announce that she was, yes, engaged. And I said, Are you engaged to John, who had just walked in the room with her? And she said, Yes, I am. I said, Well, before we start class, let me just take a moment here.

Let me ask you, since you're now engaged to John, you're planning to marry him, you're wearing his ring, do you love him? And she said, Well, of course I love him. I said, Oh, that's fine. I said, Now tell me why you love him. And she thought for a second. She said, I love him because he's so intelligent.

I said, You won't get any argued for me. He's an excellent student on the dean's list every semester, probably has an all-college 3.8. But here's Bill over here on the other side of the room.

He's got a straight four point. And I know that students can get good grades just by extra labor, and some of them are educated beyond their intelligence. But I think in the case of Bill, he's an intelligent student.

Would you grant that? And she said, Oh yes, yes. I said, But you're not in love with Bill. You're in love with John. She said, Right. I said, So Mary, there must be something about John that you love that's not in Bill.

What is it? She said, Oh, she said, John is so athletic. I said, Yeah, he plays on the basketball team.

He starts. He's a good, good ballplayer. I said, I grant you that. Bill's the high scorer, and he's the captain of the team.

So you'd grant that Bill also has athletic ability, wouldn't you? And she said, Yes. I said, But you're not in love with Bill.

You're in love with John. She said, Right. I said, Well, come on now.

We can't waste the whole day. I said, Tell me more. What is it about John that makes you love him and not Bill? She said, Well, John is so polite and courteous. I said, Bill, did you hear that?

Are you rude? Oh, no, no, no. Mary said, No, I don't mean to cast aspersions on Bill in that way. I said, Well, come on, Mary. Bill has all these qualities that you say you find in John, and yet they don't define your love.

Please, let's hurry up now. Tell me what it is about John that makes you love him. By this time, she is so nervous. I'm sure she's going to start crying.

There's another thing I hated when I was teaching is to have some young lady burst into tears under one of my interrogations in the classroom, make me feel like such a cad. But she was trembling. I said, Please, Mary, I said, Tell us what it is about John. She said, Well, I love John because he's… I love him because he's… I love him because he's John.

I said, Yes. I said, When you ran out of the specific qualities that you could enumerate, in order to capture the essence of this person, you went to his name. Because to you, everything that John represents is bound up in his name. And so it is with God.

The name Yahweh is the name of our God. And we love Him not because He's intelligent, and we love Him not because He's strong, or because He's polite, courteous, or kind. Beloved, we're not to love God simply for all of the wonderful gifts and benefits that we receive from His hand, but we're to love Him for who He is in Himself. We don't really progress in the Christian life until we understand that, that to love God is to love Him because He is lovely.

He is wonderful, and He is worthy of the creatures' unqualified affection. So in the Shema, Israel is commanded to love God not simply with all of the heart, but the idea here is that the love is to come from the heart. It's not just a superficial affection, not just a casual or cavalier endearment, but an affection that comes from the very root of our being, where this affection is not surpassed by any other affection that we ever experience in this world. It's an undiluted, unmixed love for God. And it's a love that is to come from the soul, from the very center, again, of our being.

Remember the judgment and warning that Jesus gave to the Laodicean church. He said, I wish that you were either hot or cold, but because you're lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. When we love God with all of our souls, there's nothing lukewarm about that affection. And then the Shema says, with all of your strength. The affection that we have for God is not to be a weak, impotent thing, but that we call upon all of the strength that we can muster up in our persons to magnify that affection for Him. But you notice something strange here about how Jesus quotes the Shema. In the Shema of the Old Testament, there are three dimensions about our love for God. We're to love Him with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our strength.

Some Hebrew scholars say that in the word for strength is ambiguously but implicitly contained the idea of the mind, but it's not spelled out. Well, Jesus doesn't leave it in any ambiguity. When Jesus summarizes the Shema, He said, you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of our soul, all of our strength, but with all of our mind, the fullness of our understanding.

You know, sometimes I really get impatient when I hear people say, I don't want to study. I just want to have a simple faith. God did not give all of this to His people to be treated as a children's story. He calls us to apply the fullest ability of the faculty of our minds in our attempt to understand the riches and the depth of what He has given to us in His Word. I live in terror on that part of the great commandment because I am aware, not fully aware by any means, but to some degree aware of how little I know about this book, about this book, how much of the content I don't know, I've never really carefully, closely studied. I know that in many, many ways, dear friends, I have wasted my mind with respect to mastering the things of God. And I know if God were to ask me, R.C., have you loved me with all of your mind, I would have to say, not by a million miles.

I turn my mind to other things. Sometimes I'm more interested in learning the things of this world than I am about learning the Word of God. Now we all know that not one of us for a single day keeps the great commandment, but we're at ease in Zion about it. We're not really under great conviction from that matter because we look around and we see that nobody loves the Lord their God with all of their heart and all of their soul and all of their mind and all of their strength. So what's the big deal if I don't? Now remember in the inquiry that came to Jesus from the scribe was that Jesus was being asked about the great commandment.

We're the first in terms of importance. And the Jews of that day made a distinction between heavy law and lighter law. There were six hundred and thirteen some laws found in the Torah, and the scribes distinguished between the heavy ones and the light ones. And even Jesus does that to some degree when He talks about the least of the commandments and those commandments that are weightier than others. The New Testament recognizes that there is a love that covers a multitude of sins. Those are real sins, but nevertheless they don't call for public ecclesiastical discipline, and then we find lists repeated in the New Testament of those heinous crimes that destroy the church and require ecclesiastical discipline. So distinctions are made between lesser and greater laws.

None is so small as to be insignificant. As Calvin responded to the Roman Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin, he said, no sin is so slight that it doesn't deserve death, but no sin so great that it actually destroys the grace of God in our souls. But if I were to ask you, what's the most serious sin of all?

What would you say? Murder? Adultery? Idolatry? Unbelief? It would seem to me that if this is the great commandment, the great transgression would be the failure to keep it. And that scares me because I haven't kept the great commandment for five minutes in my life. I have never loved God with my whole heart. My soul has never been totally rhapsodized by my affection for God. As I've already indicated to you, my mind has been lazy with respect to applying it to His Word, and I've only used the portion of my strength in my affection for God.

And were it not for Jesus, I would perish because of that, and rightly so. Consider Jesus for a moment and ask the question, did He love His Father with all of His heart? Was there any portion of the heart of Christ that was not completely in love with the Father? Did Jesus hold anything back from His soul when His meat and His drink was to do the will of the Father? Was there anything that the Father revealed that Jesus ignored as being not worthy of His attention of His attention? And was His affection a spineless, weak affection? Or did He manifest the most powerful, strong affection for the Father ever seen on this planet? The Lord Jesus kept the great commandment perfectly. Every second of His life He loved the Father with all of His heart, with all of His soul, all of His mind, and all of His strength. And had He not done that, He would have not fulfilled the law of God and would not have been worthy to save Himself, let alone save us. And so after He gives this exposition, tying to it the love of neighbor, which we don't have time to expound right now, the scribe was again duly impressed, compliments Jesus, a well-said teacher.

I don't think he was being patronizing. I think he meant it. He said, You've spoken the truth, for there is one God and no other but He, and to love Him with all the heart, the understanding of the soul, and with all the strength. And to love one neighbor as himself is more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifice. And now Jesus noticed that when the scribe answered in this way, He said, You're not far from the kingdom of God. He didn't say, You're in the kingdom of God, but You're close. You're starting to get it. You're starting to understand what it means when the Lord God omnipotent is really regarded as the sovereign King and that we are willing to love Him for who He is.

What a powerful charge from Dr. R.C. Sproul. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Lord's Day, and we're glad you've joined us. This is a call to examine our own lives, isn't it, to determine if we're actively pursuing God. That's why we so appreciate Dr. Sproul's verse-by-verse sermon series through The Gospel of Mark. We return to this series each Sunday, and our resource offer today will be of help as you study along with us.

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