“And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matt. 22:39, NKJV)
“Love your neighbor” has become the go to green card to sanction just about everything under the sun. We find the card particularly played to trump (if you’ll excuse the term) whatever doubt might be cast on whether a particular behavior or questionable cause is legitimate, greenlighting even dubious conduct with the benediction of God.
After all, doesn’t the concept of loving our neighbor originate from His mouth (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39)?
When evangelical cultural warriors weigh in on secular stances and agendas, they are merely playing a card that God Himself has placed at their disposal. We don’t want someone repressed or unfulfilled, do we? So we play the green card of love to pave the way, somehow championing love in the offing. We want to protect human rights, at least the ones that are in vogue to protect, don’t we? Play the card and the conversation moves to a whole new plane, now with God’s imprimatur.
But here’s the problem. While love for neighbor is part of God’s playbook, it holds a well-defined face value, and is governed by clearly stated rules.
The Law of Love
The Pharisees, religious leaders in Jesus’ day known for their meticulous keeping of God’s law but also for their manipulation of that law to suit their own purposes, approached Jesus with a question to test Him. Basically, it was trap. They were trying to trip Jesus up.
They asked Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” This question smacks of contentiousness, looking to back Jesus in a corner and provoke dispute and division.
Jesus, however, answers with the wherewithal of one who knows what’s going on and who truly understands the Law of God. In fact, He gives a fuller answer than the one being forced by the expert in the law (There are so many experts nowadays, aren’t there, who think the matter is settled simply by their use of that title?).
“Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matt. 22:37–39).
In answer to the question of the great commandment in the law, Jesus points to love – love for God and love for neighbor.
The Value of Love
In response to the question, Jesus identified two commandments: love for God and love for neighbor. In fact, in His summary He makes the numbering clear. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:40). Law and Prophets is shorthand for the entire Old Testament, which He has just boiled down to love.
No wonder these two cards carry the weight they do to trump arguments.
Jesus, however, did not cite the cards as equals in the deck. He assigned love for God as the “first and great” commandment. Love for neighbor is like it but is designated as second.
But here is where things go awry. There are those who have taken it upon themselves to reshuffle the deck, even adding a third card not dealt by God but from the deck of secular humanism.
The reasoning goes like this. If we look closely, we see Jesus highlighting three commandments in His response to the expert in the law: love for God, love for neighbor, and love for self. Since love for self is foundational to love for neighbor, it must be given a place of prominence so that we can love others properly.
The upshot of it all is the introduction of a card that carries the weight of self-interest, personal preference, and arbiter of right and wrong, shapeshifting what is loving or unloving.
Resetting Love
What has happened is that love has become upended, first by adding a third card that has its origin in human beings (particularly fallen as they are) that comes into play to set the value for love, and second by forgetting that the trump card is not love for neighbor but love for God.
When love is understood by our own dictates rather than by the law of God, such love loses any backbone and becomes nothing but a heart of wax that can be heated with misplaced compassion and molded to fit whatever we want rather than what God wants. Love becomes shaped by our preferences (or agenda) and malleable to our whim rather than set by God’s Word.
The best way for us to recapture the value of love and return it to the state from which it has been upended is by looking to Jesus who Himself is the beating heart of the Law and the Prophets, the personification of love.
We can do this by study of John’s first epistle, which draws deeply on his Gospel account and functions as a primer on biblical love.
John’s epistle majors on love. He touches on the topic at seemingly every turn, but he does so not to repeat himself but to assert, develop, showcase, and make application of a love that is distinctly divine and lived in fellowship with God.
We find other themes running throughout John’s writings, particularly those of truth, life, and light. Each of these themes is expressed in Christ and contributes to the character of biblical love.
We might describe the love John has in mind in terms of a Venn diagram, with truth, light, and life overlapping, each in itself an area for study and appreciation. At the center of that diagram tying them all together and illustrating them most powerfully is love, a love personified, realized, and conveyed in Jesus Christ.
Biblical love is informed by truth, infused with light, and invested with life. Remove truth and love has no backbone. It can’t be commanded or obeyed. It cannot function as a summary of the law. It loses its contours sculpted by God.
Remove light and love can become polluted with sin, distortion, depravity, and willfulness, aligning with darkness. It breeds sensuality and leads to a desire-driven life that caters to fallen lusts and license.
Remove life and love loses its redemptive ability to give new life, healing, and wholeness. Such love harms rather than heals and vainly tries to find life in cultural accommodation rather than in God. It succumbs to what seems right in our own eyes but leads to death.
Conclusion
When we remove love for God as the first and great commandment, we open a Pandora’s Box of ills, plagues, deformities, and deceptions. Love for neighbor becomes arbitrary and self-serving.
When we improve love by adding a third card from the humanistic deck to steer the plot to what seems right in our own eyes and to deceive ourselves into thinking it is the way of life, we yield to Eden’s tempter who would bring us to pit ourselves against God.
Stanley D. Gale is a retired pastor and author of Greater Love: A Devotional Journey through 1 John. Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
