Matthew 22:34-40
The Incredible Context of This Commandment
My main concern in this text is the commandment: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." But it is surrounded by such stupendous statements we would be foolhardy to plunge into it without pondering these surroundings. So it is going to take us two weeks at least to deal with this text.
The Great and Foremost Commandment
The two stupendous things I have in mind are, first, the greatest commandment in the Word of God. In verse 36 a Pharisee asks Jesus, "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus answers by quoting
Deuteronomy 6:5,
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
Then he adds his own words to put the commandment even higher than the question required. The question was, "Which is the great commandment?" and Jesus says, "This is the great and foremost commandment."
So the first stupendous thing surrounding the commandment to love your neighbor as you love yourself is the commandment to love God as the greatest and foremost thing that is in the entire Word of God. The greatest and most important thing you can do is love God—love GOD—with all your heart and soul and mind.
On These Two Depend the Whole Law and the Prophets
The other stupendous thing surrounding the command to love your neighbor as you love yourself is what follows in verse 40,
On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.
Everything else in the Old Testament in some sense depends on these two commandments: the commandment to love God and the commandment to love our neighbor. This is an amazing statement. We have the authority of the Son of God here telling us something utterly stupendous about the origin and design of the entire plan and Word of God.
The Overwhelming Commandment to Neighbor Love
Now those are the two stupendous things we need to ponder before we dive into the overwhelming commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. I say it is overwhelming because it seems to demand that I tear the skin off my body and wrap it around another person so that I feel that I am that other person; and all the longings that I have for my own safety and health and success and happiness I now feel for that other person as though he were me.
It is an absolutely staggering commandment. If this is what it means, then something unbelievably powerful and earthshaking and reconstructing and overturning and upending will have to happen in our souls. Something supernatural. Something well beyond what self-preserving, self-enhancing, self-exalting, self-esteeming, self-advancing human beings like John Piper can do on their own.
Before we take up such a commandment and apply it to our lives, we need to ponder these two stupendous things that surround the commandment. That the commandment to love God is the great and foremost commandment in the Word of God and that all the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commandments.
Let's start with verse 40. "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."
He Didn't Have to Say This
First, consider the sheer fact that
Jesus said this. He didn't have to say it. The Pharisee didn't ask this. Jesus went beyond what he asked and said more. He seems to want to push the importance and centrality of these commandments as much as he can. He has said that the commandment to love God is great and foremost. He has said the commandment to love your neighbor as you love yourself is "like it." Verse 39: "The second is like it . . . " That's enough to raise the stakes here almost as high as they can be raised. We have the greatest commandment in all the revelation of God to humanity (Love God); and we have the second greatest, which is like the greatest (Love your neighbor).
But Jesus doesn't stop there. He wants us to be stunned at how important these two commandments are. He wants us to stop and wonder. He wants us to spend more than a passing moment on these things. More than a week or two of preaching. So he adds, "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." They are 1) the first and the greatest, and 2) the second that is like the first and the greatest. But they are also the two commandments on which everything else in the Bible depends. "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."
Now what does this mean? Let me see if I can open a window into heaven by contrasting what Jesus says here (in v. 40) with what he says in
Matthew 7:12 and what Paul says in
Romans 13. Turn with me to the Sermon on the Mount in
Matthew 7:12. This verse is better known as the Golden Rule. It is, I think, a good commentary on "Love your neighbor as you love yourself."
Matthew 7:12: This Is the Law and the Prophets
Jesus has just said that God will give us good things if we ask and seek and knock, because he is a loving Father. Then in
Matthew 7:12 he says,
Therefore, however you want people to treat you, so treat them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
Notice that again Jesus refers to the Law and the Prophets like he did in
Matthew 22:40. He says, if you do to others what you would have them do to you, then "this is the Law and the Prophets." In
Matthew 22:40 he said, "On these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets."
Take notice here that the first commandment is not mentioned in
Matthew 7:12. Loving God with all your heart is not mentioned. Treating others the way we would like to be treated, he says, "
is the Law and the Prophets."
We must be careful here. Some people over the centuries have tried to take sentences like the Golden Rule and say that Jesus was mainly a profound teacher of human ethics; and that what he taught is not dependent on God or any relationship with God. They say, "See, he can sum up the whole Old Testament, the Law and the Prophets, in practical human relationships: the Golden Rule."
I say we must be careful here, because thinking like that not only ignores the great things Jesus said about God elsewhere and the amazing things he said about himself coming from God to give his life a ransom for many (
Mark 10:45); it also ignores the immediate context. Verse 12 begins with "therefore" (dropped in the NIV):
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