January 12 – LD 2, Day 5: The Law of God as the Law of Love
by Prof Herman Hanko
Read: Galatians 5, Matt 22:37-40.
How is it possible for
the law to show us our misery?
If we only look at the
law as a code of outward moral conduct, then the law will not be a mirror of
misery. Even worldly people may actually find out that their lives are nearly
conformable to God’s law. They never swear; they do not work on Sunday; they do
not worship idols; they usually keep the laws of the land; they do not kill any
one, or be unfaithful to their wives or husbands; they do not steal or speak
evil of others. From an outward point of view, they do a pretty good job of
keeping the law of God.
But then, so did the
Pharisees of Jesus’ day! And Jesus called them “whitened sepulchers!”
In Matthew 22, Jesus
explains why that is.
A lawyer was determined
to trap Jesus in his words and find in some teaching of the Lord a reason to
condemn him. He asked what the most important commandment of the law was. No
matter what commandment Jesus quoted, the lawyer would be in a position to
condemn him for setting one commandment above another.
But Jesus was aware of
the fact that all the commandments were of equal importance, and that, as James
says, to break one commandment is to break them all (James 2:8-11). Further,
our Lord knew also that mere outward conformity to the law of God was as good
as worthless in the sight of God. Again and again the Lord reprimanded
And so the Lord did not
quote one of the commandments as the lawyer thought he would; the Lord pointed
to the inner demands of the law: “Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and the great
commandment: and the second is like unto it. Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and
the prophets.”
This was already a part
of the law in the OT (Deut. 6:5, Lev. 19:18).
So, the foundation of all
the commandments of God is the basic command: Love God! And love thy neighbor
for God’s sake. If we do not love God, we cannot keep any of the commandments,
no matter how closely we adhere to them outwardly. If we do not love God, we do
not love our neighbor, for we must love our neighbor as ourselves. We must love
our neighbor because we love God.