Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Imputed and Original Sin from Mark 12:28–34
It is a privilege for me to be with you again. I would like to direct your attention this morning to the passage that was read: Mark, chapter 12:28 to 34. There are some parts of the Bible which seem obscure, difficult, until one spends a bit of time studying them and reading up a bit on the background and so forth.
Then there are other parts of the Bible more familiar (like this one) which seem fairly straightforward until you start thinking about them. Then the more you think about them, the more challenging, difficult, even obscure they seem to become. To love the Lord your God with your mind? What does that mean?
For us, love and cerebral cogitations don’t seem to fit in the same page. Then what is the connection between this first commandment and the second? Why should this one be the first? How about murder, treason, rape? What is it about this one that makes this one the first? And grant that it’s the first, how is it connected with the second?
Yet as we work through this passage, I am persuaded that Jesus’ words are not only true but astonishingly penetrating. They come right to the heart of who we are and what we must be as Christians, what we one day will be in the new heaven and the new earth. The question that is raised by this teacher of the law is generated simply because, in any complex legal system, eventually one law takes precedence over another. This already surfaces elsewhere in the New Testament.
For example, Jesus himself raises the question. On the one hand, there is a law that says you’re not supposed to work on the seventh day. On the other hand, there’s a law that says you’re supposed to circumcise your male child on the eighth day after his birth. Supposing the eighth day falls on the seventh day, does the priest then circumcise the child and do his work, thus disobeying the Sabbath command, or does he wait one more day, in which case he is breaking the circumcision command?
In any complex system of laws, then eventually people raise the question, “What’s the most important one?” You compare two. Which gives way to the other if they clash? Of course, ultimately that leads to the ultimate question, “What’s the most important one of all?” That issue was, in fact, being debated in Jesus’ day. This is not something that was constructed just for Jesus. The rabbis were debating it.
Jesus’ answer is straightforward. He says, “The most important one is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Now since Jesus is actually quoting the Old Testament, he is answering the question, “Which is the greatest of the Old Testament laws?” It’s worth thinking through what the Old Testament texts actually say, because when Jesus quotes the Old Testament, almost always he is not doing it in a proof texting fashion. He is bringing the context with it.
In this case, the first commandment is from Deuteronomy, chapter 6. There Moses is addressing the people of his day as they are about to enter into the Promised Land. He says, “These are the commands, decrees, and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children, and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live …” and so forth.
Then he says (chapter 6, verse 3), “Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey …” Finally, Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5. The words Jesus quotes are, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Now then this is the Shema, as the Jews call it. A devout Jew to this day will recite this first thing in the morning. To this day. What is the relationship between the first part and the second part? “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God …” What’s the point?
It helps to remember the contrast they would have known a great deal about, namely paganism. In paganism, there are many gods, and each god has his or her own domain. In Jesus’ day, for example, if you wanted to make a sea voyage and you belonged to the pagan world, then you wanted the god of the sea to be on your side. So you offered a sacrifice to Neptune.
Then you wanted to give a speech. Well, you want the god of communication to be on your side. You offer a sacrifice to Hermes in the Greek pantheon, to Mercury in the Roman pantheon of gods. Then you want to go to war. You make sure Zeus is on side, Jupiter in the Roman pantheon. All the thousands of gods had their particular domains.
In fact, you might miss one out. That was a bit tricky. You might do something really dumb and offend one of the gods you’ve missed out, which is why Paul can report that in Athens in his day, there was actually an altar to an unknown god. It was somebody who was obviously covering all the bases just in case.
That means, of course, you can’t afford to give all your heart’s affection, all your intellectual devotion, all of your faithful commitment to just one god, because each of the gods has his or her own particular domain. Supposing there’s only one God, that changes everything. Language is very well chosen here because there is a sense in which even in paganism, many people believe, underneath all of these many gods, there was a kind of ultimate “godness.”
The ancient Greeks, for example, could speak of there being one god, even though they had so many thousands. There was a sort of god who was connected with ultimate reality of things, a bit the way Hinduism is today. There is one kind of truth that underlies everything, and there are literally millions of Hindu gods. But there is one truth that underlies them all. The Greeks spoke of one god, even though they had a lot of gods.
This text goes beyond that. It doesn’t simply say there is one ultimate God connected with all of reality. It says God is one. In other words, pantheists, polytheists, people who believe in many gods could still say there was a godness behind all the gods and speak of there being one god. They could not say, “God is one.” That’s what the text says (Old Testament and New Testament). “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with heart and soul and mind and strength.”
The next things to consider then are these little prepositional phrases (heart and soul and mind and strength). What does that mean? Well, if you love the Lord with all of your heart, that’s reasonably clear in our language, because for us, heart is the seat of emotion. The trouble is that’s not the way the symbolism worked in the ancient world.
In the ancient world, heart was the seat of personality. It was pretty close to mind, in fact. It was the heart of all of who you are, the heart of your emotions, if I may put it that way. The seat of your emotions was actually in your gut. That’s why older English versions of the Bible have strange expressions like “bowels of mercy,” which sounds vaguely crude in contemporary English. But that’s what the King James Version had (“bowels of mercy”).
Then you read in the Old Testament how people love with their reins. “Les reins” in French. It’s still used in French. It means your kidneys. You can just imagine a young man saying to his sweetheart, “I love you with all my kidneys.” But that’s the language of Scripture in those days. You might think of it this way. If we have our symbolism with the thinking here and the feeling here, they sort of lowered it.
Therefore, when Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” think mind, all your personality. “… with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind …” So you have two minds in there. All of who you are. All of the way you think. All of the way you look at everything. Then “with all your soul” and “with all your strength” are the other ones. That is, with the whole of your being.
Isn’t that remarkable? There is no mention here of loving God with all your kidneys, with all your bowels. Oh, there are biblical passages that say roughly that. This isn’t one of them. What then does it mean to love the Lord your God with your mind and all your strength? Does it mean you think a lot?
Well, in a sense, no doubt, but let’s be quite frank. It’s possible to be idolatrous with our minds too, isn’t it? I know for those of us who are really gifted with tools, sheet metal work perhaps, or just love high-tech computers or who really love to be building something with their hands, the notion of intellectual love seems a bit strange, but there are others.
I’m sure some in this congregation for whom intellectual work is their pleasure.… For some people, it is enormously pleasurable to study the metal alloys that go into jet engines or to work on an ancient Coptic text or to work in a laboratory heading for some improvement in a current drug used to treat cancer. The intellectual challenge is itself immensely enjoyable, isn’t it?
For others, it’s pretty boring, but for some, that’s a great pleasure. Reading is a joy, but the point is, if you can study the fins of jet engines and get a lot of pleasure, you can also study, for some people, the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Old Testament and get a lot of pleasure. That doesn’t make it godly.
In fact, it’s quite possible to enjoy studying the Greek New Testament just because you’re an intellectual the same way you enjoy studying text criticism or you enjoy studying the stock market or you enjoy studying metal alloys. Some people just enjoy it by itself. That may be just a reflection of who you are and your gifts. This has to be saying something more than that. When you read Deuteronomy 6, the passage Jesus quotes, you begin to get an idea of what is at stake.
After the Shema (the words Jesus quotes, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” and so forth), then Deuteronomy 6:6. “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.” That is, your minds, your personalities, your whole being. “Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down, when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands. Bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses, on your gates.”
Then verse 13. “Fear the Lord your God, serve him only. Take your oaths in his name.” That is, people swear by the most important thing. If you’re actually swearing by one of the Baals, then the Baals are the most important thing for you. You swear by Yahweh, ancient Israel was told, because Yahweh must be the most important for you, God himself.
“Do not follow other gods. Do not test the Lord your God. Do what is right and good in the Lord’s sight.” Then verse 20. “In the future, when your son asks you, ‘What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees, and laws the Lord our God has commanded you …?’ ” You can just imagine some 13-year-old sassing his parents, “Give me a break! All this religious stuff. What’s the meaning of all this fuddy-duddy stuff?”
“… tell him: ‘We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes the Lord sent miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that he promised on oath to our forefathers.
The Lord commanded us to obey all of these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.’ ” Do you see what is going on here? It is a God-centeredness that embraces all of life, including how you pass it on to your next generation, what you think about, how you speak about it.
It’s not something you turn on on Sunday at 8:30 or 11:00, as the case may be. It’s something that consumes your horizons. It’s something that you delight to talk about with your family, and your children see that for you it’s genuine. It’s not fake. For in truth, you fear his commandments, and you love his commandments. Both words are used. You delight to think about these things because you remember how God himself intervened to save you and your people.
You try to make the next generation understand, to see it, to see the historical framework, the revelation of God himself, to see how it’s tied to righteousness and truth and integrity. It embraces your whole horizon so it can never, ever be reduced merely to being passionate about Jesus but without integrity, being emotionally turned on by religion but without truth. It can’t be!
That’s the way so much of ancient paganism was, you know. You could be ever so religious over here, but it didn’t touch your ethics over there. It was biblical Christianity, it was Old Testament religion, it was New Testament religion, that insisted that life is one under this one God. It touches your religion, your emotions, your ethics, your family, your priorities.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” Eventually you start asking what your priorities are. Where’s your pocketbook? What do you do with your time? What do you think about? Where’s the discipline of your mind? Where’s the discipline of your heart? What do you do with your children?
What do you hunger to be when you’re 60 and, if the Lord gives you years, when you’re 70, when you’re 80? Are you anticipating heaven, the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness? Or is that sort of “pie in the sky when you die” stuff, and meanwhile your stock folio is the more important element in your life? “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.”
We’ll come back to that one in a moment, but at this juncture, turn to the next one. The second commandment is also a quotation from the Old Testament. “The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” In this case, the quotation is from Leviticus 19. Now Leviticus 19 has quite a number of ethical laws that are laid out. Let me just read a few of them.
“Each of you must respect his mother and father. You must observe my Sabbaths. Do not turn to idols or make gods or cast metals for yourself. When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien.
Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another. Do not swear falsely by my name. Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him. Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight. Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind. Do not pervert justice. Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. Do not hate your brother in your heart” and so on and so on.
Then ultimately (chapter 19), we read these words (verse 18): “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.” In a sense, this is in anticipation of Jesus’ so-called Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
As I read through these commandments, if you were following in Leviticus 19, you will have observed that I left out one important clause that keeps recurring and recurring and recurring. That clause is precisely what ties together the first commandment and the second commandment. Let me re-read some of those verses and put the clause back in.
Verse 2: “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Verse 3: “Each of you must respect his mother and father, and you must observe my Sabbaths. I am the Lord your God.” Verse 4: “Do not turn to idols or make gods of cast metal for yourselves. I am the Lord your God.”
Verse 9: “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of the field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord your God. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another. Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.”
Verse 14: “Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the Lord.” Verse 16: “Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.” Verse 18: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”
Do you hear that? Look at it from another perspective. What is it in the Old Testament that makes God angriest most often? What is it that really narks God? Well, a number of things are listed, of course. Sometimes, for example, in parts of Isaiah or parts of Amos, it’s social injustice that makes God very angry.
But the thing that is repeatedly said to anger God is idolatry. It’s the de-godding of God. We become the center of the universe. When we try to make Christianity relevant in our society today, do we not often focus almost all of our attention on the horizontal commandments of God?
“Well, you understand,” we say, “if you pass laws that ultimately corrode the family, then there are entailments in the next generation, the next generation, the next generation.” You corrode the values of a society that make the society stable, honest, truth bearing, surely our best for the rearing of the next generation.
There are all kinds of statistics that show a solid family is, on the whole, on average, statistically best for rearing the next generation. Don’t you want to have stability in your society and culture? Well then you ought to have Christian values for the home. Don’t we argue like that? Of course there’s some truth to it all, but it suggests, you see, that Christianity is basically merely a functional religion. That is, you try to do things a certain way because politically you think this is best for the society and the culture.
That’s not what the Bible is about. It is best for the society and the culture. The Bible says so! But that’s not the heart of the issue. The heart of the issue is, “Who is God?” The first commandment is, “You shall love the Lord your God with heart and soul and mind and strength.”
The first commandment is anti-idolatry, for the first responsibility of every created being is to recognize his or her “createdness.” We are not independent beings. “God is over there (more or less us … just a souped-up model), and we’re over here independent. We interact in various ways.” No, no, no, no. He is the Creator. We owe him everything.
To fail to recognize that he is our maker and ultimately our judge is to lift ourselves up to some status that denies our essential createdness, our essential dependence and somehow threatens God’s godness. It de-gods God. We want to be God. Isn’t that what Genesis 3 is all about? “God knows that if you eat this fruit, you will be like God.” That is what is at the heart of sin (wanting, at the end of the day, to de-god God and be God).
We begin to think of religion in functional categories. We start saying, “Well, you know, if this god doesn’t do what I want, I’ll find another god.” That’s called idolatry. Then when you come to ethics, the entire horizontal panoply of obligations, the grounding of it all, is that God is God. “I am the Lord. You shall not defraud any of your employees. You shall not, because you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”
Go through the entire panoply of horizontal commandments and principles that are tied to things our society doesn’t even think seriously about anymore. “You shall not commit adultery. It’s wounding. It’s deceitful. It’s selfish. It’s not loving someone as you love yourself. Besides, I am the Lord. You shall not cheat on your income tax. It means others have to pay more. How is that treating others the way you want yourself to be treated? Besides, I am the Lord.”
Oh, well, how about a private sin like pornography? It’s so easily accessible from the Net these days, isn’t it? But what is it doing to the way you start thinking about the opposite sex? “I am the Lord.” “Well, a little gambling on the side. I mean, after all, it’s not harming anybody, is it?” Yes, but gambling is the only activity where the whole purpose of the exercise is that you should gain something while everybody else loses.
Everybody says, “Oh well, it’s just like the stock market.” No, it’s not. Quite apart from the investment value in the stock market, when the stock market goes up, everybody goes up. The whole point of gambling is that you get something while everybody else loses. “How can that be loving your brother and sister as you want yourself to be loved? Besides, I am the Lord.”
It changes everything. Thus the first commandment is the first commandment because it is the only commandment we always break when we break any other. It is first and foremost the de-godding of God. King David understood this in the terrible matter of his adultery and then his arranged military murder of Bathsheba’s husband. Eventually, he cries out before God in Psalm 51. He addresses God and says, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”
There’s part of you that wants to cry out and say, “Wait a minute, David. Let’s be fair here. ‘Against you only?’ Give me a break! You’ve sinned against Bathsheba. You’ve sinned against her husband, for sure. You’ve sinned against the military high command. You’ve sinned against the people. You’ve sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb. That one dies. There’s scarcely anybody you haven’t sinned against. Now you have the cheek to say, ‘Against you only have I sinned’?”
You see, David is not denying all the horizontal damage. He is not denying all the social cost. He is not denying that he has wounded and hurt so many people, but he understands that sin in the first instance is sin against God. In every single sin we commit, the person most offended is God. This teacher of the law understood many of these things. Do you remember how he responds so wisely, so humbly?
“ ‘Well said, teacher,’ the man replied. ‘You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ ”
Now it is very important to understand what Jesus means by this. He does not say, “This then is how you get into the kingdom: by obeying the commandment.” That’s not what he says. He says, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” What’s the distinction? What’s his point? Well, of course if a person is reading Mark right through, before he or she gets to Mark 12, inevitably Mark 10 has been read. Besides that, after you finish Mark 12, you go on to Mark 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 so you put this commandment in the context of the storyline of the entire gospel.
So already two chapters before Jesus says this, he has also said in very unambiguous terms in Mark, chapter 10, verse 45, that he did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. The gospel of Mark as a whole, like all the Gospels in this respect, is heading for the cross and the resurrection. That’s why some people have said that basically the four gospels are long passion narratives with extended introductions, because they spend chapters developing how the whole drama takes Jesus to the agony of the cross and then rises again.
In the theology of the book as a whole, it’s pretty clear that the way one enters the kingdom is by Jesus Christ. That’s why he came. He came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. His life would pay off the debt of so many. Not only so, but he dies. He hangs on the cross, and he gives this rite we call the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion. He says, “Do this in remembrance of me. This is the new covenant in my blood, shed for many for the remission of sins.”
Oh no! The way you enter the new covenant is by coming to Jesus and understanding that all the sins we have committed by breaking these first two commandments can only finally be dealt with by this Jesus who died on the cross on our behalf and took our guilt in his own body on the tree. There’s a sense in which these two commandments prepare us for the kingdom. You come to see what’s going on here, and you’re not far from the kingdom. You begin to understand what is at issue, but there’s even more than that.
So many of the commandments in the Old Testament will no longer be in force in the new heaven and the new earth. Will you need a commandment in the new heaven and the new earth about sacrificial lambs, for example? What kind of bullock to kill on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement? Of course not! Will you need a commandment in the new heaven and the new earth when we have resurrection bodies, when there is no more sin, when there is no more injustice …?
Will there be a command that says, “You shall not murder”? It won’t even make sense. I mean, how do you murder a person with a resurrection body? Besides, our hearts will be so transformed that a prohibition against murder would just be stupid. I mean, it’s unnecessary, like telling people to breathe.
In the new heaven and the new earth, these two commandments will still be in force and perfectly obeyed. We shall love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and we shall love our neighbor as ourselves. No more lies. No more deceit. No more false religion. No more hate. No more bitterness.
In some small way, the church of Jesus Christ, Arlington Heights Evangelical Free Church, is to be, so far as it is possible this side of the new heaven and the new earth, a foretaste of that heavenly community. Insofar as it is, it is not far from the consummated kingdom. “You are not far from the kingdom.” Let us pray.
O Lord God, how easily we hide our sins. We make excuses for them. We do not glimpse the depth and complexity of our own lostness and depravity. But our hope and confidence, Lord God, is not in our ability to obey these commandments of ourselves. It is in Christ Jesus who gave his life a ransom for many. O Lord God, if there are some this morning for whom all of this seems so alien and strange, help them even now from the quiet of their hearts to cry to you and say, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.”
For those of us who have tasted and seen that in truth you are good, you are not only our Creator and our Judge but also our Redeemer, our Savior, grant that these commandments may become increasingly for us not only those things which expose our petty inconsistencies and the depths of deceit in our own hearts but also our delight, our joy, as we anticipate the consummated kingdom still to come and cry, “Yes, heavenly Father, this is good. Work this out in me. Even so come, Lord Jesus.” In whose name we pray, amen.
