Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Loving Others from Mark 12:28–34
President Mohler, faculty, and fellow students of the Word of God, it’s a great privilege for me to be here. I think this is my third time on this campus, and I hope it would not be entirely inappropriate if I mentioned the first time I came. The first time I came it was not at the invitation of any one official; it was at the invitation of the Evangelical Caucus of Students. I gather things have changed somewhat since those days, President Mohler.
I would like to direct your attention to Mark 12:28–34. I shall read it in a few moments, but I want to begin with some preparatory remarks. Several years ago I gave a series of talks at a seminary in the city of Dallas. The seminary can remain nameless; the city says it all. Those lectures were subsequently published as a little book called The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.
The thesis of that book was straightforward. Over against sentimental or erotic notions of love that permeate most of our culture, the Bible speaks of the love of God in rather different ways, and sometimes we tie ourselves up theologically when we fail to distinguish those different ways, when we choose just one of those ways and absolutize it and impose that one way on all of the texts. In particular, I delineated five ways the Bible speaks of the love of God.
It speaks of the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father, for example. Here there is no notion of redemption. This is not a redeeming love, for neither the Father nor the Son needs redeeming. Moreover, this is a love where the loved is perfectly adorable in the eyes of the lover, but even here there is a small distinction in how the love is manifest.
The Son demonstrates his love for the Father by the perfection of his obedience. In John 14, we’re told explicitly, “The world must know I love the Father and always do what he commands me.” By contrast, the love of the Father for the Son is not expressed in terms of obedience to the Son but rather in terms of the Father’s absolute commitment that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father, that he should give the Spirit to him without measure and so forth.
Secondly, there is what we might call the providential love of God. That is, the love of God over the entire created order. He’s the God who sends his sun and his rain upon the just and upon the unjust without moral distinction. It’s not as if all the Christian farmers get the appropriate rain and all the non-Christian farmers don’t. All the good lions get a fat antelope to eat and all the bad lions don’t. There is a providential rule over the created order that is in some ways amoral. Not immoral. Amoral. It is removed from moral distinctions but is beneficent, kind, generous, giving, sustaining.
Thirdly, there is what might be called the yearning salvific love of God. God is the God who does cry out, “Turn! Turn! Why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” When we are told by John that God so loved the world, he does not mean God so loved the elect. Now it’s true the focus of the word world is the entire world in disarray and in rebellion against God. The focus is not so much on the bigness of the world as on the badness of the world in John’s terminology. Yet, nevertheless, this is a love for the whole world. The invitation is to all. The command is to all to repent, and God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.
Fourthly, there is the love of God for the elect. It is distinctive. Thus, when God chooses Israel, we are told he sets his affection on Israel, not because Israel is bigger or better or stronger or mightier, but simply because he loves her. That is, he sets his affection on her. He loves her because he loves her. It’s hard to get beyond that point. In that sense it is a distinctive love. He loves Israel in the sense in which he does not love the Moabites or the Hittites or the Egyptians. It is a distinctive, choosing kind of love.
In the fifth place, the Bible sometimes speaks of the conditional love of God. You find that in the Ten Commandments themselves. He shows love to the third and fourth generation of those who love him and keep his commandments. Jesus himself says, “If you love me you will obey me. You will do all that I say.”
Jude tells us, “Keep yourselves in the love of God,” which gives the impression that it is possible not to keep yourselves in the love of God. It is a conditional sort of love that turns, quite frankly, on our obedience. Let me make one or two comments about this list of ways the Bible has of speaking of the love of God.
1. We are not to think of these as five loves.
It’s not as if God says, “Hmm. In this case I think I’ll choose number three.” Rather, this is a reflection of the fact God is a personal being. He’s a sovereign, transcendent personal being, but he’s a personal being, and personal beings use the language of love in diverse ways.
This is true of us, we who are finite beings. Thus, I love woodworking and I love my wife, but she would not be too pleased if I put those two together in the same sentence and just left it there without further comment. There is a sense in which I think I love my children unconditionally. If my daughter, now in fourth-year university 750 miles from home, decided to leave Ithaca, New York and go to New York City and become a hooker, I think (so help me God) I’d love her anyway.
If my son, now in ROTC and studying computer science, decided instead to become a drug dealer, I think I’d love him anyway. In that sense my love for them is unconditional. On the other hand, if I tell one of them, “If you’re taking the car, be back by midnight,” and they’re not back by midnight, if they come in at ten past without a jolly good reason, they’re going to face the wrath of Dad.
In that sense, you see, my love is conditional. It’s the same dad. It’s not that I’ve opted to choose love number six or something. Do you see? Love is used as language in a variety of ways, and you must be sensitive to the context in which the Bible speaks of the love of God.
2. We should reflect on the love of God only in conjunction with reflection on all of God’s perfections.
I wish I could say much more about that. Some of the contemporary errors that are introduced so focus on the love of God that they forget the other attributes of God: his righteousness, his holiness, his faithfulness, his truthfulness, and so forth.
3. If you absolutize any one of the five, you generate theological nonsense.
Thus, for example, if you choose the fifth and make it absolute (God’s love is conditional), then you go through life wondering if you’ve been good enough somehow to maintain or even earn the love of God. “If I haven’t had my quiet time today, or if I haven’t been pious enough in my thoughts, or if I haven’t prayed long enough, maybe God is mad at me.”
God help us. There are a lot of evangelicals who go through life thinking of God as a sort of conditionally loving God, and there is a context in which that is correct, but there is also a context in which it makes God extraordinarily narrow and cheap and finally reduces salvation itself to something less than a free gift. If, on the other hand, you focus on God’s yearning salvific love, then you sooner or later portray a God who has done all that he can. Poor chap!
He has tried hard, and now it all turns on you, and if you don’t somehow say yes to him, he’s going to be frustrated for all eternity, poor chap, which is not exactly the picture you get of God in the Bible, but if you focus only on the God of election, then it is fairly easy to drift toward a position in which God loves the elect and hates the damned and that’s all there is to it. You’re one or the other, and there’s no sense in which God has any affection or care for you if you’re amongst the damned.
It can lead to a movement historically that is called hyper-Calvinism which finally leads to the refusal to preach the gospel universally. That has not been strong in this country, but it has reared its head from time to time in Britain and has a certain resurgence there in certain circles at the moment.
We are in a better place, I think, to evaluate certain evangelical clichÈs. “God’s love is unconditional.” Have you ever heard that? Have you ever preached it? True or not true? Well, it depends. You see, God’s love is unconditional if you’re talking about his election. God’s love is unconditional if you’re talking about his providence. God’s love for the Son is certainly unconditional, but on the other hand, it doesn’t fit that last category where the love of God is explicitly conditional repeatedly in Scripture in both the old covenant and the new.
Or “God loves everyone exactly the same.” True or not true? Well, it depends. It depends on the passage. If you’re talking about his providential love, the love that sends the sun and the rain upon the just and upon the unjust, that’s the whole point. It is! It is not conditioned by who we are. God does love the just and the unjust the same in that sense. Do you see?
On the other hand, you absolutize that and you make shipwreck of Deuteronomy 7 and Deuteronomy 10. God loved the church.… Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. What do you do with a passage like that? In other words, there are different ways in which the Bible speaks of the love of God, and unless you remain sensitive to the context of those passages, eventually you produce theological nonsense that has quite a large bearing on ethics and your vision of God and how you preach the gospel and a lot of other things as well.
That series of talks was almost exclusively focused on the different ways the Bible speaks of the love of God. More recently, I have been working on the different ways the Bible speaks of Christian love, for there there is quite a range of diversity as well. Thirty years ago, I suppose the best-known verse in the Bible was John 3:16, at least in the Western world. Today that’s no longer the case. In the Western world, the best-known verse (nobody can put a number to it anymore) is Matthew 7:1: “Judge not that you be not judged.”
The backup position is, “After all, God demands that we love. If Christians would just love, there wouldn’t be all of this judgment, would there?” If Christians introduce moral discussion into popular discourse or into questions of church discipline or into questions of national import in the public theater, immediately we are judged to be unloving by a large part of the press.
I want to begin to address some of those questions here. I have addressed them in a book, but I want to pick up a few sub points to that issue and focus on a number of passages. It’s in this connection, then, that I direct your attention first of all to Mark, chapter 12, verses 28 to 34. Listen to what Scripture says.
“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noting that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ ‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘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.’
‘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 and with all your strength, and 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.’ And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
In any complex legal system, some laws are more important than others. Jesus recognizes the point, for example, in Matthew 23:23. In the matter of tithing, he compares this scrupulous tithing of even garden herbs to the weightier matters of justice and mercy. He says, “These you ought to have done but not to leave the others undone.” Compared with the one to the other, nevertheless, justice and mercy are weightier. That is a rabbinic distinction, a distinction between the light and the heavy, between the more important and the less important.
You find the same distinction again when Jesus, in chapter 7 of John’s gospel, says, “The law says you’re not to work on the Sabbath day. The law also says you’re supposed to circumcise a male child on the eighth day. Supposing the eighth day falls on the seventh day (that is the eighth day of the child’s life falls on the seventh day of the week), is the rabbi then to perform the circumcision? That’s work.” Do you see?
The answer, of course, is the circumcision is to go ahead, which shows the circumcision law is more important (it takes precedence over, in certain contexts) than the Sabbath law. That eventually raises the question, “Which is the most important law of all?” And those kinds of debates were circulating in the first century.
Jesus now gives his answer, and in his answer he unites, so far as we know for the first time, two texts, the Shema (Deuteronomy, chapter 6, verses 4 and 5) and Leviticus 19:18 and parables this business of loving neighbor as oneself. Consider then his first answer. “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.” There are several important points to be observed.
Both in Deuteronomy 6 and here, the command to love God is preceded by this insistence on the oneness of God. Why? “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one.” In the pagan worlds, gods occupied a certain kind of domain. Thus, in the Greco-Roman world if you were going to make a sea voyage, then you wanted Neptune on board. You wanted Neptune on side. Neptune was the god of the sea.
If you were going to give a speech, then you wanted, on the Greek side, Hermes, or on the Latin side you wanted Mercury, because this was the god of communication. If you were going to war, you wanted Zeus on side or Jupiter on the Latin side. Do you see? Each god had a certain kind of domain, and there were many gods and many domains, and it was difficult, in fact, to cover them all, but strictly speaking, you wanted the appropriate god for the particular domain.
That meant you could not give all of your allegiance to any one of the gods. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your 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.” There is but one God. He alone is God. He is not the god of some narrow domain. Thus, he demands all of our allegiance, all of our affection, all of our loyalty, all of our submission. He alone is God.
When you look at these phrases (there are four of them in Mark’s account: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”), I suspect we can easily get a slightly skewed vision of what this means. To love someone with all your heart in English means to love them passionately, to love with all the strength of your emotions.
The young man says to the young woman, “I love you with all my heart.” He does not mean, “I love you with all my mind,” because for us the heart is emblematic of the seat of emotions, but of course, as you well know, the heart in biblical thought is closer to mind, although that’s not quite right either. For us, mind sounds just a tad too cerebral, but it doesn’t mean quite what we mean by heart in English either.
It has to do with the core of your whole personality. It’s certainly closer to the mind’s side (to the way you think, to the way you look at things) than it is to what we mean by heart. Whereas today, you see, there is so much nonsense going around about loving with the heart or feeling with the heart or finding the force with the heart. “Feel, Luke. Feel.”
That’s not quite what Deuteronomy has in mind. It’s certainly not what Jesus has in mind. It’s more complex. It’s more comprehensive than that, so when you look at this you find love with the mind. That is the whole totality of your being not least what you think and who you are. Then here in terms of some non-material part, but the very core of your being again. Then to add them all up together with your strength.
What does that mean? What does it mean to love God, not with your heart in the contemporary sense but with your whole being, with the way you think, your mind, with who you are, and all your strength? Let me say quickly this is not mere volitionism, which is the way some people have taken love. They think agape love refers to the volition for the other’s good and that’s all there is to it. You might hate their guts but still be committed to their good so you still love them with agape.
That is a load of international class rubbish. It really won’t wash at all. Take a look at the Love Chapter, for example, where Paul goes ahead and pictures some people as loving volitionally, altruistically, giving their bodies to be burned, giving all their goods to feed the poor but have not agape. Thus, love cannot be reduced to mere volitionism, the will determination to seek the other’s good. It is more comprehensive than that.
On the other hand, it can’t be reduced either to mere emotion, precisely because heart is more comprehensive. In fact, in biblical terminology, the emotions are seated not in the heart but in the bowels, in the guts, or sometimes in the kidneys. In the Old English version, reins, which is a word still used in French, les reins. “I love you with all my kidneys.”
You can’t imagine that today, but that’s pretty close to what would have been said in the ancient world if you were merely trying to stress the emotional side of things. Hence, the older English versions speak of bowels of compassion which sounds vaguely indecent today, but that’s the locus of the physiognomy of love in the symbolism of the ancient world. What does this mean then? It’s important to recall Jesus is, after all, quoting the Old Testament, so turn to Deuteronomy, chapter 6. Let me read a few verses.
“These are the commands, decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that 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 by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. 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, just as the Lord, the God of your fathers, promised you.
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. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on your doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
Then a little farther on: “… then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” Verse 13: “Fear the Lord your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; for the Lord your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land. Do not test the Lord your God as you did at Massah,” and so forth.
Do you hear what is being said? This love for God is bound up with fear in God, with obeying God, and passing on in obedience and example and instruction the entire corpus of the covenantal commandments to the next generation. That’s the frame of reference in which we have this command to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength.
How could it be anything else when he is the one God? He is the one who has made us. He is the one who has freed us, who has liberated us, and he is the one who is to be feared, feared so greatly that if we do not obey him he will turn against us because he is a jealous God. Thus, the Old Testament context shows that loving God is all of the peace with fearing him, obeying him, and passing on his words to the next generation.
I have a little trouble with that notion of Mark, chapter 12, and parallels that somehow think we are obeying this text of loving God with our minds provided we are doing intellectual work in a roughly kingdom domain. That’s a rising interpretation today. We’ve all read Mark Nolls’, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, with its very famous first sentence. “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t one,” he says. Too sweeping by half, but he has a certain point.
Nevertheless, one gets the impression from this tradition that eventually you are obeying this command provided you’re engaged in intellectual work, so if you’re studying Coptic in order to improve your text criticism or if you’re studying Oecolampadius because people have written on Luther and Calvin but not too much has been written on Oecolampadius or if you’re studying the finer points of music theory so you can somehow incorporate your music theory into revising old hymns and updating them for the glory of God and the public worship of the church, then somehow you are loving God with your mind.
Well, you may be. You may also be an international class hypocrite, for you see, there are some people who find a lot of satisfaction in studying almost anything. I have personal friends who spend their entire adult working lives on the metal alloys of fins in jet engines and others who are really into microbiology, and they love their work and find a great sense of fulfillment in it.
There are some of us, too, who work away at some doctrine, some heritage, some discipline in the seminary environment and find ourselves emotionally and intellectually satisfied because we are intellectual beings. For some people, they get their intellectual kicks out of studying the sex lives of sea turtles; we get it out of studying Oecolampadius.
Our danger is we think we’re somehow more noble, more righteous, more godly, because our topic is in the domain of God, so we may delude ourselves along those fronts and think that somehow, provided we’re engaged in intellectual discipline, we are obeying this first commandment.
No, no, no. Look again at Deuteronomy 6 and Mark 12. There the heart of loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength is bound up with obedience, reverencing God for who he is with our whole being, such that we pass on the tradition to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation.
Our deep commitments touch what we talk about when we stand up and when we sit down, how we converse with our children, how we do mission to the next generation. That is what loving God means, and it certainly includes the intellectual work, and it certainly includes the practical hands of obedience, self-sacrifice, and service, but be careful to avoid new idolatries by simply underlining the word mind here.
Notice what a strong emphasis is laid in this passage on knowing God’s commandments, doing them, passing them on, thinking them through, obeying them, and passing them on. Are you aware of the vast number of passages in Scripture that make the same sort of point? Think of these verse, for example, at the end of Deuteronomy 17 where the author envisages a time when eventually there will be a king in Israel and this prescription is laid down.
“When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the priests who are Levites. It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel.”
So if someone becomes king in Israel what is the first thing he’s supposed to do? Appoint his secretary of state? Call together a council? Change the judiciary? Appoint a new military commander? No, no, no. The first job is to copy out longhand the words of this law, which refers either to Deuteronomy or, possibly, even to the whole Pentateuch. Longhand. In Hebrew. Not download them from a CD to your hard-drive without it passing through your brain.
Copy them to your copy that you will then read daily all the rest of your life so you will learn to revere the words of the Lord your God and not turn aside to the left or the right, so you don’t think of yourselves as better than others in your realm. Think of the words given to Joshua in Joshua 1:8. Think of Psalm 1. “Blessed is the man who does not walk according to the counsel of the ungodly and does not stand in the way of sinners.” That’s an awkward translation.
To stand in someone’s way in English means to hinder them. To stand in someone’s way makes you think of Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge, each standing in each other’s way, and one of them lands in the drink. To stand in someone’s way in Hebrew means to walk where they walk, to adopt their lifestyle, to stand in their moccasins. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the way of the wicked or sit in the seat of mockers.”
What’s the counter to that? “His delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night.” Here then is what it means to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and now in about two minutes, let me say something about the Leviticus 19:18 quotation in Mark 12:31 as well. Jesus tells not only what the first commandment is but the second as well, and here he refers to Leviticus 19:18. If we had time to examine that passage in detail, you would discover it is a chapter that is full of commands regarding social relationships.
“Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another. Do not swear falsely. Do not defraud your neighbor. 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 hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. Finally, do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”
One of the striking things about this chapter is how often this justification is tacked on to the end of the commands: “I am the Lord.” Thus, for example, “Don’t pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord. Don’t profane the name of your God. I am the Lord. Don’t curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind but fear your God. I am the Lord. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbors’ life. I am the Lord.”
You see, the cardinal offense is not first and foremost horizontal; the cardinal offense is first and foremost defying God. That’s why the first commandment is still the first commandment. We are to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and every social offense is first and foremost a breaking of the first commandment. You cannot break anything in the second commandment without breaking the first commandment. It is to de-God God. It is to dethrone God. It is to put yourself above God. It is to introduce a new idolatry.
One of our problems as we seek to convince our world that Christianity is important is we keep stressing the value of Christian morality along horizontal lines, and that certainly is true, but the Bible sees the fundamental sin as idolatry. It is the de-Godding of God, the dethroning of God, the robbing God of his majesty, of his greatness, of his glory, of his exclusiveness as God.
Thus, all of the commands of this second command, this command to love neighbor as self, are bound up in this presupposition: “I am the Lord. I am the Lord.” Brothers and sisters in Christ, if I had time I would track out how this plays in the New Testament. It is worth pointing out here in this passage, however, that Jesus’ interlocutor appreciates what Jesus has said. “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ ”
Do not misunderstand Jesus’ remark. He is not saying, “Provided you try a little harder along this line, you’ll finally be able to get in,” as if Jesus is saying the key to entering the kingdom of God is first and foremost a matter of obeying these two commands adequately. “If you obey them adequately, you’ll get in. You’re not far. You’re getting there. Try a little harder and you’ll get in.”
That’s not what he’s saying at all. It misunderstands the entire flow of the chapter. What he is saying, rather, is, “Entrance into the kingdom of God is irrefragably bound up with loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself. You cannot enter this kingdom without demonstrating something of those obedience forms.” That’s why in John’s first epistle, for example, he can make the test of love as important as the test of truth. You cannot finally be saved by grace and hate your neighbor. You cannot finally be saved by grace and make yourself God.
To come to terms with the finality of the first and second commandment is to come to terms with a God-centered universe, and thus, a small picture of what a renovated universe will be on the last day when there is no more tension between the already and the not yet, when we shall be all that we ought to be. Now we confess Jesus as Lord and we still sin, but on that day we will confess Jesus as Lord and we will no longer sin, so we join the church in every generation crying, “Even so, come Lord Jesus,” and meanwhile we go back to the cross and say, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Unless we recognize this is foundational to what it means to have a God-centered universe, that God is calling out a people to himself in which all acknowledge he alone is God and that this touches all of our social relationships, we are merely creating new idolatries, we are merely loving self and hiding the grossness.
