Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Love of God in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Welcome to this afternoon’s workshop. Let me begin with prayer.
Our Father, when we come to a subject as grand as your love, we do not want somehow to dilute it by mere sentiment, nor to kill it by endless analysis, nor to minimize it by reducing it to the dimensions of our own. We want, Lord God, both to understand what your most Holy Word says about your love and then also to bask in it.
For the apostle Paul could pray for his converts that they might have the power, together with all the saints, to grasp how long and wide and high and deep is the love of God in Christ Jesus, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that we might be filled with all the fullness of the measure of God. What the apostle prayed for the Ephesians, we dare, Lord God, to pray for ourselves. In Jesus’ name, amen.
A few years ago, I wrote a little book that sprang out of some lectures I had given called The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. I want to summarize the argument of that book first of all before I press on to other material. In much of especially the Western world today, if people believe in God at all, they believe him to be a God of love. Not necessarily a God of holiness or rectitude or righteousness, and probably not a God of wrath, but a God of love.
There was a time when the best-known verse in the Bible in the culture at large in the West was John 3:16. That is no longer the case. The best-known verse today (people don’t know where it’s from, but they can all quote it) is “Judge not, that you be not judged.” This is taken to be a perfect reflection of the fact that God is love.
If there is one theological pressure driving us, for example, toward openness theology or the like, it is the assumption that since God is a God of love, he cannot really stand in sovereign sway over nasty things, because, after all, he’s a loving God. Much better to somehow diminish his knowledge or his sovereignty in some respect or another, because the given is that God is a God of love.
Worse, that notion of a God of love becomes astonishingly sentimentalized, so that we are no longer capable of hearing anymore what Scripture actually says about the love of God. There have been times in the history of the church, of course, when people began with the holiness of God or when they were so convinced of the justice of God that to announce the love of God was to announce good news.
But in our culture in much of the West, where there is any sort of belief in God at all, the assumption is that God is an endearing granddaddy in the sky whose primary function it is to love me. This manifests itself in all kinds of interesting ways and has been operating along these lines for some time and in many more countries than just the West.
I remember a number of years ago I was studying in Germany. I was taking a mid- or upper-level German course to improve my ability to speak the language. In the same course was an African from what was then Zaire. He knew no English, but both of us, when we got really good and tired of German, would go out for a meal together and speak French, because I was brought up in French. So I got to know him pretty well.
It turned out that he was trying to complete a PhD in mechanical engineering at a German university and needed to improve his German somewhat. His wife, meanwhile, was pursuing medical studies in London. In due course, I got to know him pretty well, and I observed that once or twice a week he would go to the red-light district of town and pay his money and find himself a woman.
Once I got to know him pretty well, one evening when we were out for a meal I said to him, “What would you say if you discovered that your wife were doing something similar in London?” He said, “Oh, I’d kill her.” I said, “Well, that sounds a bit inconsistent, doesn’t it?” He said, “Oh, you don’t understand. From my tribe, the men have the right to sleep around. The women don’t. She would be dishonoring me. I would have to kill her. It would be a matter of honor.”
I said, “But you told me you were brought up in a Christian school and in a Christian church. You know God doesn’t grade on the scale according to gender.” He said, “Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son mÈtier. God is good. He’s bound to forgive us. That’s his job.” It’s pretty common, isn’t it? I want to suggest that, in fact, the Bible speaks of the love of God in distinctive ways, and it is always a mistake to confuse them. I have listed five ways on the whiteboard.
First, the Bible speaks of what we might call the intra-Trinitarian love of God. That is, the love of the Father for the Son (John 3 and John 5: “The Father loves the Son,” the text explicitly says) or the love of the Son for the Father. John 14:31: “The whole world must know that I love the Father,” and so forth. Clearly, the love of the Father for the Son or the Son for the Father is in no sense a redemptive love, since neither the Father nor the Son needs redeeming.
In some sense, this love must be connected with the loveliness of the loved. That is, when the Father loves the Son or the Son loves the Father, each finds the other lovable. In that sense, the love of the Father for the Son can’t be exactly the same as his love for me, since I am not intrinsically lovable. We’ll come to that in due course.
Then we might refer to passages that speak of God’s providential love. One could almost call it his amoral love. Not quite, but pretty close. That is, it is the love that finds God sending his sun and his rain upon both the just and the unjust; that is, without distinction. In that sense, it is morally blind. It is generous and giving. Although the text does not actually speak explicitly of God’s love in this respect, we know that’s what it’s about.
Consider, for example, Matthew, chapter 5. We are to love our enemies as ourselves, just as our heavenly Father sends his sun and his rain upon the just and the unjust. In other words, the model of our love for our enemies here is, in fact, God’s providential love, what Reformed people would call God’s common grace, his loving care for his people comprehensively.
Then one might think of passages that speak of God’s yearning love or his inviting love, his salvific, his saving love. He’s the God who calls to benighted rebels, “Turn! Turn! Why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” Then there are passages that speak of God’s choosing love, his elective love.
Why, then, does God set his affection on Israel? Why does he choose Israel? Is it because Israel is smarter or bigger or militarily stronger or wiser? Read Deuteronomy 7 and Deuteronomy 10. God sets his affection on Israel because he loves her. That is, he loves her because he loves her. There is a sovereignty to it that simply cannot be denied. Of course, there are similar passages in Romans and Ephesians and so forth.
Then there’s what might be called God’s conditional love, his familial love, his covenant love, where there may be explicit conditions that are set. For example, in the Ten Commandments, God shows himself to be the God who extends his love to the third and fourth generation of those who love him and keep his commandments, or in Jude 21 we read, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” The assumption certainly is that it’s quite possible for you not to keep yourself in the love of God.
In John 15, likewise, there are conditions that are set. If we love him, then there are certain things that will happen. It is set out quite conditionally. Now I hasten to say that we must not read these five different categories as if they are distinctive loves of God. It’s not as if God turns to a new person or a new situation and says, “Hmm, which love should I use this time? Let’s go for #4.” We should not think in those sorts of mechanistic terms.
I never speak of the loves of God. I speak of different ways that the Bible has of talking about the love of God. I don’t want people to go from this workshop thinking, “Well, actually, what Don Carson said is that God has a whole lot of different loves.” No, Don Carson did not say that. Rather, the Bible has different ways of talking about the love of God.
In some sense, this should not surprise us, because we likewise have different ways of talking about love. I might say, “I love my wife” and “I love woodwork,” but if I put the two of them in the same sentence with my wife in the room, I’m probably in trouble, because somehow the two forms of love are incommensurate.
I would like to think I love my children unconditionally. I have a daughter in Upstate New York in fourth-year university. If, God forbid, instead of being in the church she’s in and following the Lord as she is she decided to become a hooker on the streets of New York City, I would like to think I would love her in any case. She’s my daughter.
I have a son who by this autumn will be in California, and if, God forbid, he should become a mugger on the street and start pushing drugs in LA, I would like to think I would love him in any case because he’s my son. In that sense, I love him unconditionally. On the other hand, if they’re at home and they borrow the car and I say, “Please have it back by midnight,” and they come in at 12:15 without a jolly good reason, they will face the wrath of Dad.
It’s not that there is no sense in which I love them, but there is a sense in which my love as manifested in my generosity with the car is conditional upon obedience and driving decently and getting in on time. There are inner-familial structures and constraints. So there are many ways in which language that describes God’s love is in conformity with the different ways in which we speak of God’s love too. So it is important to recognize that these are not distinctive loves of God; they are different ways of talking legitimately about the love of God.
The second thing to observe about this series is if you extrapolate any one of these ways of talking about the love of God and make it normative, you will make theological shipwreck. In other words, if you take any one of these ways the Bible has of speaking of the love of God and now universalize it, “This is the only way to think of the love of God,” then you will introduce so many warps into your theology you cannot possibly be orthodox.
For example, take the last one: God’s love is conditional. Well, if you absolutize that, then.… “Have I been good enough today for God to love me? Have I tried hard enough? Have I kept my mind pure enough? Were my devotions long and passionate enough? Did I bear witness to anybody within the last 24 hours?” Constantly, then, you will be forcing yourself under a system of merit theology that diminishes God and finally abandons any notion of grace.
Or if you take, let’s say, the second one, God’s providential love, and now you have God’s love being extended to all people unconditionally, independent of whether there is moral virtue or not, independent of whether they’re saved or not, independent of whether they’re righteous or not.… God loves Mother Teresa and Hitler all the same, and everything is just wonderful because he’s such a sweet and loving God (which is pretty close to the contemporary vision).
It’s not long before you have not only an amoral God but an actively immoral God. This becomes the only virtue. It becomes almost impossible to talk meaningfully and insightfully about God’s holiness or justice, and if you cannot talk about God’s holiness and justice, pretty soon you can’t talk about the cross either.
On the other hand, if you absolutize the third one, then you picture God as having done his very level best, poor chap. Now it all depends on you. There he stands, pleading with you, and there’s not a blessed thing he can do. It all depends on you. He has done what he can. He sent his Son. He has given his Spirit. He has invited you, and now it all depends on you. You hold the key to eternity entirely in your own hands. Poor ol’ God. He does try so hard, doesn’t he?
If you absolutize the fourth one, then you have God sovereignly in control, but there’s no point inviting anybody to be converted. No point pressing evangelism. After all, God has his elect. That ends it. God will save them whether by your means or mine. Who gives a rip? God will do it. Just trust him.
So it is very easy to make moral shipwreck, theological shipwreck, by taking any one of these diverse ways the Bible has of talking of the love of God and then absolutizing it until eventually there is no more sense in it at all. Insofar as many parts of the world still speak of the love of God today, most are at step two. This has resulted in extraordinarily fuzzy thinking.
Now that’s the first step I want to take. The second step I want to take is this. There are many people who try to think of God’s love today as God’s willed commitment to the good of another, which has no emotional entailment, and they likewise argue that Christian love, agape love, is something of the same. That is, it has nothing to do with emotion. It has nothing to do with what you’re feeling about the other person. It has to do with whether you are committed to the other’s good.
For some people, this is tied, in their thinking, to the agapao word group, which is cast over against other word groups. This is a mistake both lexical and theological. It’s a lexical mistake in that agapao is not so restricted. It simply is not. Neither is phileo. For example, in 2 Samuel 13, when Amnon incestuously rapes his half sister Tamar, twice in the LXX version we are told that Amnon loved her, once using agapao and once using phileo. Whatever else he was doing, he was not seeking her good.
When we are told, “Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present evil world,” the verb is agapao. Again, it is not dispassionate seeking of the good of money either. When we are told, “The Father loves the Son” twice in John’s gospel, John 3 and John 5, once the verb phileo is used, and once the verb agapao is used. There is no semantic difference between those two in that context at all.
Perhaps the most stunning passage is 1 Corinthians 13, the so-called Love Chapter. There Paul argues, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Then he mentions the other things he might have. “Though I give all my goods to feed the poor …” That is altruistic love, sacrificing everything for the good of the other. “… but have not love …” That shows that such altruism is not itself love.
“Though I give my body to be burned, but have not love,” which shows once again that mere self-sacrifice for the good of another is not itself love. It may simply be disciplined will. So the kind of argument you find in some Christian circles, which says you may love somebody while hating his or her guts, does not work.
In other words, the argument runs, “I can’t stand them. They go right up my nose. They irritate me every time they’re in the room, but I love them for Jesus’ sake.” It’s scarcely a Christian way of looking at Christian love. You may be determined to do them good, but whatever altruism or self-denial or willed commitment may be entailed by such a view is still not Christian love. There is an emotional commitment of the whole being in love that includes the affective structures of our minds and hearts as well as our wills.
The third thing that needs to be said is that when we speak of God’s love, many people today, influenced by contemporary psychological theory and the like, infer from the fact that God loves us that we must be wonderfully important and, therefore, we should encourage self-esteem. If God loves you, who are you not to love yourself? If God loves you, for you not to love yourself would be to disagree with God. You thus owe it to yourself to agree with God. If God loves you, you should love yourself. That’s the way the argument goes.
What is the intrinsic flaw in the argument? The intrinsic flaw in the argument, of course, is that this assumes the reason God loves me is that I am so lovable or that somehow I am worth his love. That’s not quite right either, because all of Scripture insists there is a profound sense in which, while God stands over against me in love in certain senses (we’ll come to them in a moment), he also stands over against me in judgment.
Picture Charles and Susan walking along a beach. They have just finished graduate school. They are deeply in love. Charles takes Susan’s hand as the sun settles in the west and sheds its glorious beams across the water. They kick off their sandals. They feel the wet squishy sand between their toes. They walk along, and Charles says, “Susan, I love you.” What does he mean?
Well, he could mean a lot of things. It may simply mean his hormones are leaping and he wants to go to bed with her. It may mean no more than that. But assuming that there is a modicum of decency in the chap, let alone Christian commitment, presumably it means something more than that. It may be a declaration of lifelong intent, but it certainly includes the assumption that in his eyes she is lovable.
When he says, “I love you, Susan,” he does not mean, “Susan, quite frankly, you have the greasiest hair on the planet. Your knees would shame a crippled camel. Your breath, quite frankly.… This halitosis is like a herd of unwashed elephants. Your sense of humor reminds me of Genghis Khan, but I love you.” He doesn’t mean that, does he? He means something like, “With your smile, you are utterly irresistible. Your eyes are so beautiful. The scent of your hair.… I am already on the outskirts of heaven.” He means to say she is lovable to him, does he not?
Now God comes to us and says, in effect, “I love you.” What does he mean? Does he come to us and say, “Quite frankly, you are so adorable. I can’t imagine heaven without you. I would be so lonely up here if you did not join me. Your wit, your intelligence, the sharpness of your conversation, the brilliance of your repartee, your smile.… Heaven would be barren indeed unless you joined me.” He doesn’t mean that either, does he?
In fact, when we read, “God so loved the world that he gave his Son,” it is important to remember that in Johannine theology, cosmos, used more than 70 times, in 3 or 4 texts merely means a big place. In every one of the rest of the texts, it has negative overtones. In the last two verses of the book, for example, John says, “Jesus did many other things, which are not written in this book, but I suppose that if all of the things that were written down were here, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
The world, then, is the potential for being a very big library. It’s a nice usage I always think, but in that context, cosmos is morally neutral. But in the overwhelming majority of passages in John’s gospel, cosmos has negative overtones. We saw this morning in the prologue, “He came into the world. Though the world was made through him, the world did not know him.” That’s a damning indictment.
When you come to John 3:16, “God so loved the world,” we are not to think God’s love is wonderful because the world is so big, but God’s love is wonderful despite the fact the world is so bad. In other words, God is saying to us, in effect, “You are, morally speaking, the people of the halitosis and the camel legs and the greasy hair and the repartee of a Genghis Khan, but I love you anyway, because that’s my nature.”
Now that’s not all of these usages. It’s not this one. It’s not this one. It is certainly these two. In one sense, it’s not this one either, because this is a redeeming love we’re talking about. There are different usages depending on the context. So there is a place where Christians ought to think of themselves with the right kind of self-esteem. Yes, there is the right kind. But this is tied not to the fact that God loves me in order to save me; it is tied theologically to the doctrine of the imago Dei.
That is to say, every human being is made in the image of God, and that is what gives me an ultimate significance. Regardless of how gifted I am or how gorgeous or ugly I am or how disabled I am, I am a human being made in the image of God. I am not merely a convenient collection of orderly molecules. I am a being made in the image of God. That is what gives us a transcendental significance.
So one ought to tie questions of self-understanding and self-awareness first and foremost to the doctrine of creation. We ought not infer from God’s redemptive love of us that the reason God loves us is that we’re so lovable. It’s simply not the way it is.
Now this and other sorts of arguments were all part of that earlier book, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. Now I want to flip the whole thing over and talk about Christian love in the light of the love of God. I would like to direct your attention for a few minutes to Mark, chapter 12, verses 28–34.
“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing 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.”
Now I don’t have time to expound this paragraph in detail, but I would like to draw your attention to a number of crucial points. First, this question, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” was a question that was already being discussed in first-century Judaism. It’s an almost inevitable question where you have any complex system of law, because in any complex system of law, there will be hierarchical matters necessarily introduced.
For example, in John’s gospel, we are reminded that the law teaches the seventh day is the Sabbath and no work is to be done in it. We are also reminded that every male child is to be circumcised on the eighth day. Supposing the eighth day of the child’s life falls on the Sabbath. Then the question is.… Does the rabbi perform circumcision? If he does, he’s breaking the Sabbath. If he does not, he is breaking the circumcision law.
So in some sense or another, there must be a hierarchy to resolve this issue. Jesus himself draws attention to the point in John’s gospel. His answer is that the circumcision law takes precedence over the Sabbath law. In that case, in other words, circumcision law is elevated above the Sabbath. That’s his example.
In any complex system of law, there will inevitably be some sort of hierarchy. That raises the question.… If there’s a hierarchy, which is the most important of all? First-century rabbis had a variety of answers. Some said it was loving your neighbor as yourself, but only Jesus, so far as our sources go, gave this twofold answer.
Now we turn to his answer itself. The first thing to observe about it is that the terminology can be misleading in our world. I cannot speak for all of the languages represented in this room, but in many Western languages at least, you speak of loving someone with all your heart. In other words, Charles does not say to Susan, “I love you with all my kidneys” or “I love you with all my liver,” at least not in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese.
I don’t know all of the languages represented here, and there may be some language here that loves you with all your kidneys, but not in these languages. You love people with all your heart. In other words, in the Western world the heart symbolizes the center of emotions. But that’s not the way it is in the Bible. It’s a little lower down. In the biblical worldview, the center of your emotions is your gut or your abdomen, your viscera. We sometimes speak today of “visceral emotions.”
In older versions of the Bible in English, like the King James Version, you sometimes read of “reins and mercies.” Reins, French … les reins. It’s the kidneys and mercies. Philippians used to be rendered, bowels of compassion. It sounds vaguely indecent in modern English. In other words, in the Hebrew world, the center of the emotions was down in this domain, and the heart was the center of self-identity. It was the center of the whole person.
In fact, it’s closer to what we mean by mind. The only problem is that mind is just a wee bit too cerebral, but it’s closer to mind than it is to what we mean by heart. Now come to Jesus’ answer again. The most important commandment is, “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.”
Notice four elements, four prepositional phrases: heart, soul, mind, and strength. In fact, both heart and mind are in parallel, and soul and strength are in parallel. It’s a kind of “A/B, A/B” parallelism. Your whole soul, your whole being, your whole strength; your whole self-identity, your heart, your mind. If that’s the case, then one asks the further question, “What does it mean to love God with your mind, when so much in Western terminology and heritage speaks of loving in some dimension other than the mind?”
You think with your mind, and you love with your heart. We criticize people sometimes for choosing to love someone without weighing carefully with their mind what is at issue. They respond, “Well, I’ve fallen in love,” as if the love dimension is so removed from the evaluative process of mind that the heart is acting independently. This language suddenly seems very obscure indeed, very strange. How shall we respond?
The third thing to observe about this passage is that it is, of course, a quotation from the Old Testament, and it is important to observe that text within the Old Testament framework. The quotation is from Deuteronomy 6. Let me remind you of the context. Moses is presented as reminding the people of all of the covenantal obligations God has already given just prior to their entry into the Promised Land.
We read, “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.” Then further on, commandments and so forth.
Now what are we to make of this passage? Observe that when Jesus quotes it, he does not simply quote the commandment itself; he quotes the initial line. It’s part of the Shema, what every dutiful orthodox Jew is likely to quote morning and evening even to this day. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God.” What’s the connection between those two? I think the connection would have been almost self-evident to anybody living in polytheistic times. We’ve lost that understanding today.
In the world of polytheism, the gods had various domains. Thus, in the Greek world, if you wanted to take a sea voyage and you wanted to offer a sacrifice to an appropriate god to make sure you arrived safely at the proper port, you might offer a sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea.
If you’re going to give a speech somewhere and you’re a little nervous.… After all, rhetoric was highly praised in the Greco-Roman world, and now you have to give a speech to the city council. To what god do you make appeal? Well, you make appeal to the god Hermes, the god of communication. Now you’re going to war. What god do you appeal to? Well, now you want Zeus on side, or Jupiter in the Latin pantheon.
In other words, each of these gods has his or her finite domain. Now you’re going to fall in love. What god do you want now? Or goddess, as the case may be. Because of the multiplicity of gods, literally thousands of them, not one of the gods should capture all of your affection. Not one of the gods should capture all of your loyalty.
It all depends on the dimensions of your work, of your particular concern, of your particular traveling, your plans. That’s probably what stands likewise behind what Paul discovers in Athens in Acts 17. He says, “As I was traveling around, I stumbled across this altar, an altar to an unknown god.” That has not been found archaeologically, but it certainly makes sense. One understands what has gone on.
Granted that there are thousands of gods, granted that there are many different sacrifices to be offered depending on the particular domain of your life, there could be some god out there you don’t know much about who might have some influence in some domain of your life or the other, and just to make sure you don’t get snookered, it might be best to offer a sacrifice to any particular unknown god out there who might have a bad day and take it out on you.
But supposing there’s only one God. If there is but one God, if God is one, then he must capture us entirely if he is God. You love God with all your mind, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Notice that in many pagan systems, they could say that there is one God; they could not say that God is one.
In a pantheistic world, like the Greek world, it is possible to say that there is one God. In fact, in Greek discussions of divinity, often theos is used in the singular, but then it’s in a pantheistic sense almost, in which there is a divinity, a “godness,” in all of reality, and this “godness” emerges in particular finite theoi, in particular gods.
So there is a sense in which in a pantheistic form of paganism it’s possible to speak of one God, but this text goes beyond that. It says that God is one, and that no pagan could ever say. The biblical texts supporting monotheism insist not only that there is one God but that God is one. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.”
Now this commandment clearly is at the center of all commandments. One understands why it is the first, because it is the fundamental commandment that is always broken when any other commandment is broken. That is also why all sin is first and foremost rebellion against God. If this is the first and foremost commandment, the greatest and first sin is failure to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength.
We come back to the de-Godding of God. He is removed from the center. The opposite of this command is, in fact, not mere withholding of love. The opposite of this, the refutation of this, is idolatry. That’s why this is the first commandment. If only this commandment is kept, everything else is kept. If this commandment is broken, no matter how good you are socially, you are damned.
Still, that does not, by itself, explain what it means quite to love God with your heart/mind, with your soul/strength. Some people in academic or scholarly worlds think somehow, or give the impression at least, that loving God with your mind means writing a learned book. I have no doubt it is possible to love God with your mind while writing a learned book, but it is possible to write a learned book without loving God with your mind too.
Some Christians seem to think that just because they are doing intellectual work, intellectual theological work or intellectual theological work even on the sacred text, writing commentaries or the like, that somehow this gives them a higher edge up in the spiritual sphere of things. Or they may confuse their own deep enjoyment of intellectual work of this sort with love for God. “Of course I love God. I mean, I just love my work.” But let’s be quite frank …
There are intellectuals who just love studying sea urchins, molecular biology, Sahidic Coptic. I know a research scientist at Cambridge University, a brilliant man, who just loves studying the metal alloys that go into the fins of jet engines. To be honest, this does not turn me on, but it turns him on. I’m sure he gets as much emotional pleasure out of studying the metal alloys in the fins of jet engines as I get studying the Greek New Testament. The only difference is I may then delude myself into thinking my pleasure is actually love for God. He is not so deluded.
So what does this mean? Well, there’s a sense in which the rest of the chapter tells us what it means. What do we read immediately after the command? “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 the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
Then a little farther down: “Be careful not to forget the Lord, who brought you out 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. Do what is right and good in the Lord’s sight, so that it may go well with you.”
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?’ 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,’ ” and so on.
Do you hear what is being said? The unpacking of this command to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength means, in fact, actively working at remembering all of God’s salvific benefits, rehearsing them and reviewing them to a new generation, self-consciously and delightedly obeying them, fearing God and his jealousy lest we should ever slump into idolatry, rehearsing all of God’s commands, thinking about them, turning them over again and again and again. That’s what it means. It is a comprehensive adoration of God as God.
It lies at the heart of Christian worship. It lies at the heart of the creature/Creator relationship. It lies at the heart of the wholeness of life and being. This is precisely why secularization is so evil. Secularization does not mean the abolition of religion. Secularization squeezes religion to the periphery of life so that it doesn’t matter anymore. You can be ever so religious, but it just doesn’t matter. If, instead, you love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, there is no domain whatsoever in all of your life where Jesus is not Lord. It is the first commandment.
Then Jesus says the second commandment is, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s actually said several times in the Pentateuch, but perhaps the one that is specifically being referred to is Leviticus 19. Again, I submit it is the entire chapter, the entire context, that is being brought by the quotation. It is not merely the mere prescription, as if Christ has picked up a couple of lines here and a couple of lines there and married them together somehow and created a whole system. No, there are entire structures of thought that are coming with it.
How does Leviticus 19 run? “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” ’ ” Then there are all kinds of specific moral commandments, but within this framework, all of these moral commandments, “Do not lie, do not deceive one another, do not swear falsely, do not hold back the wages of a hired man, do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind,” and so on …
All of them are repeatedly said to be anchored first and foremost in the sheer godhood of God. Thus, you read, “Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of the Lord your God. I am the Lord. Do not 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 neighbor’s life. I am the Lord. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”
These are not arbitrary bits of things. The commandment to love one’s neighbor is itself grounded in who God is. To love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength necessarily brings with it the second commandment. They are not two independent commandments. “Well, I’ve managed to keep the first one pretty well. I do love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength. It’s the second one I have problems with.” It can’t be, because the two are flip sides of the same thing. That is why there is a comprehensiveness to this God-centeredness that brings Jesus, finally, to saying, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two. I am the Lord.”
Now we’ll turn to a new topic, this one grounded in Matthew, chapter 6. We have looked at the various ways the Bible speaks of God’s love, and now we have begun to look at various ways the Bible speaks of the Christian’s love. We’ve looked at one passage, Mark 12. I want to look at two more before I tie a couple of things together, and then we’ll open it up for questions and answers. Now we come to Matthew, chapter 5, beginning at verse 43.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Now, again, this passage is quoted more commonly today than it would have been a number of years ago, because it is tied to the sentimental views of God we’ve sometimes found in our society that I discussed at the beginning of the session. Nowadays, if someone makes moral judgments about something in the society.… “It seems to me that this particular activity is wrong. The Bible says it’s wrong.”
Somebody is going to come back at you and say, “You Christians, if you just listened to what the Bible says! ‘Judge not, that you be not judged. God sends his sun and his rain upon the just and the unjust.’ He commands you to love people the same way. Stop being so judgmental.” Haven’t you heard that again and again and again? Deep down, you hear these statements about the love of enemy, and you say, “Well, it’s what the text says.” What does this mean?
My father, who was a Baptist minister, used to say, when I was growing up, “A text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text.” It’s important to begin by trying to read this paragraph in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. This passage is one of six antitheses; that is, antithetical utterances in which Jesus says, in effect, “You have heard that it was said, but I say unto you.”
There are six antitheses, and all of these emerge after Matthew, chapter 5, verses 17–20. I want to deal with that passage at greater length in the theological network on Wednesday, but let me say this about it. Matthew 5:17 begins, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” The question is.… What does “fulfill” mean?
Often we have been told that fulfill means something like preserve or maintain, because that’s the opposite of abolish. “I haven’t come to abolish but to preserve.” But fulfill never means preserve. Does it simply mean perform? “I have not come to abolish but to perform.” But that’s no kind of setup for the antithesis. “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” No, in Matthew’s gospel, the verb to fulfill is used more than 20 times, and in every occurrence, without exception, it means something like to bring to pass that which was predicted. It is the fulfillment of prophecy.
Jesus begins this section by saying, “I have not come to abolish the law. That’s not my purpose at all. I haven’t come to destroy it. I’ve come to bring it to that to which it pointed. I have come to bring to pass that which it predicted.” There is a sense in which you and I are already familiar with this sort of thinking. If we’re Christians at all and we’ve been reading our Bibles for some years, we do have a category for a kind of predictive element in the law.
We read Leviticus, and we find out about the temple and the tabernacle. We find out about the priestly system and the sacrifices, and we say they are pointing forward, in a typological way, to the ultimate High Priest and the ultimate temple of God, the ultimate sacrifice who takes away our sin, the ultimate high priesthood. That is worked out in considerable detail in a book like Hebrews.
What reasons there are in the Old Testament itself for thinking those elements have a prophetic function, a forecasting function.… Not merely prophetic in a denunciatory sense, but prophetic in a predictive sense. “Do not think, therefore, that I have come to abolish the law. I haven’t come to do that at all. I’ve come to be that to which it points. I have come to bring to pass that which it predicts.”
We’re familiar with that way of looking at the law already in matters of sacrifice, in the cultic domain, but I want to suggest to you that in the teaching of Jesus, there is a pretty broad strand of thinking that insists the law comprehensively has a prophetic function, including the domain of what traditionally we’ve called moral law. I want to deal with that much more in the theological network, but, still, let me tease it out a wee bit here.
Jesus is not saying, “I have come to bring to pass certain moral strictures.” He’s saying something more comprehensive than that. He’s saying, “The law itself, in the stream of redemptive history, has a prophetic function, and I will bring that function to pass.” Now take a look at a couple of the other antitheses here so you can see what is meant. Begin at verse 33.
“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths that you made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the Evil One.”
Formally, Jesus is contradicting the Old Testament, because the Old Testament does tell us to swear and tells us by whom to swear. In fact, in the very passage we were looking at a few moments ago, Deuteronomy, chapter 6.… It’s a stunning text. Deuteronomy 6:13: “Fear the Lord your God, serve him only, and take your oaths in his name.” That’s what the Bible says.
Now along comes Jesus, and he says, “Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem. Do not swear by your head. Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ ” Now he dares say that this is the fulfillment of the law? Give me a break. It sounds like a contradiction rather than a fulfillment to me. It’s important to think that one through carefully.
Why in the Old Testament does Deuteronomy tell us that we are to swear by the Lord, to take our oaths in the Lord’s name? The reason is because you always swear by that which is most important to you. A secularist might say, “I solemnly swear on my mother’s grave,” or something like that, because the secularist may not have any god to swear by, and that which is understood to perhaps be most sacred or precious or valuable to him is the memory of his dear departed mom.
It would be quite possible in the polytheistic societies to swear by the Baals, to swear by Asherah, to swear by the sun. God says instead, “No, you take your oaths in the name of Yahweh, because by choosing to do that, you are showing that Yahweh is your highest good. It is your highest value. It is a way of confessing that God is God.” That’s what Deuteronomy 6:13 is saying.
But what happened in Judaism was ultimately this. “If we are to swear by the domain of the sacred, if we are to swear by God, then how far down the sacred ladder do you get before it doesn’t count anymore? Supposing you swear by the temple. Does that bind you? How about the altar in the temple? Does that bind you? How about the sacrifice on the altar in the temple? Does that bind you? How about the gold on the altar where the sacrifices are offered at the temple? Does that bind you?”
Now it becomes a casuistic system by which you have to decide whether the thing is sufficiently sacred, sufficiently holy, to bind you. That’s exactly what’s going on here. “I say do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is God’s footstool.” Many Jews argued, “To swear by heaven is binding; to swear by the earth is not.” Jesus says, “It doesn’t matter, either one.”
“Or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.” In the Greek, there’s a change of preposition. Jews in the first century sometimes adopted the position that if you swear by Jerusalem it is not binding. If you swear toward Jerusalem, that is, facing Jerusalem, then it is binding. In fact, the preposition here changes. “By this, by that … toward Jerusalem.”
It’s just like the little child who says, “Oh yes, I promise, I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die.” Then you turn away and he says, “It doesn’t count; I had my fingers crossed.” So all of the promises merely become ways of creating nasty systems of excused lies. In that world, Jesus comes along and says, “No, tell the truth.” The ultimate direction in which the Old Testament commandment points is toward a consummated kingdom in which we always tell the truth.
For, in fact, whatever you swear by is part of God’s world. You can’t control it. You can’t add a hair to your head. You can’t make it white or black. Well, we paint them, but apart from that. We don’t change their intrinsic color. No, it’s all God’s. The direction in which the Old Testament vision is pointing is toward an absolute reliability of thought and word and deed, a God-centeredness that is absolutely truthful.
Tell me, in the consummated kingdom, in the new heaven and the new earth, will there be any signs posted, “You shall not commit murder”? Quite apart from the difficulty you would probably have of committing murder on a resurrection body, you won’t need to have signs posted along those lines in any case, because there will be no more hate.
Will there be any signs posted, then, in the new heaven and the new earth, “You shall not commit murder”? No. Does that mean God has changed his mind on the murder law? No. The murder law itself ultimately points to, anticipates, a situation in which in the consummated splendor of God’s presence, not only will there be no more murder, but there will be no more motive for murder, no more hate, no more want to murder.
There is a sense in which the Old Testament law anticipates the glories of the kingdom to come, and the glories of the kingdom to come are already brought back into this life. That’s realized eschatology, inaugurated eschatology. The Christian community is already to be an outpost in time of the consummated kingdom, bringing those structures back into our lives and saying, “This is the direction in which the Old Testament law points. Do not think I have come to abolish the law. I have come to bring it to that toward which it points.”
Does this text, then, necessarily abolish all oaths in court? That’s the way some cultic groups take it. You go to court, and you’re supposed to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God. There are some cultic groups that say, “I can’t do that. Jesus forbids it. Let me just say ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no.’ Anything more is a sin.” Well, I appreciate their concern to take the Word of God seriously, but it does not really understand. It understands the words at a superficial level. It does not see that the real issue is truth-telling.
If there is something intrinsically evil about taking an oath, then God is a sinner, because God takes an oath. Hebrews reminds us that because there was no one greater to swear by, he swore by himself. That comes from Psalm 110. “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: ‘You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.’ ” He swears by himself, because there is no one greater.
Now why does God swear by himself? Because otherwise he might tell a lie? Does God swear because otherwise he couldn’t be relied upon? No, no. The writer to Hebrews points out this makes it two immutable things you can rely upon: the promise itself, because God is true, and the oath. In other words, the reason God swears is not because otherwise he might tell a lie; the reason God swears is because otherwise we might be inclined to doubt him.
It becomes an act of grace in which God doubly gives us reason for trusting him. So much does God want us to trust his Word he not only articulates his promise, but he then swears it as well. In this passage, then, the concern is to see how those who follow Christ are utterly truthful, utterly reliable. We do not need to swear. We certainly must not ever succumb to casuistic swearing, which gives us an excuse to bear false witness.
No, the point is that the oaths.… “Do not break your oath” or “Swear by the Lord.” Such texts in the Old Testament become a way of pointing to the ultimate good, the ultimate consummation, in which there is no falseness, no lie, no deceit. Already the people of God are to bear witness to that way of looking at all of reality by being an outpost in time of the consummated splendor of the kingdom in which we already are reliable people. We tell the truth.
What about the next antithesis? “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”
This is often projected as being an Old Testament law that is rather vicious and mean. Mahatma Gandhi said, “If this law prevails, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ pretty soon everybody in the world will be half blind.” That really is a very uninformed criticism. Gandhi, who could on his better days be a pretty insightful scholar, really goofed on that one. In the Old Testament context, the “eye for an eye” language, the lex talionis, was designed to limit revenge. It was designed to ensure perfect justice.
Now there are many kinds of crimes where you cannot apply the lex talionis. If, for example, A rapes B, you cannot have lex talionis by raping A. On the other hand, for many kinds of vicious crimes, the lex talionis does provide perfect justice, and provided it is administered by the courts, not by vendetta, it is precisely what will stop vendetta, because the justice is perfect. Moreover, in the Old Testament, God himself is precisely the one who not only authorizes the lex talionis, he is the one who promises judgment upon those who are unrepentant.
After all, the God of the Old Testament is still the God of the New Testament. Lest we should think for a moment that the God of the New Testament is somehow easier or gentler, the kind of fuzzy God who is full of endless sentimentality, let me remind you that the Jesus who teaches this is also the Jesus who introduces to the New Testament almost all of the Bible’s most colorful images of hell itself.
If you absolutize this text, you’re going to have to throw out an awful lot of the New Testament, including the teachings of Jesus. So what is going on here? The problem, again, is that although the Old Testament law was given in the context of the court system to ensure justice, this has now become, in first-century Judaism, an excuse for a kind of retaliatory system. People start keeping records. Who’s up? Who’s down? And there comes someplace where Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye,’ but I tell you, do not resist an evil person.”
There’s a very dramatic passage in Paul that has a similar kind of question over it, a certain kind of structure. At the end of Romans 12 we read, “Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
That’s the end of Romans 12, but our chapter versification system in the Bible was not part of the original. Our chapter versification system came centuries later. When we’re having our devotions, we read Romans, chapter 12, come to the end, full stop, and then begin chapter 13 the next day, but, in fact, you’re supposed to read from the end of chapter 12 into chapter 13. It stands together.
What does chapter 13 say? “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for God has given the sword to the state.” So “Do not seek revenge; it’s mine to repay, and I have given the sword to the state.” That’s the way the text runs. In other words, we are not to seek personal justice, personal vendetta. God is ultimately the one to be trusted with justice, even eschatologically, and meanwhile, God has given the sword of justice to the state. That’s the argument of Romans.
So also here in the teaching of Jesus. “At the personal level, do not seek endless keeping it all square, keeping it all right. No, turn your cheek. If someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. Give to the one who asks you. Do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.” For the Christian will never live, finally, under the dictates of mere justice. At the personal level, we do not follow the dictates of mere justice. The dictates of mere justice belong to the state, they belong to the court system, and ultimately they belong to God.
Indeed, both this book and the rest of the New Testament insists that the cross itself is part of the outworking of the dictates of justice, but the cross is also the demonstration of the outworking of God’s love. What Christians do, therefore, at the personal level is demonstrate this forbearance, this willingness to absorb, to take on punishment, because we follow the Master who himself took on punishment.
We come now to this text. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.’ ” You can understand how the text came about. There is no Old Testament text that says explicitly, “Hate your enemy,” but there are Old Testament texts where David could say, for example, “Do not I hate them with a perfect hatred?” There are certainly texts in which God expresses his wrath and even his hatred upon his enemies.
Some first-century people, therefore, managed to take the text from Leviticus 19 that we’ve already looked at, “Love your neighbor,” combine it with some of these others, and say, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But Jesus says, “No, no. Do not forget; if you are to be like God, sons of your heavenly Father, who causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous …”
Now you’re back at this one. Now suddenly the ways the Bible speaks of the believer’s love begin to mirror the different ways in which the Bible speaks of God’s love. Let us be quite frank. There are other ways the Bible speaks of God’s love. Down here, God has a special love for his elect. Here it is a love of invitation. Here it is conditional upon obedience. We’ve seen all of the texts that line up with these sorts of things.
In this passage, the model for Christians’ undistinguishing of friend and enemy, of refusal to make the kinds of distinctions every pagan can make (“I love my friends, and I don’t love the people who oppose me”), is the fact that there is some huge dimension of God’s love that is amoral. It is blind to distinctions. It is providential. There are huge domains of Christian ethics, of the demand for Christian love, that reflect this way of talking about the love of God.
If you absolutize that in the entire domain of Christian ethics, then you will come to the place where you can no longer exercise church discipline, no longer make moral judgments, and so forth. Let me close this way. This is very important. In a great deal of contemporary New Testament scholarship, it is argued that by the time you move from the teaching of Jesus to the writings of John, you have a corruption of Christian ethics.
Jesus says, “Love your enemy.” That’s a high point. When you come to the teachings of John, “By this shall all men know that you’re my disciples, if you love one another …” You come to the first epistle of John, and it says, “Love one another, love one another, love one another.” It doesn’t say anything about loving your enemies. In fact, 1 John has all kinds of things about putting outside the camp those who are corrupt in their doctrine or their morals.
So it is argued originally Jesus taught, “Love your enemy,” but eventually in the Christian church, even within the New Testament, this degenerated into a kind of sectarian view in which you primarily love one another. Have you come across such teaching? It is very common in the domain of New Testament scholarship. What shall we say of this? Well, go back to the various ways in which the Bible speaks of God’s love.
The Bible can speak of God’s intra-Trinitarian love, the love of the Father for the Son. Will this be considered a lesser love, a diminished love, a diluted love, because it’s not love for enemies? Here God loves his enemies and those who love him by sending his sun and his rain upon the just and the unjust. Here he invites sinners to repent. Here he sets his love on certain people. Here he makes his love conditional. “Keep yourselves in the love of God,” he says.
Shall we talk about God’s intra-Trinitarian love as being the least love because the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father? Good grief! From a biblical perspective, God’s intra-Trinitarian love is the heart and the source of all Christian love. In fact, according to John, chapter 17, Christian love, the love of Christians for Christians, the love of believer for believer, is to be a reflection of God’s intra-Trinitarian love. “That they may love one another as I have loved you. That they may be one as we are one.”
Far from seeing Christian love for one another as being a diminution, it is meant to be seen as the high point of reflecting the very intra-Trinitarian love of God himself. What this suggests, then, is that as we think about Christian love, Christian ethics, we must sooner or later discover that just as the Bible has different contexts in which it speaks of God’s love, so it has different contexts in which it speaks of Christian love.
If I had time, I think I could show you that the different ways the Bible has of speaking of God’s love are perfectly mirrored in the different ways the Bible has of speaking of Christians’ love. Thus, ultimately, all of Christian ethics turning on love, in the fulfillment of the first and second commandment, turn out to be ways of reflecting perfectly the different ways the Bible has of speaking of God’s very own love. Let us pray.
Lord God, we have merely dipped in the surface of themes that surface in every book in the New Testament, themes that are grounded in the Old Testament, themes that finally find their deepest reservoir in your own very character and self-disclosure. Lord God, the surrounding culture wants to diminish your love to mere sentimentality, to divorce your love from your holiness, to adopt views of love that are separated from questions of justice, mercy, integrity, and judgment to come.
O Lord God, have mercy on us, and help us to escape the slippery thinking of a relativistic culture that cannot see how your love is perfect, as also is your justice; that your mercy is immeasurable, as also is your holiness; and that these things, bound up with your very character, must find their appropriate reflection in all Christian virtues as well.
Grant that we may not only come better to understand these things theoretically but to work them out in our lives so that we will be a people who love justice and integrity but also love our neighbors as ourselves, who love our enemies as well as our friends and yet who are prepared to live in the light of the certain judgment of God, which finds its most momentous declaration in the cross itself. Help us not only to think deeply and rightly about these things but to work them out in obedience. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
