Matthew 22:36-40 – “Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest? ” He said to him, “Love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. “This is the greatest and most important command. “The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. “All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
Mark 12:28-31 – One of the scribes approached. When he heard them debating and saw that Yeshua answered them well, he asked him, “Which command is the most important of all? ” Yeshua answered, “The most important is Listen, O Israel! Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one. “Love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. “The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”
Luke 10:25-28 – Then an expert in the law stood up to test him, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? ” “What is written in the law? ” he asked him. “How do you read it? ” He answered, “Love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind;” and “your neighbor as yourself.” “You’ve answered correctly,” he told him. “Do this and you will live.”
It is within these very passages that Yeshua summed up the entire Bible in only two commands: Love Yahweh your God with all of your heart, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Even with this direct reference and simple clarity from Yeshua himself, why do we find this so hard to do?
I believe the biggest challenge lies in us: we need definitions. We need to have clarified for us how to love God, and what it means in practice to love our neighbor.
Loving God has been defined for us by the first five of the Ten Commandments: Put God first in all things, make no images that represent him, do not identify as his child in vain, honor the weekly Sabbath (as a memorial of God’s Creation), and honor your parents (as representative authorities of God). In the Sermon on the Mount, Yeshua also said it means seeking God’s kingdom first, vigilantly standing for what’s right, trusting God in all things.
Loving our neighbor has been defined for us in the second five of the Ten Commandments: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, and don’t covet what belongs to others. Yeshua refined it further as living with integrity and holiness, forgiving others and being compassionate. He captured its essence as doing for others what we would want done for us.
Most significantly, loving God and loving others has been demonstrated most clearly for us by Yeshua himself, placing God’s will above even his own, giving his life willingly on behalf of others.
Through my writings, I am continually attempting to simplify the Bible message as much as possible, boiling it all down to the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. But Yeshua has provided us the simplest summary of the entire Bible for all time: Love God and love others. And then he went and demonstrated it.
If we truly consider ourselves to be his followers, it’s up to us to also live out these directives in each of our lives, to be the examples for others to see. Like Yeshua, it’s up to us to provide the definitions, the living demonstrations, of how that type of love is lived out in practice.
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