The Book of Mark
Loving God
Mark 12:28-34
Text
Obviously, the theme of this passage is loving God, and you will notice, that is a command. You shall love the Lord your God. This is the foundation of spiritual life. It is the beginning of true spiritual love as we love the Lord God imperfectly with a limited human love and it is the culmination of spiritual life in heaven where we will love the Lord God spiritually and perfectly and eternally.
So in that context, loving God is both the beginning and the end of our relationship with God. It is what it is to be a believer in God. It is what it means to be a Christian. To be saved is to be one who loves God. In fact, I would suggest that is the most defining attitude that we can express in explaining who we are. We are those who love the true and living God.
If someone were to ask, “What does it mean to be a a Christian?”, that’s how you can answer. It means to be a lover of God.
Now, while that is a definition of what it means to be a believer and to have a relationship with God, it is also a universal command. Everyone is commanded to love God and disobedience to that command is why hell will be full. The world has been, is and will be full of people who have been commanded to love God, but have refused and that disobedience is what brings about eternal judgment and punishment.
So that means nothing is more basic and fundamental and critical than this command. It is far-reaching as to its implications, as we’ll see.
Now just to quickly refresh our memory, as we come to the twelfth chapter of Mark, we are in the immediate days and hours before the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. There is a concerted move on the part of the Jewish leadership to discredit Him before the people and have him seen as a threat to the Roman government.
They have attempted twice already to accomplish their objective. The Pharisees have come with flattery and kindness seeking his teaching concerning the paying of taxes and the Saducees have come in an attempt to make him look foolish regarding the resurrection.
In the verses we’ve read, we now have one of the scribes coming to give it a try. Matthew tells us (22:34) that this scribe is also a Pharisee. Most of the scribes were Pharisees. They were the legal experts who studied the law and gave expert advice on the legal issues of the day.
And Matthew makes the point that he’s sent to test Jesus. He’s not looking for information. This is simply another trap in which they hope to catch Jesus.
Interestingly enough, this man seems to have a sincerity to his questions. And I am speculating that even though he is a spokesman for the group, he may well have a heart that is genuinely searching for God’s truth.
This is a scribe who had heard them arguing. He would have heard the previous argument over the resurrection with the Sadducees and maybe even heard the previous argument with the Pharisees’ about the paying of taxes. And he was stunned by the answers Jesus gave, recognizing that He had answered them well, and comes, not just to get answers for the Sanhedrin, but for himself.
And the question this time is “What commandment is the foremost of all the commandments?”
So what are they after in asking that question? This is not like the contentious problem of paying taxes or the apparent absurdity of whose wife a woman will be after her death. This is at the very root and core of faith. So what is the trap connected to this question?
Well the answer may be more obvious than we realize. Their charge against Jesus was that what Jesus preached was contrary to the Law of God.
The problem was the Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t agree on what constituted the Law of God. The Pharisees considered the whole Old Testament, including all their interpretations and all the traditions that grew up around it to be the Law.
The Sadducees said nothing more than the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, to be all that came from God. So the common ground between the two was the writings of Moses. They all agreed that this was the Law of God.
So the Sanhedrin came up with a question they could all agree on, and their hope is that He’s going to give them something that is not found in the Law of Moses. Their assumption is He’s against Moses and if they can get Him to elevate Himself above Moses, then the people will be more likely to turn from Him.
After all, there was no one closer to God than Moses. He was the man who spoke face-to-face with God. The glory of God was on his face when he came down the mountain. It was to Moses that God had given the Ten Commandments. So to the common Jew, there was nobody greater than Moses.
And if the Pharisees and the scribal questioner could just get Jesus to put His own teaching above Moses, then they could have reason to use that against Him before the people. That is the trap. If Jesus comes up with some new law they’ve never heard, then He has attacked God because God is the friend of Moses.
So what is the greatest and foremost law according to Jesus? And, as always, the Lord’s response is perfect and accurate. He answers from the framework with which the Pharisees and the Sadducees could agree. He answers from the Pentateuch. He answers from Deuteronomy and then He answers from Leviticus and He speaks words that are very familiar to every Jew.
In fact, the Jews were required to recite these things twice a day. They knew these words. So He affirms complete solidarity with Moses and with the truth of the Word of God as recorded by Moses. Let’s pick it up in verse 29.
We saw the question and the approach, here’s
3. The Answer
verses 29-31
That was absolutely accurate. And any clear-thinking, intelligent, rational scribe would have to agree, and this one does.
verse 32
“You’re right, You’ve got it.” Maybe that is a statement of surprise; perhaps it’s relief. Maybe it’s genuine, but he apparently has absolute agreement with what Jesus has said.
Jesus goes all the way back to Deuteronomy 6 and what he says to the children of Israel as they prepare to enter into the Promised Land.
So let’s pick it up in chapter 6.
Verses 1-3
Abd what will be their motivation to do that?
Verses 4-5
This is known as the Shema by the Jews because that is the Hebrew word for “hear”. And notice, what is required of them couldn’t be done through external obedience. This would require an internal resource.
They were reminded there is only One God and He is to be loved supremely.
Now the word “love” that the Lord uses here in the New Testament is from the verb agapao. We call it agape love. It is the love of intelligence and will and purpose. It is the idea of choosing to love and sacrificing to love and loving through obedience.
It is a sense of love connected to fearing God, as we read in verse 2. He is worthy of our affection and certainly we give Him our affection, we give Him our emotional love as is part of what is being discussed here, but it’s because of who He is that we do that, not something stirred up emotionally, but something emotional in response to what is a true revelation of God.
So the purest, noblest, highest, most comprehensive, most exhaustive, most complete love is given to the one true God. There is only one God and therefore you can give Him all your love.
That’s why we are to love Him with our heart, soul and mind, as Moses put it in Deuteronomy. And then Jesus adds in our passage in Mark, the dimension of “strength.”
Let’s think about those for a moment individually.
What does it mean to love the Lord your God with all your heart?
Again, we need to think in original terms for a moment. In Hebrew understanding, the heart is the core of your identity, the source of all your thoughts, words, actions.
That’s why Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life.” It’s the core of your being. So everyone is commanded to love God with the deepest, purest, truest part of you, your deepest identity.
Soul has to do with your emotions. It was Jesus who said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful,” Matthew 26:38. He was speaking of His soul as the seat of emotion.
Mind may best be seen as the will, the best intention, the power of purpose, the decision-making part of us.
And then Jesus adds strength which would be a reference to physical energy and ability.
So the intellectual, emotional, volitional and physical elements of personhood all combine to love the one true God. It is an intelligent love, it is an emotional love, it is a willing love, and it is an active love. It is an all-consuming love.
And notice here in Mark 12, how the words are emphasized. It is “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The addition of those words “with all” is to lay out the emphatic nature of this comprehensive whole-hearted love. We might say that God’s whole-hearted love toward us should not be returned with a half-hearted love on our part.
And I think it needs to be noted that Deuteronomy 6 is not the only place the Jews were instructed to love God in this way.
Over and over they are reminded of this responsibility. It’s seen in Deuteronomy 11:13, again in verse 22 of that chapter. Then he repeats it again in chapter 13, again in chapter 19, the in chapter 30, he repeats it no less than three times in rapid-fire succession.
The idea is a love relationship with God was to be foundational to everything that did and everywhere they went and every decision they made. He was to fill their thoughts and minds and hearts and actions.
And if that was true for an Old Testament person of God responding through a law and command, how much more so should that be true of those of us bought with the blood of Jesus Christ?
It is foundational. When somebody asks you, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” you can tell them, “It means to love the Lord your God with all your entire being.”
And this scribe may have quickly agreed with Jesus and affirmed what He said, but the truth of the matter was the Pharisees and the scribes and the Sadducees and leaders of Israel and people who followed them weren’t anywhere near this.
And it wasn’t that they didn’t know it was there. It isn’t that it was unavailable. It was unmistakable and obvious. They knew it. They repeated it. They read it. They problem they had was in the doing of it. And what should have happened is that they fell on their knees before Jesus and confessed their sin and failure and asked how it could be done.
And there they would have found the power of God made available through Jesus for the doing of it.
Instead, the Pharisees had no interest in doing it. They were hypocrites of the worst kind. They loved to agree with the Bible, but they want Jesus dead.
And before He is crucified, Jesus will unleash the worst series of judgments every pronounced on the Jewish leadership. And unfortunately, they never came to the place where they loved God.
Moses demanded an internal, relational, life-changing kind of love. There’s was all on the outside. To use the word of Jesus, they were whitened tombs full of dead men’s bones.
And then, even though the scribe didn’t ask, Jesus says there is another law that needs to be considered because it goes hand in hand with the first and that is the requirement of loving your neighbor as you love yourself. That’s from Leviticus 19:18.
And contrary to what some teach, this is not about loving ourselves more. We already love ourselves way too much. Our lives are consumed with taking care of self. What the Lord is saying is, “Treat other people with the same detailed care you treat yourself.”
The reason Jesus answers with these two requirements is obvious. There is nothing more important in life, no commandment any greater than these two things.
In fact, they are so important, Jesus says everything else in the Law and the prophets is connected to these two things.
Obviously the Ten Commandments are connected to this. The first four are about loving God. You don’t have any other God. You don’t make a false idol. You don’t take His name in vain. And you remember to worship Him. Then the next six are to be respectful to parents, have respect for authority, have a respect for life, you don’t kill people. You have a respect for moral purity, you don’t commit adultery. Respect for others’ goods and rights, you don’t steal. You have respect for what is true, you don’t lie. Have respect for what God has provided and you’re content, you don’t covet. All that has to do with man to man.
So these two commandments are a summarization of the whole Law.
Here we see the genius of the Lord. In these two commands, He says it all. Love Me, love others. It’s not complicated.
And the Jewish leaders didn’t do either. Their religion was all external and they had nothing but disdain for anyone who wasn’t like them. The Pharisees wouldn’t even eat with a non-Pharisee. They were corrupt through and through.
Well, the scribe knew what to say.
verses 32-33
Well, there goes the trap.
And he got the point, didn’t he? He knew exactly what Jesus was saying. He had all this ritual and routine. After all, they are standing right in the temple courtyard where all the sacrifices and burnt offerings took place every morning and every night of every single day of the year.
Here they are in Passover Week. Ther’s all kind sof stuff going on around them, even as they speak! And he listens to Jesus, knowing his own heart, and says, “You’re right on the money, Jesus!
He was in the middle of that sacrificial system with priests all over the place and He acknowledge, “What’s more important than this is to love God and to love others.”
And notice the sad declaration in
verse 34
That’s good, but it’s not good enough. He is near, in that he understands that it’s an internal issue and not merely ceremonial and rituals. But that internal relationship is made possible only through faith in Christ. And he’s close, but he’s not there yet.
And for now, the questions are over. Nothing they tried has worked to turn the people against Him. He’s to wise for them. But they will get there and before long, people will be screaming for His crucifixion.
Let’s pray.
