The Greatest Commandment
God’s Perfect Ten
The Greatest Commandment
Matthew 22:37-40
 
We spent eleven weeks recently studying the Ten Commandments, and I hope we’ve learned a little bit, at least, about what God expects from us in regard to them. Even though they were originally given to the Jews, the moral tenets contained there transcend cultural and social boundaries and they actually form the basis and foundation for any civilization.
 
However, I think it wrong of us to stop studying with the Ten Commandments.  In fact, Jewish scholars, experts in the Law of God, have determined that God did not just give Ten Commandments to Moses, but He gave him six hundred and thirteen principles, precepts, laws - some would say commandments - on that holy mountain.  Can you imagine it?  Six hundred and thirteen!
 
Then if we fast forward to Psalm 15, we discover that David took those six hundred and thirteen rules and narrowed them down to eleven rules.
 
Then if you read Isaiah 33:15, you will see that Isaiah took those eleven rules and narrowed them down to six rules.
 
Then Micah took those six rules and he narrowed them down to three rules.  And Habakkuk took the three rules and said, "I'm going to summarize all of the law," and he under the direction of the Holy Spirit, he came up with this phrase, "The just shall live by faith."
Then when we turn to Matthew 22, we find what Jesus has to say about it.
 
Verses 34-40
 
Now to understand what Jesus identifies as the “first and greatest commandment”, we need to understand
 
1. The Climate
 
I mean by that, the theological climate in which Jesus makes this statement to this inquiring lawyer.
 
There were schools of rabbinical thought in that day who took the six hundred and thirteen precepts taught in Exodus and expanded them to come up with all sorts of little rules and laws about every situation.  As a result of that there were literally thousands requirements that were imposed upon Jewish culture.
 
So much so that it was impossible to keep up with them, much less observe them all. And these rabbis just thrived on all the minutia of the Law and for many of them, their great delight was catching someone in violation of these traditions.
 
That’s why you will often find them bird dogging on Jesus and His followers to catch them not washing their hands before they eat or plucking grain or healing someone on the Sabbath.
 
These guys would have fit right in with the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate today!
 
 
They were the original liberals who believe that more laws and a bigger government with more control is better.  And what made the situation even worse was they believed themselves to be God’s spokespersons.   
 
That is a glaring difference with many of our elected officials who ignore God or deny there is one to begin with.  But that was one section of rabbinical thought.
 
Then there were others who wanted to take all of these laws and rules and regulations and just narrow them down and to state them simply. Their desire was to codify all of the law and state it in a simple, straightforward kind of way lest they become lost in a maze of details that no one could understand and keep track of.
 
(Kind of like the IRS)
 
And because of these differing approaches, the rabbis spent a great deal of time debating about which law was the most important and how all of that should be done.
 
And as a result they were constantly evaluating these 613 precepts to determine which was the more important.
 
And knowing that helps us to understand this question that the lawyer asked Jesus.  Now the text makes it clear it was a test, but it was a valid question because of the theological climate of the day.
 
 
And the question basically deals with
 
2.  The Priority
 
Verse 36
 
What is the most important commandment? What has priority over any other commandment?
 
We find Jesus’ answer in verses 37-40
 
Now Jesus took a passage from Deuteronomy and a passage in Leviticus and put them together and gave His answer.  Now I think it important to say that if Jesus put them together, they need to be looked at together.
 
Now Jesus said, “These two statements summarize all of the Law and all the prophets.”  That means all the rules, and all the regulations, all 613 of them come together in these two instructions.
 
Now maybe we went about this study in reverse order because if we are to understand the Ten Commandments, we should have begun here because Jesus said these two statements puts it all together.
 
Now it’s interesting to see Jesus response when asked what the greatest commandment was.
 
He didn’t respond by sayin, “Be orthodox”.  Now obviously, Jesus wants us to believe rightly and what we believe determines how we behave.  But Jesus said, “First, love God”.
 
 
Jesus didn’t say, “Hold to the infallibility of Scripture”.
 
I believe the Bible is without error and absolutely trustworthy, but that’s not the starting place according to Jesus.
 
He didn’t say, “Be evangelistic and win the lost and do missions.”  We ought to do that, but it finds its place on down the line somewhere.
 
Jesus said the first and greatest is to Love God.
 
That was a great affront to the Scribes and Pharisees because they were all about performance and conduct and behavior.
 
I think they were expecting Him to respond with some behavioral instruction so they could brag about what they were doing and accuse Him for what He was not doing.
 
But Jesus says, “The greatest commandment is all about love.  Then He went on to say that love takes two directions.
 
First, it is to be
 
1. Directed Toward God
 
Verse 37
 
Now this is a quote from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and it is called the Shama in Judaism.  Shama is the word for hear, and it's the first word in the verse.  This is the confession of faith of Israel.
      
"Hear, oh Israel; The Lord, the Lord is one."  And that is the principle of faith that there is one
God, there are no competitors, there is no other God, there are no rivals. There are pretenders, there are phonies, and there are fakes, but He is the one true God.
 
That's the principle of faith. And then he went to the principle of devotion, or how do we relate to this one God? And then he said this, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength."
      
Now what’s implied in that verse is that God is a great God. He is the only true God.
 
 
And as such, all of His commands are great.  But there is a commandment that is the great commandment, and it is the command that we give to God a supreme devotion, a supreme love, a complete love, and with that kind of love.
 
It is a love for God that is complete, that is total, it is with all of my heart, all of my soul, all of my mind, and all of my strength.  It is an all kind of love.  It is not a moderate, it is not a simmering kind of love, it is a boiling, passionate love, divine love, a response to God in worship.
      
In fact, in that command is repeated seven times in the book of Deuteronomy.  The shama is repeated by Jews morning and evening. They were instructed to wear on their foreheads and put it on the door posts, and on the gates of their homes.
 
This is the very essence of their relationship with God.
 
As New Testament believers, it is the very heart of God and the heart of Christ. When Jesus prayed in John 17, He said, "Father, glorify Me with the love that you had for Me before the world began."
 
There is, among the Godhead, this perfect love of God, the Father for the Son, the Son for
the Father, and the Spirit for the Father and the Son, and mutual in return, this perfect love that is of God,
the very essence of who God is in His holiness.
      
And so this principle of devotion means that all obedience that honors God is out of love.
 
 
I think it would be good for the church to rediscover that.  If the church is the body of Christ in the world, then we need to remember that we are to love God just as Christ loved God and we are to serve others because we love God.
 
I say that because it seems to me there is a great temptation to love the world and the things of the world that pass away, or to love another person more than we love God, or to love ourselves more than we love God.
      
Paul instructed the Romans to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice," which is spiritual worship.  He wasn’t excluding the soul and spirit.  He was saying give everything you’ve got.  When you come to present your body, you're presenting all that is within it, all that you are.
 
And for far too many of us, there are too many things in our life competing for the love of God, and where I love myself, my thoughts, my opinions, my
concerns more than I really love God.
 
And if we’ll ever really be serious about living as God instructs us to live, we're going to have to fall in love with God and Jesus, all over again.
 
That’s why Jesus said the greatest commandment you can ever keep is to love the Lord your God with everything you’ve got.
 
I love the story of John Blanchard and Hollis Maynell.  John Blanchard lived in Florida and was preparing go overseas during World War II.  He stopped by a little bookstore and selected a used book to take with him overseas.
He found himself intrigued, not so much with the words of the book, but with the notes penciled in the margin. The soft handwriting reflected a thoughtful soul and insightful mind.
 
In the front of the book, he discovered the previous owner's name, Miss Hollis Maynell. With time and effort he located her address. She lived in New York City. He wrote her a letter introducing himself and inviting her to correspond.
 
The next day he was shipped overseas for service in World War II. During the next year and one month the two grew to know each other through the mail. Each letter was a seed falling on a fertile heart. A romance was budding. Blanchard requested a photograph, but she refused. She felt that if he really cared, it wouldn't matter what she looked like.
 
When the day finally came for him to return from Europe, they scheduled their first meeting - 7:00 PM at the Grand Central Station in New York. "You'll recognize me," she wrote, "by the red rose I'll be wearing on my lapel." So at 7:00 he was in the station looking for a girl whose heart he loved, but whose face he'd never seen.
 
Blanchard relates the meeting like this:  A young woman was coming toward me, her figure long and slim. Her blonde hair lay back in curls from her delicate ears; her eyes were blue as flowers. Her lips and chin had a gentle firmness, and in her pale green suit she was like springtime come alive. I started toward her, entirely forgetting to notice that she was not wearing a rose. As I moved, a small, provocative smile curved her lips. "Going my way, sailor?" she murmured.
Almost uncontrollably, I made one step closer to her, and then I saw Hollis Maynell.
 
She was standing almost directly behind the girl. A woman well past 40, she had graying hair tucked under a worn hat. She was more than plump, her thick-ankled feet thrust into low-heeled shoes. The girl in the green suit was walking quickly away. I felt as though I was split in two, so keen was my desire to follow her, and yet so deep was my longing for the woman whose spirit had truly companioned me and upheld my own.
 
And there she stood. Her pale, plump face was gentle and sensible, her gray eyes had a warm and kindly twinkle. I did not hesitate. My fingers gripped the small worn blue leather copy of the book that was to identify me to her. This would not be love, but it would be something precious, something perhaps even better than love, a friendship for which I had been and must ever be grateful.
 
I squared my shoulders and saluted and held out the book to the woman, even though while I spoke I felt choked by the bitterness of my disappointment. "I'm Lieutenant John Blanchard, and you must be Miss Maynell. I am so glad you could meet me; may I take you to dinner?"
 
The woman's face broadened into a tolerant smile. "I don't know what this is about, son," she answered, "but the young lady in the green suit who just went by, she begged me to wear this rose on my coat. And she said if you were to ask me out to dinner, I should tell you that she is waiting for you in the big restaurant across the street. She said it was some kind of test!"     
What was she looking for?  She was looking for man of integrity, a man who could offer her a pure love.
 
She wanted to see what kind of man John Blanchard was.  I wonder, as God looks at our hearts, as He looks at the heart of Terry Tolbert and the throne of my heart, what or better Who does He find there?
 
Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God”
 
Do you?  Really?  Do you enjoy spending time with Him?  Is reading His word and praying to Him a pleasure or do you have to make yourself do it?
 
Jesus said, Love the Lord your God.
 
Not only is that love to be direct toward God, it is to be
 
 
2.  Demonstrated to People
 
Now notice the order.  First, we love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.  We love Him above all human relations and material possessions and even above life itself.  This is the first and greatest commandment.
 
THEN, we are ready to love others.  God comes first, people come second.
 
Now it seems to me that our answer to the question, “Do you love God” is authenticated by how we treat other people.
 
Let me explain that.  Ask most people in the church, Do you love God?” and they will immediately respond by saying “Yes!”.
 
But if you watch their behavior toward other people you can determine that their answer is a lie because their behavior toward others demonstrates they don’t love their neighbor as themselves.
 
Someone may say, “But I don’t hate anybody!”  Well allow me to straighten out some incorrect thinking:
 
The opposite of love is not hate.  The opposite of love is apathy.  The attitude of a lot of people is they will simply ignore those they don’t want to be around and through their cool indifference they let then know they could care less about them.
 
And what they are saying is, “I don’t love you.”
 
Unfortuntely, it also says, “I don’t love God either.”
 
So maybe the question needs to be rephrased.  Instead of asking “Do you love your neighbor”, let’s ask it this way:  “To whom are you indifferent?”
 
You cannot divorce your love for God from your love for the people of God.  If you love God, it will be demonstrated by your love for people.
 
Now this is where the love gets put into action.  On the one hand, we love God.  That’ all about attitude.  But when that love that is being directed toward God gets put into action, it will be demonstrated toward people.
 
It’s rather enlightening to see how Luke records this account of Jesus comment.  It’s found in Luke 10 and it occurs in the context of the story Jesus tells about the Samaritan helping a wounded man.  And ultimately Jesus is saying the man who helped his neighbor fulfilled the Law of God.
 
Now we call the man the “good” Samaritan but that was man’s term, not God’s.  Jesus never called him that.  Jesus is simply stressing that he did the right thing.  He was obedient to the law of God.
 
We have so degenerated in our love relationships with one another that when a man comes along and just does what’s right we call him good when Jesus said, “This is what should be done.  This is the very basics of fulfilling the law of God.
 
This man let the love in his heart for God be demonstrated to a person in need.
 
 
And for 33 years on this earth, Jesus demonstrated that and on the night before His crucifixion he gathered them up real close and said, “I’ve got a new commandment for you.  Love one another. Just like I’ve loved you, I want you to love one another.”
 
If you want to know if He meant what He said, look at Calvary where God was demonstrating His own love for us.
 
What do you see when you look around at church and in your neighborhood and at Wal-mart and the ballgames?
 
Let me show you something form Mark 8.
 
Verses 22-25
 
See the impact of that?  This man couldn’t tell a man from a tree.  That’s the way some of you are with your neighbors.  You don’t know anything about them.  You don’t know the burdens they carry or the hurts they fell.  You’re just critical of their behavior and they way they look and act.
 
They’re just blurry to you.  You can’t see if there are tears in their eyes or if their fact is dirty or the painin their face
 
Too many of us live our lives simply seeing men likek trees, walking. That’s why Jesus said, Love your neighbor as yourself.  That’s why he said, I’m giving you a new commandment to love one another as I’ve loved you.
 
 
 
To the little baby crying in the nursery, Jesus can say, “I know what you’re going through.  Ive been there.
 
To the child who is restless and bored, Jesus can say, I understand.  I was a child once.  You think Bor. Terry’s boring, you should have hear those rabbis when I was a child!
 
To the teenager who thinks no one understand you, Jesus knows.  He was a teen ager.
 
You been deserted by friends and mistreated by family?  Jesus had his family and friends desert him when he needed them the most.
 
Your church turned its back on you?  Jesus went home to his church and they picked up stones to kill him.
 
You dealing with a death that is unexplained?  Jeuss went all the way to the cross after praying, God if there is any other way, let’s do it that way.
 
This love we say we have for God must be demonstrated to others or it’s not love at all.
 
And the only way we’ll ever be able to demonstrate it to people is to first and foremost direct it to God.
 
Do you remember when we used to have those church picnics?  We don’t do that much anymore, but let’s just suppose we have one planned for Saturday and we’re all going to meet down at the park.
 
 
But Saturday comes and you get busy and forget about fixing anything. So at the last minute, you throw a few bologna sandwichs in a sack and decide you’ll just get by yourself and eat your sandwich.
 
So there you sit, kind of embarrassed, waiting on the blessing to be offered when all of a sudden up to your table comes Mrs. Best Cook in the Church.
 
She has a basket full of fried chicken and potato salad and deviled eggs and chocolate pie and she’s spreading all that stuff out on the table where you and your little bologna sandwiches are sitting. And all of a sudden she says, “Why don’t you join us?”
 
You say, “All I’ve got are bologna sandwiches”.  She says, “Just cut ‘em up and put it with ours and we’ll eat together.”
 
Now if someone were to come by that table, they would see you sitting there eating like a king when you came as a pauper.
 
That’s how it is when we learn to love the Lord our God.  We don’t have anything to share with others.  We don’t have the grace. But He does. We don’t have the love.  But He does! We don’t have the patience, but He does.
 
And He says, “Sit at my table and enjoy what I have to offer you and there will be plenty to share with others.
 
I get a little amused at people running through life clutching their little paper bag saying, “I’m not sharing with anybody!  God’s not gonna get my bologna!”
Hey, listen:  He doesn’t need it, but you desperately need His fried chicken! We can share in the very nature and being of God.
 
You shall love!
 
Direct it toward God and Demonstrate it to People and when you do, you will full all the Law and the Prophets.
 
Let’s pray!