The Greatest Commandments

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We all had a weird week waiting for weather that never seemed to materialize. And I know we were in the same boat as the schools and everybody else. We kept waiting for it to happen.

Monday, we were here at the office working. It was a normal day as far as we were concerned. And then it sounded like heavy, heavy rain came through.

And it was little ice pellets. And we thought, oh, well, that’s all it is. That’s not that big of a deal. Stella walked out to her car.

She was going to go run an errand. She came back in and said, it’s really slippery out there. I said, well, that’s it.

We’re done. Because I knew it was supposed to only get worse from there. And I used to be great at driving on ice.

But ever since we’ve moved here, every winter we’ve lived here, I’ve ended up in a ditch within a mile of my house. So I don’t play around with that. So as soon as Stella said that, those were the magic words.

I went and found everybody who was volunteering in different parts of the building and said, you know, it’s not in my nature to say get out, but get out. Go where you’re going. And then my priority list for all the stuff I had to do on Monday and the meetings I had and various things planned, my list of things to do got very short.

Salt the sidewalks and get out. You know, get the kids and get home in one piece. And we all go through those moments in life where our priority list gets very short.

And we just, we focus on what is most important in this moment. Some of the most frequent times that’s happened for me have been in weather situations, whether it’s ice, power outage, tornado situations. You know, there’s a lot of stuff that suddenly doesn’t matter.

I say all the time I didn’t realize what a percentage of my life was going to be just taking head counts of all the kids walking around. I also didn’t realize what a percentage of my life was going to be prioritizing when they’re all yelling at us that they need something. You have to figure out on the fly what is most important in that moment.

And we all do this on a regular basis, or at least we should. Otherwise, we end up getting nothing done if we can’t prioritize. But we have to figure out what is the most important thing.

What is the most important thing that I need to do in this moment? The story we’re going to look at tonight out of the book of Mark deals with somebody bringing this question to Jesus. In terms of his relationship with God, in terms of his obligations to God, what is the most important thing I need to focus on?

And so he came to Jesus and he asked this question. We’re going to look at the man’s question and we’re going to look at Jesus’ answer in Mark chapter 12. And we’re going to start in verse 28 tonight.

if you’d turn with me to Mark chapter 12. If you don’t have your Bible with you, it’ll be on the screen back here. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to start in verse 28 and see what Jesus said about the most important thing.

This is probably a familiar passage to a lot of you, but it’s one that bears a reminder of from time to time. So starting in verse 28, it says, Then one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, which is the first commandment of all? And by the way, he’s not asking which of the ten is first. This is not Bible trivia.

He’s not asking of the ten commandments. He’s saying when he says first, he means what’s the most important? Not which one comes first chronologically, but which one comes first in terms of its gravity and its importance.

Which is the first commandment of all? Jesus answered him, The first of the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

This is the first commandment. He’s saying this is the greatest of all the commandments. He starts out with that statement that is not a commandment.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. That’s from the same place in the Old Testament. That is called the Shema.

that was a prayer that the people of Israel would pray every day, recognizing the nature of God. And because of who God is, it says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength. So verse 31, he gives him a bonus, because he only asked which one is the greatest. But Jesus says, the second is like it.

The second like it is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. And I think the reason why he goes ahead and gives him the second one, even though he didn’t ask for it, is because it is very difficult to separate these two.

If we are loving God the way we are supposed to, then it will show up in our love for other people. And we can’t really love other people the way we’re supposed to unless we’re loving God the way we’re supposed to. Verse 32, so the scribe said to him, well said, teacher.

Now, I think he’s just agreeing with Jesus here, but imagine the impertinence of telling Jesus, yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, from our standpoint, he’s Jesus by fault. He’s right.

That’s just well said, teacher. You have spoken the truth, for there is one God, and there is no other but He. And to love Him with all the heart, with all the understanding, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.

So he has agreed with Jesus. He has shown some enthusiasm about this, and he’s actually restated the command in his own words that in a way that shows he actually understands. He’s not just repeating what Jesus said, he gets it.

Now when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God. But after that, no one dared question him. And you may be seated.

So he’s asking the question, what is the most important thing that God wants from us? Up to now, we’ve seen the Pharisees and the Herodians and the scribes and then the Sadducees come ask Jesus questions. People have come and done this questioning over and over.

One of the Gospels, I believe, after the Pharisees, after the Sadducees, like we talked about this morning, said they did not ask him any more questions. Then we come and see this man, and some people have said, well, there’s a contradiction there. No, the Sadducees were put in their place.

The Sadducees learned after this morning and his statements about how they had won the gold medal in the Olympics of being mistaken, right? That they weren’t going to ask any more questions. They had learned their lesson.

If not to agree with Jesus, then at least just to keep their mouth shut and not embarrass themselves. This man came and asked Jesus the question because he had seen how skillfully Jesus had answered the Pharisees and the Herodians and the Sadducees, how skillfully he had answered everybody else. And I think this man was genuinely looking for an answer.

And that’s one thing that separates this man from everybody else who’s come and questioned Jesus before, is that he was actually looking for an answer. He was looking for the truth. So many of the others have come to Jesus looking to trap him or to try to trick him or to get him into some kind of trouble.

They were not interested in the truth, as we saw with the way the Pharisees deliberated the question, where did John’s authority come from? Was it from heaven or was it from man? They never once considered what’s true.

They said, how is this answer going to help us or hurt us? See, a lot of people were coming to Jesus to question Jesus, and this man came to ask Jesus a question. There’s a difference.

There’s nothing wrong with asking God questions, but questioning God is a different story. So he comes, he wants an answer, and it’s interesting that he would come and ask this way, because we see here in Mark that he’s a scribe. I believe it’s Matthew that says he’s a lawyer.

That’s not a contradiction either. Scribe means he’s somebody who wrote out the law. Lawyer means he’s somebody who could explain the law.

This man was an expert. Both of those things tell us that he had an expertise in the law, and part of his job was to be someone who explained these things to Israel. And yet, this was a question that he had wrestled with himself.

Out of all of it, what is the most important? And seeing the way Jesus handled all these other questions, recognizing that this man taught with wisdom and authority that nobody else had. He came to Jesus and said, I want to know your answer to this question.

Because it’s a question that the Pharisees and Herodians and Sadducees and scribes, everybody had gone back and forth discussing. It was one of the hot button issues. He said, I want your answer.

With this question, the scribes sought to understand what exactly it is that God wants from us. I mean, we can make a list, and God’s law contains over 600 commandments. 600 commandments in the Old Testament law, not just the 10.

The 10 are kind of the tip of the iceberg. There are over 600. If we want to know, if they wanted to know what God requires, there’s a whole list. But he’s looking behind the list. What is the principle here?

What is the meaning behind all of it? What is it that God really wants from us? And so he comes and asks, which is the first commandment of all?

Again, they were trying to, many people were trying to trip him up. He was different. He was genuinely seeking an answer to this question.

And he believed Jesus was the one to answer it. And we’ve probably all considered this question at some point or another. In the midst of all the stuff that we do, in the midst of all the things that God’s word tells us to do, in the midst of all the religious activities we’re part of, in the midst of all the busyness of church life, in the midst of all of it, what is it that God actually wants from us?

I mean, is God’s goal for us to go to church a certain number of times a week? Is God’s goal for us you have to read this many chapters in your Bible a day? Is God’s goal for us that you have to give X number of dollars?

Is God’s goal for us any of these things? He’s wrestling with that same question that sometimes plagues us in the middle of the night. What is it that God actually wants from us?

And it’s another way of asking what matters most. And so Jesus gives him an answer. Jesus gives him the answer, I should say. God’s law is summarized in the twin admonitions to love God and love people.

Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment, and the second is like it. I keep saying it that way.

The second like it is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There’s no other commandment greater than these. So he’s drawing the scribe’s attention back to Deuteronomy 6 and talking about loving the Lord with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength.

He paraphrases it a little bit. Our heart would be, and there’s some overlap among these and different interpretations even of what they mean, but I think the heart is talking about the emotions, the allegiance. The soul is talking about our spiritual self.

Our mind is our thoughts and our will. Our strength is all of our ability. Like I said, there’s different interpretations.

any Bible teacher you listen to is probably going to give you a slightly different account of what these four words mean. But I think rather than getting bogged down in the details, not that they’re not important, they’re just not my focus tonight, rather than getting bogged down in the details of what each of those things mean for us, I think we step back and look at the overall point Jesus is making here, that we are supposed to love God with everything we have, with every part of ourselves, that there should not be a part of ourselves that is closed off and separated away from God that we are not loving God with that part of ourselves. And it’s the single most important commandment.

And he says that he presents it here in such a way that the only one that could even be considered for second place is to love others like we love ourselves. And I forgot to write down where he takes that commandment from. I want to say it’s Leviticus.

Some of you will have cross-references in your Bible that will probably tell you that. It’s another Old Testament command. to love our neighbor as ourself.

And to demonstrate it as well, because when he talked about this principle, his disciples asked, who is my neighbor? And that’s where he told the story of the good Samaritan. The Samaritan and the Jews should have been enemies, and yet the Samaritan saw someone in need and came to help him.

And the lesson there is that anybody in need that we can serve is our neighbor, not just those who look like us, act like us, can do something for us. And in Matthew’s account of this story, He adds the thought in chapter 22, verse 40, that on these two commandments hang all of the law and the prophets. If you want to summarize the whole of the law, if you want to summarize all of Scripture in one easy-to-memorize chunk of information, it’s to love God with everything you have and love others as yourself.

And sometimes we can get, I don’t want to say get these out of balance, but we can get so busy doing one, we forget to do the other. And when we do it that way, we’re not doing either one of them right. See, we can emphasize love our neighbor as ourself and take that to mean that we just affirm everything that anybody wants to do.

But loving God keeps us from doing that. You notice he starts his statement that we’re supposed to love God with everything we have by going back to the Shema, that reminder of the nature of God to Israel that they would repeat every day, that they would recite every day. See, we can’t separate our love for God from our understanding of who God is.

we need to know God as he’s revealed himself to be in his word not as we want him to be but as he says he is and we love him with all we have as who he says he is and then out of that love grows a love for other people we cannot do either of them right if we’re not doing both of them and so when he says that on these two commandments hang all of the law and the prophets the point here is if we could just do these two things perfectly it would take care of all the other commandments we wouldn’t need all of these lists of rules. By the way, that’s true across the board. The more rules we’re willing to break, the more rules we need to make up for it.

Have any of you ever sat down and looked at the books of state law? Yeah, a few of us who are boring, I guess. I’m boring.

I won’t hang that label around anybody else’s neck. I have reasons for needing to look at those from time to time. I don’t just sit and do it for fun.

I’ll put it that way. The state law books are huge and federal regulations, oh my goodness, just the EPA stuff alone, their regulations are killing the forests, right? With all the books they have to print.

We have all of these laws, federal laws, state laws, city ordinances, all these things, most of which we would not need if we would just abide by the Ten Commandments. And if we would follow these two, I’m not sure we would need the Ten. Because doing these two takes care of the ten.

Doing these two takes care of the spirit behind the 600. Because the New Testament teaches us that the point of the law is not that it can ever be kept perfectly. The point of the law is to show us how well we don’t do these two things.

The point of those 600 some odd commandments is to show us how far we fall short of God’s standard because none of us can keep it perfectly. So when he says on these two commandments hang all of the law and the prophets, If we could just do these two things, it would take care of everything else. But the problem is none of us can do either of these well enough to make it to the kingdom.

We cannot do these things perfectly. And the scribe, as I mentioned earlier, he shows this incredible enthusiasm. He says, well said, teacher, you have spoken the truth.

He got it right. Not that he’s testing Jesus and you got the right answer. See, I knew it all along and now I don’t know if anybody’s ever done that to you.

but sometimes people will be skeptical of preachers, like they’re looking for a church. Okay, so what about this? Explain this to me.

And they’ll either say, you’re right, you got it, or no, I don’t think so. Because they already have an answer in mind. They’re wanting to make sure you’re not crazy.

He’s not doing that to Jesus. He’s really coming looking for an explanation, and he knows the right answer when he hears it. He says, that’s got to be it.

You’ve spoken well, you’ve spoken the truth, because there is no other God. There is one God. Love him with all we have.

Of course, we should do that. And to love our neighbor as ourselves. And Jesus says, you are not far from the kingdom.

Now, to us, that’s a strange statement. To them, it would have been kind of an outrageous statement. I’m not saying the scribe got mad about it, but some of the others in the listening audience probably took offense to it.

Because as one of the religious leaders, as an expert in the law, it was assumed, of course, he would be in the kingdom. And here you’re telling him he’s almost there. I’m sure some of the Pharisees and some of the Sadducees and some of the other scribes said, who is he?

Who’s he to tell this man, this expert in the law, that he’s on the outskirts of the kingdom? But the scribe agreed with Jesus. And Jesus said, because he understood that God is concerned more with the heart than the outward characteristics, he was close to the kingdom.

You see, just understanding that isn’t going to be enough to get us into the kingdom. Trying to do that isn’t going to be enough to get us into the kingdom because we can’t do it. That scribe for all his religious efforts, for all of his goodness, for all of his time spent in the law, even that scribe was not into the kingdom yet.

Because Jesus taught over and over and his apostles taught over and over. These standards that are set for us are not standards we can keep. If we are trusting in our goodness, if we’re trusting in our religion, if we’re trusting in our efforts to get us into the kingdom, we are going to always fall short.

Because God’s standard is absolute sinless perfection. You say, well, that preacher said, I’m not good enough to get into heaven. Exactly, that’s exactly what I said, because I’m not either.

This scribe was not. Jesus looked at the most religious people of his day. The people that from an outward perspective looked the godliest of anybody in his day.

He looked at the Pharisees and scribes, and he told the crowds that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees and scribes. You’re not getting in. And as far as the outward behavioral parts of the law, they had kept them as best they could perfectly.

If anybody was going to make it into heaven on their good works, it was going to be the Pharisees and scribes. And yet Jesus said, you’ve got to do better than that. Because the problem of the Pharisees and scribes was their hearts.

Their hearts that were far from God. The Bible says that all of our hearts are desperately wicked. None of us love God the way he deserves to be loved because we still struggle with sin.

We struggle with idolatry. We struggle with self. Now, when I say idolatry, I’m not saying anybody in here has a little golden statue at their house that they go and bow down to, right?

Nobody’s taking food to little statues and ringing bells. Don’t raise your hand if you are, but come see me afterwards. We need to talk, right?

I’m not accusing anybody of doing that, but we all have idols in here, even if it’s just self. John Calvin, not somebody I quote often, but I think he was dead on when he said the human heart is a factory of idols. We’re all prone to it.

Our hearts are rebellious toward God, even when we love Him. Sometimes we read a commandment in Scripture. We read something we’re supposed to do, and the flesh wells up and says, but I want to do something else.

Have you experienced that? Because I have all the time. And then loving others as ourselves, we know we’re not perfect at this.

As important as this command is to God, it’s impossible for us to keep it perfectly. And that’s why Jesus Christ came as he did this week. Later on in the week, he went to the cross and he took responsibility for our sins.

And he was nailed to that cross and he shed his blood and he died because you and I could not get to the kingdom on our own. We could not do enough good to get to the kingdom. Even this scribe could not do enough good to get to the kingdom because we’ve all sinned and that sin has to be paid for.

It has to be cleansed and wiped clean and we can’t do that. So Jesus took responsibility for it and he was punished in our place so that our account could be wiped clean. And if you want to look at it in terms of an account like a bank account, Jesus didn’t just get us out of the red and bring us back to zero.

He put his righteousness in our account so that if we’ll trust in him as our one and only savior God looks at us and sees the righteousness of Christ see this is something we’re supposed to do it’s something we should shoot for as Christians but it is not a standard we can keep to make it into the kingdom it’s not a standard we can get to heaven it’s one more standard that we fall short of even as as hard as we should try to to do it it’s one more standard that shows us how far we fall short of what God says even when there’s just two commandments to look at. We still fall short of it, and that’s why we need Jesus. And not only does he forgive us, not only does he save us and cleanse us and bring us all the way into the kingdom, but then he changes our hearts and helps us to do these very things.