How Can Two Commandments Sum Up the Whole Law?
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In the Torah or the Law there are 613 commandments. Yet Jesus says all 613 of these commandments can be summed up with just these two: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. How is it possible that these two commands can sum up the entire law? The key is based on the one word that is at the center of each of these commandments: love.
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The reason why these two commandments can sum up the entire Law and the Prophets is because love is an action word. Real love will be expressed or demonstrated by your actions. This is a principle that was established by God himself. Remember this verse:
Because God loves us, he demonstrated it by sending Christ to die for us when we could care less about him. Since God is filled with love towards us, at some point it had to be expressed, and he did this through Christ’s death on the cross. By the way, the word for love used here is agape. However, this expression is not just limited to God. Consider what John said.
What you see here again is that true love is not solely based on what comes out of your mouth, but it is seen by the things you do. Real love must be expressed or demonstrated.
In sales and marketing there is an expression called WIIFM which stands for What’s In It For Me. If we are not careful, we can turn our love for God into a WIIFM statement. When this happens, we can approach God strictly from a transactional basis and look at loving God simply as a means to an end.
For these two commandments to be the greatest, we must get past WIIFM. When Jesus was performing miracles, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes, many people followed him. However, when the road got a little tough or he was telling people to deny themselves take up their cross and follow him, then the crowds thinned out. This is still true today. Many will follow and “love” Jesus when things are going well, but when the trials come, they fall by the wayside. It’s like they want the blessings Jesus can give but they don’t want Jesus himself.
If we are loving Jesus only for the things he can give us and not for who he is, then this type of love will not fulfill these two greatest commandments. We must have an enduring love that desires God more than we desire anything God can give us.
There is one final Scripture I want to share with you regarding this type of love.
Let me give a summary of these two verses. No matter what you do, or what you go through in life, in every high place, in every low place, every victory, every failure, when you take your first breath in life, and when you take your last one in death, God will never stop loving you. When you are in Christ, nothing will separate you from his love.
This is agape love, and this is the way God loves us. This is also the way we should love God and how we should love each other. It is this type of love, when it is activated and demonstrated, that can sum up these two greatest commandments. The challenge today is to love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself with no strings attached. When you do, you are in position to fulfill everything that God desires you to do and become the person that God wants you to be.
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