Chapter Seven: The Proof of Love
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PROOF OF LOVE
This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.
1 JOHN 5:3
In his book Loving God, Charles Colson told how he asked a number of more experienced Christians how they loved God. The answers he got ran the gamut of spiritual exercises —reading the Bible, prayer, attending church, tithing —along with giving up favorite sins, and a having warm feeling in one’s heart.[33]
Amazingly, one answer that was not given was Jesus’ own response to the question of how to love God. In fact, few things in the Bible are more clear than Jesus’ precise answer: obey His commands. In just the short space of nine verses, Jesus reiterates this thought three times: “If you love me, you will obey what I command”; “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me”; and “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching” (John 14:15, 21, 23).
One issue believers frequently struggle with is the relationship between living by grace and obedience to God’s commands. For example, I stated in chapter 6 that nothing you ever do or don’t do will make God love you any more or any less. Rather, He accepts you strictly by His grace through the merit of Jesus Christ alone. Such an unqualified statement about the love of God sounds exceedingly dangerous, leaving me open to the charge of saying in effect that God doesn’t care whether you sin or not.
But consider the alternative: “God loves you if you are obedient and doesn’t love you if you are disobedient. Since God’s love is conditioned on obedience and you are never perfectly obedient, God never loves you perfectly or accepts you completely.” Such a bald description of the all-too-common works/merit way of thinking about our relationship with God puts the issue into focus. We are accepted by God, not only in salvation but also in our present relationship with Him, either on the merit of Jesus Christ or on the basis of our own performance.
Are we to conclude, then, that since we are saved by grace and accepted by God continuously by grace, He does not care whether we sin or not? To use Paul’s strong exclamation in Romans 6:2, “By no means!” Such a conclusion flies in the face of all the ethical commands of the New Testament. (I will address the Old Testament commands later in this chapter.) Such a conclusion also ignores the very clear relationship that Jesus insisted on between love for Him and obedience to His commands.
Our love for God, expressed through obedience to Him, is to be a response to His love, not a means of trying to earn it. The apostle John said, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). It is not clear whether John was saying that we love God because He first loved us, or that we love one another because God first loved us. It really doesn’t make any difference in this discussion because both are true. Jesus said that love for God and for one another essentially sum up all His commands (see Matthew 22:36-40).
So one clear evidence that we are living by grace is a loving obedience to the commands of God. Anyone who thinks, Since God’s love is not conditioned on my obedience, I am free to live as I please, is not living by grace, nor does he understand grace. What he perceives as grace is really a caricature of grace.
Jesus said that if we love Him, we will obey His commands. Now a command suggests two things. First, it gives clear direction. We are told what to do or not to do. We are not left in doubt as to how we are to live. The commands in the Bible provide a clear set of moral standards.
One very popular philosophy today is “situation ethics,” in which actions are morally evaluated in terms of a “loving” response to the situation at hand rather than by application of moral absolutes. Situation ethics knows no external, objective standard of behavior. Rather, it responds to what “seems right at the moment.” The problem with this philosophy is, as Scripture says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure” (Jeremiah 17:9). Therefore, anything can be made to “seem right.” And because of the sinful nature still at work in us, this description of the heart is true to varying degrees even among believers.
Through “Christianized” situation ethics, all kinds of sinful actions have been committed in the name of “love.” Christians have engaged in adultery —illicit sexual intimacy —on the pretense that they were acting in love toward a “lonely” or “hurting” person. Recently I heard of a man who allegedly conspired to have his incurably ill wife murdered because “she would be happier with Jesus.”
This is the type of trap even Christians fall into when we do not let the commands of God give definition to love. An objective standard of love such as, “love does not commit adultery,” or “love does not murder,” should at least give people pause and certainly leaves them without excuse. God’s commands provide us this objective standard and, when obeyed, keep us from falling into situation ethics.
For this reason, the apostle Paul told us, “Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is” (Ephesians 5:17). His will as used here is not His particular will for us in some issue of personal guidance; rather, it is His moral will as used, for example, in 1 Thessalonians 4:3: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality.”
A few verses before Ephesians 5:17, Paul said to “find out what pleases the Lord” (verse 10). To understand what the Lord’s will is and to find out what pleases the Lord are essentially the same; both expressions refer to the specific directions given in the ethical commands of Scripture. But these verses are themselves commands. That is, we are commanded to know and understand the commands contained in Scripture. And quite obviously, we are to seek to know God’s will in order to obey it. As my first Bible study leader said many years ago, “The Bible was not given just to increase your knowledge, but to guide your conduct.”
A command, however, is more than a set of directions. We’ve all heard the humorous statement, “When everything else fails, read the directions.” Such a statement suggests that directions are optional, that sometimes we can “muddle through,” sort of figuring out things on our own without bothering to read the directions. Some Christians seem to think the commands of Christ are nothing more than a set of directions.
If we follow them, they will help us get through life without falling on our face and getting hurt too many times.
But the word command carries the idea of authority. The most basic meaning of the word is “to direct with authority.” A command does not just give guidance that one may accept or reject; a command implies that the one giving it has the authority to require obedience and the intention of doing so. This is true of the commands of God. As the sovereign God of the universe, He has the authority to require obedience and He does insist that we obey Him.
LAW AND GRACE
This brings us to a core issue in understanding the relationship of the law of God to the grace of God. (Law is used here as a summation of God’s moral commands.) Under the reign of grace, is the moral will of God, considered as a whole, a request or a command? This question is not a theoretical exercise in semantics. The word request connotes desire; whereas the word command connotes authority to require. Response to a desire is optional; response to a command is not.
So when Jesus said we love Him by obeying His commands, was He using the word command as we ordinarily understand it, or was He using it as an expression of God’s desire? In the realm of grace, does the moral will of God express the desire of God as to how He would like us to live, or does it express the requirement of God as to how we are to live?
Some people believe that, under grace, God’s law no longer has the meaning of requirement but is an expression of His desire. They would readily say God desires that we be holy, but God does not require that we be holy. They maintain that we have been freed, not only from the curse and condemnation resulting from breaking the law, but also from the requirements of the law as a rule of life. They believe that to insist on obedience as a requirement for a Christian is to teach legalism instead of grace. In other words, to assign the concept of requirement to the will of God is legalism, but to assign the concept of desire to it is grace.
I believe such a view is a misunderstanding of grace. God’s grace does not change the fundamental character of God’s moral law. Rather, the grace of God provides for the forgiveness and acceptance of those who have broken the law. The good news of the gospel is that God has removed the guilt we incur by breaking His law and has bestowed on us the righteousness of Christ, who perfectly kept His law. Legalism does not consist in yielding obedience to the law. Rather, it is to seek justification and good standing with God through the merit of works done in obedience to the law —instead of by faith in Christ.
We need to always keep in mind that God is not only our Savior and heavenly Father through Christ, but He is also still God, the supreme Ruler and moral Governor of His creation. The sons and daughters of a king are still under obligation to obey the laws their father has decreed for his realm, even though they are his children. They are no more exempt from the laws than any other citizen.
Even when the children of the king freely and willingly obey the laws, because they love their father and understand and agree with the laws he has pronounced, they are still subject to the laws of the realm. So we as God’s children are subject to the laws of His realm. Out of a response to His grace, we should obey in a loving and grateful way. And as we’ll see in chapter 8, because God has written His law on our hearts, we will, as a rule, be in agreement with His law written in His Word. But we are still to regard God’s law as commands to be obeyed, not merely as expressions of His desires.
Along the highways in the United States we have white speed limit signs and yellow speed advisory signs. The speed limit signs declare the law of the state. The speed advisory signs caution you to slow down, perhaps because an upcoming curve is too tight to be rounded at the legal speed limit. You can be fined for exceeding the posted speed limit because you have broken the law of the state. You will not be fined for exceeding the advisory speed because you have not broken any law.
The law of God is like the white speed limit sign. It is the declared law of the realm. We have broken that law many times, but Christ has paid our “fine” (which is death) for us. But His paying our “fine” did not abolish the law. Christ’s death did not, so to speak, change a speed limit sign to a speed advisory sign. God’s law has not become optional because of His grace, merely advisory to keep us from getting hurt as we go through life.
So the fundamental character of God’s law has not changed. What has changed is our reason for obedience, our motive, as we discussed in chapter 6. Under a sense of legalism, obedience is done with a view to meriting salvation or God’s blessing on our lives. Under grace, obedience is a loving response to salvation already provided in Christ, and the assurance that, having provided salvation, God will also through Christ provide all else that we need.
There is no question that obedience to God’s commands prompted by fear or merit-seeking is not true obedience. The only obedience acceptable to God is constrained and impelled by love, because “love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10). God’s law as revealed in His Word prescribes our duty, but love provides the correct motive for obedience. We obey God’s law, not to be loved, but because we are loved in Christ.
I readily acknowledge that it is indeed difficult to keep in our minds and hearts the commandment nature of God’s will without falling into the trap of legalism. Samuel Bolton recognized this difficulty when he wrote,
It is a hard lesson to live above the law, and yet to walk according to the law. But this is the lesson a Christian has to learn, to walk in the law in respect of duty, but to live above it in respect of comfort, neither expecting favour from the law in respect of his obedience nor fearing harsh treatment from the law in respect of his failing.[34]
Ironically, the law of God, viewed as commands to be obeyed, should actually promote living by grace. When we view God’s commands as optional —or think that as God’s children we are no longer under the law as a moral requirement —we subtly slip into a works mentality. If obedience to God’s law is optional, then in our minds we begin to accumulate merit or extra points. “After all, we didn’t have to obey, so we must gain some merit by voluntary obedience.”
But the person who knows that he is required to obey God’s commands, even as a child of God, will see more and more how far short he comes in obedience. And if that person understands the biblical concept of grace, he will be driven more and more into the arms of the Savior and His merit alone.
Evangelist D. L. Moody is reported to have said something to this effect: “You’ve got to get people lost before you can get them saved.” He was saying that only those who recognize they are lost will turn to the Savior. The Lord Jesus stated the same principle: “For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13).
This principle applies to us even as believers living under grace. We don’t have to get “lost” time and again, but we certainly need to be reminded that we are still sinners. The best way to do this is to take seriously the commands of God as a required rule of life. As we do, we will be continually reminded that we really are spiritually bankrupt —even as believers. And as redeemed sinners in a perpetual state of bankruptcy, we will come to appreciate more each day the superabounding grace of God.
So, then, God’s law, as a rule of life, is not opposed to grace. Rather, used in the right sense, it is the handmaid of grace. Or, to use an analogy, it is like a sheepdog that keeps driving us back into the fold of grace when we stray out into the wilderness of works.
LAW AND LOVE
Some people maintain that the “law of love” has replaced even the moral commands of Jesus, and that our only rule is to “love our neighbor as ourself.” They quote the apostle Paul, who said,
He who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
ROMANS 13:8-10
Some people understand Paul to say that the New Testament principle of love has replaced the Old Testament principle of law. That is, whereas the Jewish nation in the Old Testament lived under a number of specific moral laws, the church in the New Testament has “come of age” and now lives by the higher principle of love. Since love must be voluntary and cannot be compelled, so the thinking goes, love and law are mutually exclusive.
But if we realize the moral law is a transcript —a written reproduction —of the moral character of God and that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), we see that we cannot distinguish between law and love. Both express the character of God. They are, to use a figure of speech, two sides of the same coin. In our case, love provides the motive for obeying the commands of the law, but the law provides specific direction for exercising love.
For example, Paul said in Romans 13:10, “Love does no harm to its neighbor.” But suppose that were all we knew about love. Suppose we didn’t have the Ten Commandments, from which Paul quoted in verse 9: “‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet.’” If we didn’t have those specific directions, how would we know what it means to harm one’s neighbor?
Most of us are familiar to some degree with the classic description of love given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Paul did not give a dictionary definition of love; instead, he described it in terms of specific attitudes and actions toward one another. What are these attitudes and actions? They are nothing more than various expressions of the moral law of God.
Leviticus 19 is basically an amplification of the Ten Commandments as originally set forth in Exodus 20. Let’s consider verses 11-18 of Leviticus 19:
Do not steal.
Do not lie.
Do not deceive one another.
Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.
Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him.
Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight.
Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the LORD.
Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.
Do not go about spreading slander among your people.
Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the LORD.
Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.
Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.
Now, let’s paraphrase those verses using the format “Love does not,” which Paul used in 1 Corinthians 13. When we do this, the passage from Leviticus 19 reads as follows:
Love does not steal, it does not lie, it does not deceive. Love does not profane God’s name. It does not defraud nor rob its neighbor. It does not hold the wages of a hired man overnight. Love does not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block in front of the blind.
Love does not pervert justice, nor show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great. Instead, it judges its neighbor fairly. Love does not slander another, nor do anything that endangers his life.
Love does not hate its brother, nor seek revenge, nor bear a grudge, but rather treats its neighbor as itself.
We can see from this paraphrase that the various expressions of God’s moral law, wherever they occur in Scripture, are simply a description of love in action.
Leviticus 19 also helps us understand who our neighbor is. He is the hired man, the deaf, the blind, the poor, the great, the person whom we are tempted to lie to or steal from or slander. He is the person who has wronged us and against whom we are tempted to hold a grudge. Our neighbor is even the person whose life we might endanger by reckless behavior. We can easily say our neighbor is anyone with whom we come in contact. But because of our human frailty and our tendency to have moral “blind spots,” it is helpful to think in terms of specific situations.
The principle of love is not a “higher principle” over God’s moral law. Rather, it provides the motive and the motivation for obedience, while the law provides the direction for the biblical expressions of love. The actions prescribed by God’s law would be hollow indeed if they were not motivated by love for both God and our neighbor. I would much rather do business with someone who wanted to treat me fairly because he loved me than someone who deals fairly only because “it’s good for business.” I would also want his love to be guided by the moral and ethical principles of the Bible.
OLD TESTAMENT LAW
Earlier in this chapter, I promised to address the issue of the moral commands of the Old Testament as they relate to us as believers today. Gordon Wenham was especially helpful in this area when he wrote,
As far as basic principles of behavior are concerned the OT [Old Testament] and NT [New Testament] are in broad agreement. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:20-31; Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18). With this double quotation from Deuteronomy and Leviticus Jesus drew out the quintessence of OT law and gave it his own seal of approval. The ten commandments are often quoted by the NT. Peter quotes the Levitical injunction to holiness (1 Pet. 1:16). The examples could be multiplied to show that the NT advocates the same standard of personal morality as the OT. This is to be expected, since the God of the OT is the God of the NT. The people of God are supposed to imitate God. If Leviticus summons men to “be holy, for I am holy,” our Lord urges us: “You, therefore, must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). It is evident that the personal ethics of both testaments are similar. . . .
The principles underlying the OT are valid and authoritative for the Christian, but the particular applications found in the OT may not be. The moral principles are the same today, but insofar as our situation often differs from the OT setting, the application of the principles in our society may well be different too.[35]
One of the examples Wenham cited is Deuteronomy 22:8: “When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.” A parapet is a low, protective wall or rail along the edge of a roof. In an area where flat-roofed houses were common, it was obviously intended to keep people from falling off the roof. The underlying principle shows that safety measures are more than just a good idea, they are the will of God. This should help us respond in a Christian way to the proliferation of occupational safety and product liability laws. While some aspects of those laws seem to go too far in addressing safety problems, they are —although unintentional on the part of their authors —applications of the safety principle God set forth in Deuteronomy 22:8. Therefore, out of love to God and to our neighbor, we should make our workplaces and our products as safe as possible.
The apostle Paul used this method of applying principles from Old Testament law in 1 Corinthians 9:9-10:
For it is written in the Law of Moses: “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn’t he? Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest.
The specific application Paul made to ministers of the gospel was far removed from the Old Testament agricultural economy. Yet, it is as applicable today as it was in Paul’s day, not only to the ministry but to all employment situations. In this sense, then, the law of God as expressed in the Old Testament has not been abolished.
THE FREEDOM OF THE GOSPEL
“But,” some say, “didn’t Paul say in Ephesians 2:15 that Christ ‘[abolished] in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations’? Didn’t he say that Christ has set us free from the law, and didn’t he urge us to stand firm in that freedom?” (see Galatians 5:1). We must honestly address these questions if we are to correctly understand the relationship of God’s law to grace.
In answer to the first question, Paul surely cannot mean that Christ abolished the moral will of God. Such a meaning would contradict what he wrote so abundantly elsewhere. In fact, Paul himself referred explicitly to the Ten Commandments later in the same letter: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’ —which is the first commandment with a promise” (Ephesians 6:1-2).
So Paul cannot mean that Christ abolished the law of God as an expression of God’s moral will. Neither can he mean that the requirements of the law have now been changed to the desire of God. The word abolished would not sustain such a meaning. Paul, then, surely meant that Christ abolished the curse of the law and the condemnation of the law for those who have faith in Him.
In Galatians 3:10, Paul wrote, “All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.’” This passage gives us a clue as to what Paul meant in Ephesians when he said Christ abolished the law. It is the law viewed as that which condemns and curses for disobedience that is abolished. Christ abolished the law in this sense by bearing its curse for us. Paul went on to say in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’” This verse also helps us understand the sense in which Paul said we were called to be free (see Galatians 5:1).
The issue in the Galatian church was not obedience to the moral law of God; rather, it was a reliance on the moral law and the Mosaic ceremonial law for salvation. Some Jewish teachers were saying, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5). Christ has freed us from this Jewish insistence on observance of the Mosaic law. We are freed from the curse on those who rely on the law as a means of salvation.
It is difficult for us today to appreciate the struggle the newly emerging Gentile churches had with the Jewish “law-keepers” in Paul’s day. We must seek to understand what Paul meant by freedom in the context of the issue he was contending against. Otherwise, we may interpret Paul as saying more than he actually said.
In the history of the United States, a famous patriot cried out, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Because we know he uttered this in the context of the American Revolution, we readily understand he was speaking specifically of liberty from the rule of the British monarch. He was not crying out for liberty from all civil law, but from what he considered the tyranny of unjust laws.
In the same manner, Paul did not call for freedom in an absolute sense, but freedom from the bondage of the Jewish law system, which was abolished by Christ in His death. When we stop to think about it, there is no such thing as unqualified freedom. Such “freedom” would not be freedom, it would be anarchy. It would be everyone doing what is right in his own eyes; and given our sinful nature, it would be total chaos.
In the United States, we say we live in a “free country.” We understand that freedom to be political freedom: the right to have a say in our government. But we all recognize we are not free to disobey the laws of our state or nation. We are not free, for example, to drive on the left side of the highway.
My son observed a humorous example of “freedom” when he visited a country in which automobile drivers are undisciplined and “free spirited.” He saw cars stopped at a railroad crossing for a passing train. Instead of lining up behind one another to cross in their proper turn, several cars lined up at the crossing guard across the entire road. Each driver wanted to be first to cross when the guard was raised. But when the train had passed, lo and behold, cars were lined up completely across the road on the other side of the tracks. “Freedom” quickly turned to chaos! That kind of thing happens in a much more serious way when we insist on unqualified freedom from the law of God.
We have indeed been set free from the bondage and curse that results from breaking the law. And we have been called to freedom from works as a means of obtaining any merit with God. But we have not been called to freedom from the law as an expression of God’s will for our daily living.
Paul said, “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law,” and “I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law” (Romans 7:22, 25). A few verses before he had characterized God’s law as “holy, righteous and good” (verse 12). It seems inconceivable that Paul would want to be free, or urge others to be free, from what was holy, righteous, and good —that in which he himself delighted.
So, then, God’s law is not opposed to grace, nor is it an enemy of grace. Neither is the law of God opposed to us as we seek to live by grace. To live by grace means we understand that God’s blessing on our lives is not conditioned by our obedience or disobedience but by the perfect obedience of Christ. It means that out of a grateful response to the grace of God, we seek to understand His will and to obey Him, not to be blessed, but because we have been blessed.