What Does It Take to Love? – Part 2
David W Palmer
(Luke 10:25–28 NKJV) And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” {26} He said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?” {27} So he answered and said, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’” {28} And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”
We see here Jesus saying that the choices involved in love are also related to “life”—eternal life. So, is loving God and our neighbours as he does a prerequisite for eternal life? After all, he said to the lawyer to “do this” and you will “live” or have life. We could argue that the lawyer was under the Old Covenant and that we are under the new? But is this right? After all, the Lord has only promised the “crown of life” to those who “love him”:
(James 1:12 NKJV) Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.
(See also: 1 John 3:10, 14–15, Jude 1:21)
We next look to Jesus to see his way to define or describe love for your neighbour in an easy to apply way. He put it in the form of a very straightforward axiom that we can all understand and apply. During his “Sermon on the Mount, in a great foundation for what was to follow (in Luke 10), Jesus said:
(Matthew 7:12 DKJV) “Therefore, in everything, whatever you want others to do to you, you do the same to them; for this is the [objective of the] law and the prophets.”
This is so simple to understand, and we can all run a mental checklist to see what we would love to have someone do for us if we were in their situation, position, or plight. This bypasses culture, season, geography, and era. It’s what I would love someone to do for me right here and now if I were in his shoes; this is what Jesus tells me to do for others.
The lawyer in our opening passage was probably not at all surprised to hear Jesus say that “doing” this kind of love was the way to eternal life. (After all, he knew that eternal life for him would come from obedience to the law (Lev. 18:5), and that the objective of the law could be summarized as love.) But hearing this didn’t satisfy the lawyer; it didn’t fully convince him of his need to humbly and proactively obey the directive to love his neighbour sacrificially.
The experts in the Old Testament law obviously had the intellectual gifts and skills to grasp intelligibly that love was God’s heart, and that he wanted from his people. In other words, they already knew they should love God and neighbour. However, as the new birth was not available to them until after Jesus’s resurrection, their flesh-ruled nature would have squirmed at the thought of loving others in the way God wanted; “Love … your neighbour as yourself.” To find a way around this (while maintaining academic integrity), their only option would have been to see if there was a loophole in the definition of the word “neighbour”—something that would absolve them from the requirement of loving the unlovely with God’s type of love.
So next, in what proved to be the perfect leading question for Jesus—one that allowed him to be very instructional to us all—the lawyer asked:
(Luke 10:29 NKJV) But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
His motivation was “off” (he wanted to “justify himself”); but his question opened the way for Jesus to nail this down into an un-evadable and practical application.
Before looking at Jesus’s answer, let’s recap what we have seen so far. The key question was: “What must I ‘do’ to inherit eternal life?” The answer was: “love” God and neighbour. The next question was, “Who is my neighbour?” If Jesus could clarify this for the lawyer, he would then be able to “do” the love-your-neighbour part (or
