Matt 22:34–40 — The Messiah And the Twofold Commandment of Love

The Pharisees and the Law

We are in this section of the Gospel of Matthew that is a little bit like a pause before the climactic ending. The climactic ending is only a few chapters away. The passion narrative, the crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. But we are in this pause during Passion Week, during Holy Week, leading up to that climax. We are somewhere in the middle of that week.

Thursday night is the Last Supper, Friday is the Crucifixion. So we are somewhere before Thursday, maybe this is Tuesday or Wednesday of Passion Week, in which Jesus is engaging in dialogue with the various groups within Judaism concerning how to interpret the scriptures.

He was first challenged by the Herodians who were pro-Rome. They believed that the Romans were a good thing and that we should not be attacking them. And he dealt with the issue of Jewish nationalism in this debate over should we pay taxes to Caesar. That was one group within Judaism that he was addressing, the Jewish nationalists.

Then the Sadducees came, another theological sect within Judaism who denied the resurrection. And the Sadducees came to Jesus to try to trick him and to argue that if you believe in the resurrection that it leads to absurd ideas such as a woman who died and had seven husbands. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection if there is such a thing as a resurrection? And Jesus shows that the Sadducees, this one particular theological group within Judaism, had misunderstood the nature of the resurrection. But they had also misunderstood the scripture because he says in verse 31, as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?

I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He is not God of the dead, but of the living. And we pointed out that Jesus’ argument there is not simply to focus on the present tense of the word am. I am the God of Abraham. implying that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive with God. It is not simply that, but it is more that Jesus here is quoting from Exodus chapter three, and this covenant formula that God is the God of his people.

This covenant formula, I will be their God and they shall be my people, is the whole thrust of scripture, beginning with the first revelation of the covenant of grace in Genesis 3.15 and then amplified with Abraham and continued on throughout the scripture is this covenant theme that God is a covenant God. who desires to have a covenant relationship with his people. To be the God of someone means to be their covenant God and for them to be in a covenant relationship with him. So he is not just simply focusing on the word am, he is focusing on the word of as well. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Jacob. It would make no sense for God to say that he is the God of his people and they are his people if that was only a temporary covenant relationship that ended at death.

Clearly there is a resurrection hope that there is a covenantal communion that transcends death and will be fulfilled in the age to come in the resurrection. Now we come to another important group within Judaism, and that is the Pharisees. Now the Pharisees seem to be better than the Sadducees. The Pharisees, unlike the Sadducees, they believe in the resurrection hope. They affirm that there is a covenantal communion between God and his people that transcends death and will be fulfilled in the age to come.

And yet, they too have a serious shortcoming in their approach to interpreting the Scriptures. The Sadducees turned the Scriptures into this lifeless code of civil law, and had no sense of union and communion with God. The Pharisees, they had the communion with God idea, they had this idea that there is something more than just this life, but yet they too had turned the scripture into a legal code as a means of achieving righteousness before God. They had turned the law into a set of rules that would be a form of rule keeping, in which if you keep all those rules, then you are righteous before God.

Jesus describes this earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, in Matthew chapter 15, when the Pharisees came to Jesus and said, why do not your disciples wash their hands before they eat? Of course, that principle of washing your hands before you eat has nothing to do with hygiene or avoiding infections. It had to do with, in the Pharisees’ mindset, had to do with this idea of keeping the ritual commandments described in the book of Leviticus for the purpose of ritual purity and holiness. And that was a man-made tradition, because in the Pharisees’ idea, this was something that was not just required of the priests, but of all the people. And Jesus says, in that context, he condemns the Pharisees for their man-made traditions, their oral law, and their desire to try to keep all of these laws in order to be pure and righteous before God.

And this is what he says in Matthew 15, verse 8. He is quoting from Isaiah. This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. That would be a good cross-reference to bring into play here in our text, because when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together and said, okay, we need a scheme here. We have got to trap Jesus somehow. And one of them, one of the Pharisees, a lawyer, that is an expert in the law, was an expert in all of the 613 commandments of the law and trying to figure out how to keep them and all the details of how you should keep the Sabbath, how many steps can you take outside of your home, what are all the rules about washing and so on. A lawyer who was an expert in this Turning this law into a set of rules that the Pharisees could keep in order to be right before God, this lawyer comes and perfectly expresses what Jesus had said back in Matthew 15.

This lawyer, he honors me with his lips, but his heart is far from me. He is simply a legalist. He is simply a a technician of the law and trying to figure out how to keep the law, but without any concern for loving God and loving his neighbor and having a purity that is bigger than just the purity of the hands and the outward Levitical principles, but a purity of heart. There is no sense of heart purity, no sense of heart change, no love for God or neighbor, no sense that love is the heart of it all. They have distorted the law. They have ignored the weightier matters of the law and focused all their energy on these traditions about how to keep the law in order to be righteous before God.

And so here then, in this particular confrontation with the Pharisees, we see the culmination of a controversy that we have been reading about throughout the Gospel of Matthew, beginning in chapter 9. Chapter nine is the first time we began to see, that is when they asked Jesus, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And all throughout this whole section of Matthew from chapter nine onward, we have seen this conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. And it centers upon the law, their view of the law.

The Pharisees, as exemplified by this lawyer who is an expert in all the technicalities and ins and outs of how to keep the law, the Pharisees had reduced the law to an engine of self-righteousness. It is kind of a helpful way to think about man’s fundamental problem, is that man is always trying to find a way. Man, apart from Christ, apart from grace, apart from the gospel, is always trying to find an engine of righteousness that they could use in order to produce their own righteousness before man, usually, before other people, perhaps even before God, as in the case of the Pharisees. In this particular cultural context in first century Judaism, the perfect engine was the whole system of law-keeping that the Pharisees had created through oral tradition and all of their man-made rules about how to be ritually pure and how to keep the law in order to be righteous before man and before God. But today, in our culture, there are other engines out there, right? People can find political engines, they can find engines of their own righteousness, and they can say, this is the thing that shows that I am righteous, that I am a good person, and all of you people out there are not.

That is man’s fundamental problem apart from the gospel and apart from Christ. And so here we have the Pharisees coming to the Lord Jesus Christ attempting to trick him and to test him and to engage in this legalistic technical wrangling over the law to ask which is the great commandment in the law. The danger is that he might pick one commandment, and then they would say, ah, so then are you saying that the other commandments are not important? Of course not, right? But Jesus answers their question with an obvious response, which is he says, look, the Old Testament itself tells you, right?

The Shema in Deuteronomy chapter 6 verses 4 and 5 says that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And the second commandment is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now you will notice that if you look in your bulletins, I titled the sermon, The Messiah and the Two-Fold Commandment of Love. I did not title it, The Two-Fold Commandment of Love. I titled it, The Messiah and the Two-Fold Commandment of Love.

Christ Our Prophet

Because what we see here in this passage is the relationship between Christ and the Law, between the Messiah and the Law. And this is a theme that has been found throughout the Gospel of Matthew. We are not just reading about it here in this one text. This is an important principle too, and I think you have noticed this as we have been going through Matthew, which is that any particular pericope, that is paragraph or story, in the Gospel has to be interpreted in light of the whole context of the Gospel as a whole, the Gospel of Matthew as a whole.

This particular one here, this paragraph about the two-fold commandment of love, comes, as I said, right before the climax of the story, before Jesus goes to the cross, and it comes after all that Jesus has already taught about the law, going all the way back to Matthew chapter 5. Remember in the Sermon on the Mount, what did Jesus say? He said right at the beginning, before he got into each of the commandments, he commented on the 6th commandment and the 7th commandment and so on. But before he did that, what did he say?

He gave this programmatic statement about his relationship to the law in Matthew 5.17. He said, that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them, to fulfill the law and the prophets. And so we cannot read this particular pericope about this little discussion between Jesus and this lawyer about which is the great commandment without reading the whole context of Jesus’ relationship to the law according to the Gospel of Matthew. And so the title of the sermon then is intended to bring out that thought. They were looking here at the Messiah and the twofold commandment of love. What is it that Jesus does with respect to the law?

What is it that Jesus is referring to when he says back in Matthew 5.17, I have not come to abolish the law of the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

What is all implied in that word fulfill. It is a short word, and you know, you might have certain ideas that come to your mind when you hear that word. You might think maybe this is just referring to the fact that Jesus keeps the law on our behalf. Absolutely. But there is more to it than that, right? He also fulfills the law in the sense that he teaches us the true meaning and intention of the law. And even more than that, he not only teaches us the true meaning and intention of the law, he not only keeps the law in his own person, but he also works within us by his spirit, fulfilling the law within us according to the prophecy of the new covenant. I will write the law upon their hearts.

Now you might be asking yourself, so I have made a prima facie case that is sort of an initial first glance case for saying that we have to interpret this passage in light of the whole Gospel of Matthew, just as a principle. That is how you interpret any verse or any paragraph is in light of the whole context of the book.

But can we say, is there anything in the text itself? Is there anything right here in our text that encourages us to think not only in terms of how do we interpret these two commandments, to love God and love neighbor, but how do we interpret that teaching of Jesus concerning these two commandments in light of how they relate to Christ as the Messiah. There are two things in our text. that point us in that direction, that suggest that my title for the sermon is correct, that this is about the Messiah and the twofold commandment of love. First clue is the immediate paragraph that follows. That is why I read that section there beginning in verse 41. Immediately on the heels of teaching these two great commandments, love for God and love for neighbor, Jesus says, what do you think about the Christ?

What do you think about the Messiah? So right here, immediately in the very context, Jesus does not simply answer the lawyer’s question and say, here are the two great commandments. He says, let us think about that some more. And so he turns the tables on them and says, what do you think about the Messiah?

Whose son is he? Is he merely the son of David? Of course he is the son of David, but is he something more? According to Psalm 110 verse one, which Jesus quotes there in verse 44, he is not only David’s son, he is also David’s Lord. He is the divine son of God.

So that is the first clue in our text, in the immediate context, not just simply the broader context of the whole Gospel of Matthew, that we must interpret this passage as the relationship between the Messiah and the twofold commandment of love. The second clue is the fact that Jesus’ climactic statement in verse 40 mentions not only the law, but also the prophets.

He says, on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. He does not just say the law. If he had just said the law, then you might think, okay, he is just simply talking about how do we interpret these 613 commandments, bring them to some order. There is different ways you could summarize them. You could summarize them as the Ten Commandments, but then you can even summarize it more as the Two Great Commandments. Perhaps that is all Jesus is doing here is simply saying, how can we step back and get a big perspective and try to summarize the law of God? Summarize all the teaching that God communicated to Israel through Moses as recorded in the Pentateuch in the first five books of the Old Testament. But that is not what Jesus is only doing. He is not only saying, here is how to interpret the law.

He says, on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. Even the prophets were getting at this issue. Even the prophets are involved in this question of how to understand the law. Now the prophets is referring to that section of the Old Testament that begins with the book of Isaiah and goes all the way to the end of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi. You have the great prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. You have the minor prophets as well, Hosea and so on. But if you step back and think about what all those prophets are saying, They have many things that they say.

There are many passages in there that you can look at that you could sort of isolate from the whole context. But overall, big picture, stepping back and thinking about what they are talking about is fundamentally the New Covenant. Because what is the context in which the prophets are speaking?

What they are speaking of is the fact that Israel has failed to keep God’s law. They have worshipped other gods. They have failed to keep God’s law. They have broken the covenant. And so, as a result, they are either about to go into exile, like, for example, Isaiah’s point of view. He is looking towards the exile. The exile has not happened yet. Or they are already in exile. Some of the prophets are writing at the time of the exile. Daniel, for example, is writing right there in Babylon, in exile. Jeremiah was the prophet who wrote right during the time when they were going into exile, right?

All the prophets are speaking of the failure of Israel to keep the law. But in the midst of that failure and calling God’s people to repent, showing them their sin, showing them that the reason that they are being judged and sent into exile because of their sin, in the midst of that darkness and that discouragement and that failure, The prophets also looked ahead with a word of hope to the coming of the Messiah and the making of a new covenant. And what is the essence of the New Covenant? All the prophets have their own way of speaking of it.

Some of them do not actually use that language, the New Covenant. Some of them do. Jeremiah does. Isaiah does not use that language specifically of New Covenant, but he does speak of other terms that relate to that. He calls it the Covenant of Peace. He speaks of the sure mercies of David. He speaks about these different covenantal terms. But all the prophets are basically saying what?

Christ Our Priest

They are saying that God is not going to let things stand where they are with Israel and their utter failure and discouragement and disappointment and law-breaking. God is going to send the Messiah and make a new covenant. And through the work of the Messiah, he is going to make a new covenant in which he will write the law upon the hearts of God’s people. All of that, that whole biblical theology of Israel’s failure, the exile, the looking ahead to the coming of the Messiah and the new covenant is all embedded right there in that one word at the very end of verse 40. on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. The prophets were speaking of that day when God would send his son, the Messiah, to be the true Israelite, to be the true law keeper, and through his work to form a people, a new Israel, who would have the law written upon their hearts. And so when we ask the question then, what is the relationship between the Messiah and the twofold commandment of love? What does it mean when Jesus says, I have come not to abolish the law of the prophets, but to fulfill them? We see three things, three things that Jesus as the Messiah does with respect to the law.

First, he teaches us the depth of what the law truly demands at the heart level. We see it in our text. The essence of the law is summarized with a command that has to do with our hearts, that is to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We also see this earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus took two of the Ten Commandments as representatives to explain this idea. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit murder, but I say unto you, whoever hates his brother in his heart, you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you, whoever looks at a woman with lustful intent has committed adultery in his heart. In the Sermon on the Mount and here as well in this teaching of Jesus on the two great commandments, we see that the first thing Jesus does to fulfill the law, the first thing we understand about the Messiah and the twofold commandment of love is that he is our prophet who teaches us the depth of what the law truly demands in its heart requirements, that we would love God with all of our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves. The Pharisees, this is the first area where the Pharisees failed. Because they were trying to turn the law into an engine of righteousness, of self-righteousness before man and before God, what did they have to do?

They had to lower the standard. They had to say, it does not really matter how your heart is. It does not really matter whether you truly love God or love your neighbor. All that matters is that you keep all these rules and principles in an external way. They wanted to believe that the law was keepable, that you could actually keep it.

And so they turned the law into an engine of righteousness that is really not true righteousness, is it? It is not really righteousness before God if you are simply checking off a list of things and externally washing your hands and externally doing this and that. They had to lower the standard. They had to ignore the fundamental truth that the law was something that they could not keep.

That the law was demanding a purity of heart that is beyond their capacity and that they needed Christ to be the Savior who would provide that true purification of heart. They had to ignore the fundamental truth that the law was not sitting there as an engine for them to come and do all the levers to get the righteousness from, that the law was pointing to Christ, that the law was like this glove that no one could wear except Christ.

Once he puts his hand in that glove, by his active and passive obedience, he fulfills it. The law is an arrow pointing to Christ, who alone will truly fulfill it on behalf of his people. So the first thing that Jesus as the Messiah does with respect to the law is that first, as our prophet, he teaches us the depth of what the law truly demands at the heart level and shows us that the law is not keepable by fallen sinners, that it is only keepable by Christ. But secondly, the second thing Christ does as he fulfills the law is that as our priest, he perfectly fulfills the commandments, not only the Ten Commandments, but also the summarized form of the Ten Commandments, the twofold commandment of love. And we see this throughout the Gospel of Matthew. Beginning all the way back in Matthew 2, verse 15, we are told that Jesus is the true Israel.

Israel has failed, as we just mentioned before. Israel has not kept the law. They have been sent into captivity because of their failure to keep the law. And the Jews and the Pharisees here have shown, by their lowering of the standard and by their externalism, that they are not true keepers of the law.

But in Matthew 2.15, the author of the Gospel of Matthew quotes from Hosea 11 and says, And in the context in Hosea 11.1, this is referring to Israel. Israel being called out of Egypt and being called God’s son. But Matthew applies that to Jesus. Because he is the true Israelite. He is the one obedient Israelite who truly has fulfilled the law of God.

Who truly fulfills all righteousness as Jesus said to John the Baptist in the very next chapter. When John the Baptist said, why are you coming to be baptized by me? And Jesus says, permit it to be so now in order to fulfill all righteousness. That is, in order to fulfill this symbolism. Because what was John the Baptist calling the nation of Israel to? He is calling them to repentance because of their exile, because of their sin. He is calling them to repentance.

Jesus, although he is the sinless Lamb of God who never committed any sin, who is perfect and perfectly righteous, he steps into Israel’s shoes and he confesses not his sin, but the sin of his people by identifying with them in their state of sin and exile. And he goes into the waters of baptism, the waters of the baptism of John the Baptist, which was a baptism of repentance. Not that Christ had to repent of any sin, but he is confessing his identification with Israel in her state of sin. And Jesus says, permit it to be so now. Let this symbolic action happen now in order to fulfill all righteousness.

And of course, immediately after he comes up out of the water, what do we hear? We hear the voice of God the Father in heaven saying, behold, this is my beloved son. Remember that word son is symbolic also because it not only refers to his deity, but also to the fact that he is the true Israel. Out of Egypt, I have called my son. This is my beloved son. This is my beloved son who is truly obedient to me, with whom I am well pleased.

And what is amazing is that when Jesus here now, as we come towards the climax of the Gospel of Matthew, just a few days before the death of Christ, Jesus summarizes the law with these two commands, to love the Lord with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. And in so doing, he is not only teaching us as the true prophet, the heart meaning of the law, he is also teaching us and showing us what he himself fulfills, what he himself does as the true obedient Israelite, the beloved son of the Father.

Jesus fulfilled the great commandment to love the Lord with all of his heart. Remember when he was being tested by the devil in the wilderness, he quoted against the devil that quotation, you shall worship the Lord your God. The devil had said, why do not you bow down and worship me and I will give you all the kingdoms of the earth. And he says, you shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve. Jesus was completely devoted to the honor of his heavenly father.

We see that same zeal that Christ has for the glory of his father when he cleanses the temple and he casts out the money changers. We see it again in that same chapter, this is Matthew 21, just the chapter before which we have been looking at, when he speaks about the fact that he is the cornerstone of the new temple that God is building. Cleansing the old temple and promising to build this new temple of his church is part of his zeal for the first great commandment. for that first table of the law, which has to do with honoring God, with our duty toward God, in honoring Him and worshiping Him alone. The temple was the place where God’s people worshiped God. The temple was the primary thing that the kings of Israel in the Old Testament were supposed to support and promote and keep pure and clean from all idolatry. There were many kings who failed in that, but there were a few, like King Josiah, who came and cleansed the temple, threw out all the idols, and restored the true worship of God, and led God’s people in fulfilling that first great commandment to love God with all of your heart and soul. Jesus here, throughout the Gospel of Matthew, is presented as the one true Davidic king who truly does this, who truly honors God the Father and brings God’s people in that true worship of God, who honors God with all of his heart.

But he also fulfills the second commandment to love your neighbor. We see that throughout the gospel. He heals the sick. He has compassion on those who are needy and sinful. He binds the strongman to plunder his goods, meaning bind Satan in order to rescue the hostages from Satan’s kingdom and to bring them into his kingdom of salvation and grace by casting out demons. He feeds the multitudes. He seeks the lost sheep.

Christ Our King

And of course, the culmination of it all, he loved his neighbor when he gave his life as a ransom for many. The twofold commandment of love is perfectly fulfilled in his voluntary act of going to the cross. In going to the cross, he supremely loved God with all of his heart, completely devoting himself to God’s will, offering himself as a burnt offering upon the altar of God, totally consumed to the glory of God. And in going to the cross, he also supremely loved his neighbor with all of his heart, sacrificing himself for us in self-denying love, in a holy love, a just love, in which he honored God’s law by paying the penalty that we deserved.

And when we consider Christ’s voluntary sacrifice, so often we think about the second commandment, about how he loved us. We are his neighbor and he loved us by sacrificing himself for us. But we should not separate that from how much he loved his father. Setting his love for us in the context of his love for God magnifies his love for us. His love for us is a holy love, a just love, in which the only way that he could fully love us to the bitter end is by satisfying the justice of God on our behalf, by bearing the wrath of God in our place. And he did that, not only out of his love for us, so that we might be saved and delivered and forgiven, but he did that out of his love for God and for God’s holiness and to uphold God’s law. So first, as our prophet, he teaches us what the law truly requires.

Second, as our priest, he fulfills the two great commands, and we see that fulfillment as it reaches its climactic expression in his voluntary act of laying down his life for us on the cross. And third, as our king, he calls us, as his disciples, to keep the twofold commandment of love, not in order to earn God’s favor, not in order to be an engine of righteousness before man and before God, but as a way of showing our gratitude to the Lord for his great love for us. We keep the twofold commandment of love, which is a summary of the Ten Commandments. We keep that twofold commandment of love as it comes from the hand of Christ.

We do not keep that law as it comes to us from Mount Sinai as a covenant of works by which we are threatened with judgment if we fail. We keep the twofold commandment of love as a summary of the Ten Commandments as it comes from the hand of our Redeemer who gave his life for us, who loved us to the very end to save us from our sins. That is what Jesus says, is not it? He says it in Matthew 11, verse 28 and following.

He says, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden. all these burdens heaped upon you by the legalists of this world. And you are heavy laden with all those burdens, but come to me and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

The Lord calls us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart. And we can do so because He has first loved us, because of His grace in saving us from our sins and forgiving us and laying down His life for us. It causes our hearts to thrill with joy and gratitude and love for God because of His grace to us.

If we ever get to the point where the cross is old hat, where the reality of the forgiveness of sins is just old information, I do not need to think about that anymore, then we have lost the plot. The gospel should be this ever-renewed spring of joy and gratitude within our hearts. as we meditate upon the cross of Christ and his love for us, and that then provokes love from our hearts toward God and thankfulness for his love for us, but also then leads to love for our neighbor. Love of neighbor cannot be taken on its own apart from love for God.

Because to truly love your neighbor means that you are seeking your neighbor’s spiritual good. You are seeking that they would love God with all of their heart. You are seeking that they would know the wonder of sins forgiven through the cross of Christ, and that they would live as becomes the followers of Christ. You are seeking their spiritual good.

Love for neighbor is not simply that you affirm them in whatever they claim, or whatever they want to be affirmed in. Love is not toleration. Love is not divorced from love for God. Love for neighbor is under the umbrella of love for God. Jesus explicitly says that. He says the first commandment is to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart. But the second commandment is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

He clearly prioritizes love for God and makes love for neighbors secondary so that our love for our neighbor is understood within the context of our love for God. And that means that when you love your neighbor, you are not just seeking their own happiness as they define it. You are seeking their spiritual good. You are seeking that they would have a right relationship with God through Christ.

Of course, love for God can also become easily an abstract thing of just focusing on God alone and you are not really thinking about your neighbor. And so it is important for us to practically express our love for God by loving our neighbor. As John himself says in his first epistle in John 4 verse 20, he says, if anyone says I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God, whom he has not seen. Love of God is primary, and is the umbrella under which love of neighbor makes sense, and it defines and provides boundaries for our love of neighbor. But on the other hand, love of neighbor is the way in which our love for God can be practically expressed, and it keeps us from simply going off into our own private devotion and our own love for God and without seeing our neighbor next to us who God has put within us, put in our lives for us to care for and to care for them practically, to care for them by seeking their spiritual good. Sometimes we cannot do very much other than to pray for them. That is why Jesus said one of the ways in which we love our neighbor is by praying for our enemies.

But in praying for your enemy, you are praying for their spiritual good. You are praying that God would change their heart. Obviously, if they are your enemy, there is something really messed up in their heart, right? Something really wrong and dark in their own heart. But if you pray for them, even though they have hurt you, if you pray for them, what you are praying for is that they would understand the grace of the gospel, that they would repent of their sin, that they would come to know the Lord, and that they would be restored and reconciled to God. That is a very practical thing to think about in the Christian life. If you are going through a difficulty or a struggle, maybe the enemy is not even an unbeliever.

Maybe it is a professing Christian. But if you are struggling in your relationship with that person, and maybe there is simply nothing you can do right now. It just seems like there is no way to be reconciled. You have tried, but things are just completely stuck. There is still one thing you can do.

You can pray. You are praying for them. You are praying for their spiritual good. You are praying that they would know the Lord. You are praying that they would, if they are believers, But obviously they are struggling, and you would pray that God would help them. And that, if you do that, if you pray for your enemy, that is going to change your heart too. It is going to make you have thoughts of compassion for them.

It is going to remind you of the ways in which you were acting bad in the past, and how you can understand why they are acting the way they are. but you love your enemy by praying for them and seeking that they too would be restored to a right relationship with the Lord. Only those who have known the glory, the glorious gift of having their sins forgiven through the work of Christ are able to do that, to love your enemy, to love your neighbor as yourself.

But we do all this not in order to receive God’s favor. We do it because we have already received his favor pronounced upon us when we were justified and declared righteous in the sight of God on the basis of the work of Christ. And now we receive this twofold commandment of love from the hands of our glorious King, our crucified and risen King. We receive these two commands of love from his hand, from his pierced hand, showing us that out of grace, out of gratitude, out of love, we can make some small beginnings toward keeping the twofold commandment of life, of love, as it comes from the hand of our Lord Jesus Christ.