"If You Love Me, You Will Keep My Commandments."

I recently spoke on the "new commandment" of Jesus to his disciples, referred to in 1 John 2:3 and named thus in the Gospel of John 13:34. My point was that Jesus, though he gave many commandments as we have them in the four New Testament Gospels, said that everything he expected of his disciples (and everything the Old Testament expected) could be summed up in the word "love God and your neighbor". There were several corollary points to make, of course, but as I read John 13 again this evening, a different train of thought left the station, one that I think will go just as far as any.

When Jesus gives this "new commandment", he says that our love is not just now required (as though we weren't already required under the Old Covenant to love God and our neighbor) but that our love is to be patterned after his love: "as I have loved you, you also are to love one another." (13:34) Later in the same discussion, in John 14:15, Jesus states, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments," and again in 14:21 he states that "Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me." And finally, in 14:31, Jesus says that what he does is not determined by "the ruler of this world" but by his own love for his Father: "I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father."

Now, I point this out because till now I've always taken such passages to mean, "If you love Jesus, you'd better be sure that you're also obeying him," much like Mom might point out, "If you really want to go to the movies, make sure you get your chores done by dinnertime," as if the two could be divorced, one done and the other left undone. But as I read them this eveing, their unity came through in a remarkable way, almost as though Jesus was promising, not threatening, that if we manifest and experience love for him, we need not also worry about conjuring up obedience to his commands because our love for him will be the fuel for such obedience, and in fact is the beginning of such obedience. This reading, I believe, is confirmed later in 14:21 when we read the same thought turned around somewhat: the keeping of his commandments is nothing less than the evidence of our love for him, not some other thing that gets attached to love for him. He, then, becomes our model (as alluded to in 13:34) in 14:31 when he says that the world will know that he loves his Father when it sees, not his abstract "love" but his obedience to "all that the Father has commanded" him to do.

All of this is to say that I am again moved and happily perplexed that the obedience that my God requires is a happy one: to love him, and that such love not only begins my obedient walk with him but fuels it. It's as though he says, "Here, eat this feast, prepared especially for you, and make sure you enjoy it." Who could say that one's delight in such a feast was a hindrance to the command to eat it?

BHT

God, Man, Love, and for Whose Sake

On loving oneself, one's neighbor, God, and how they all fit together, Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine,

No sinner is to be loved as a sinner; and every man is to be loved as a man for God's sake; but God is to be loved for His own sake. And if God is to be loved more than any man, each man ought to love God more than himself. Likewise we ought to love another man better than our own body, because all things are to be loved in reference to God, and another man can have fellowship with us in the enjoyument of God, whereas our body cannot.

BHT

Christ's Death as Satisfaction for Sin

John Owen writes on the human heart's need for a "resting place" and why believing that Jesus' death was, among other things, a satisfaction for sin before the demands of God's justice is so neeful:

God is abundantly willing that we should receive that strong consolation that comes from gospel faith; the root of such faith is plucked away by denying the satisfacatino that was made by Christ. It makes the poor soul to be like Noah's dove in its distress, not knowing where to rest teh soles of her feet.

When a soul is turned out of its self-righteousness, and begins to look abroad, and view the heaven and earth for a resting place, and perceives an ocean, a flood, an inundation of wrath, to cover all the world, the wrath of God revealing itself from heaven against all ungodliness, so that it can obtain no rest nor abiding, -- heaven it cannot reach by its own flight, and to hell it is unwilling to fall; -- if now the Lord Jesus Christ do not appear as an ark in the midst of the waters, upon whom the floods have fallen, and yet has got above them all for a refuge, alas! what shall it do?

When the flood fell there were many mountains glorious in the eye, far higher than the ark; but yet those mountains were all drowned, whilst the ark still kept on the top of the waters. Many appearing hills and mountains of self-righteousness and general mercy, at the first view, seem to the soul much higher than Jesus Christ, but when the flood of wrath once comes and spreads itself, all those mountains are quickly covered; only the ark, the Lord Jesus Christ, though the flood fall on him also, yet he gets above it quite, and gives safety to them that rest upon him.

From The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, Book 3, Ch. 9, section V.

BHT