The Law of Love

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.(James 2:8-11 ESV)

A prevalent concept among evangelicals is that the law of Moses was superseded by Jesus with a simple ethic of love; as though all one has to do under the new covenant of Christ is love God and all the rest will take care of itself. One unspoken implication of this is an interpretation of love as a sentiment. In other words, have the right emotions, feel a certain way, and you're okay. As if this were not bad enough, a more crucial implication is that this idea of loving God is something that Jesus introduced as distinct and different from the law of Moses. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When the lawyer asked Jesus what the greatest commandment of the Law was, and Jesus answered,"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets,"(Matthew 22:37-40 ESV), Jesus was actually quoting the law himself, specifically Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Consider, for instance, that in the Gospel of Luke the tables are turned and Jesus asks a lawyer, "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?", and the lawyer answers with the same two verses. What Jesus and all his Mosaic Law scholar-interrogators understood perfectly well was that love was not distinct from the Law: it was the law. All the rest of it, the rules, and commandments and prohibitions were merely the practical outworking of that law of love.

The radical part of Jesus' message was to identify how pallid and compromised human interpretation of that law had become, and how hopeless it was to achieve by self-righteous effort. When Jesus assented to the lawyer's answer, and the lawyer, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29), Jesus answered him with the parable of the good Samaritan, an object of racial loathing by pious Jews of the day.

When Jesus told his disciples how difficult it would be for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, they despaired: "Who then can be saved" But Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Matthew 19:25,26 ESV)

This is the hopeless dilemma of man the apostle Paul spoke of: For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members, (Romans 7:22,23 ESV)

Judged by this law of love, when I look to my own self I see what a pathetic and degenerate sinner I am, thoroughly lost without God's grace and the justification of Christ; for if I am commanded, in the very first and most important commandment, to love God with all my being, I cannot in all honesty, identify even one moment when I have loved God with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind.

...who on earth can set me free from the clutches of my sinful nature? I thank God there is a way out through Jesus Christ our Lord.
No condemnation now hangs over the head of those who are "in" Jesus Christ. For the new spiritual principle of life "in" Christ lifts me out of the old vicious circle of sin and death.
The Law never succeeded in producing righteousness - the failure was always the weakness of human nature. But God has met this by sending his own Son Jesus Christ to live in that human nature which causes the trouble. And, while Christ was actually taking upon himself the sins of men, God condemned that sinful nature. (Romans 7:24-8:3 Phillips translation)

But now we are seeing the righteousness of God declared quite apart from the Law (though amply testified to by both Law and Prophets) - it is a righteousness imparted to, and operating in, all who have faith in Jesus Christ. (For there is no distinction to be made anywhere: everyone has sinned, everyone falls short of the beauty of God's plan.) Under this divine system a man who has faith is now freely acquitted in the eyes of God by his generous dealing in the redemptive act of Jesus Christ. God has appointed him as the means of propitiation, a propitiation accomplished by the shedding of his blood, to be received and made effective in ourselves by faith. God has done this to demonstrate his righteousness both by the wiping out of the sins of the past (the time when he withheld his hand), and by showing in the present time that he is a just God and that he justifies every man who has faith in Jesus Christ. (Romans 3:21-26 Phillips translation)