Love
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
Definition
Love, as Christ names it, is the fulfillment of the whole moral law, expressed in two inseparable commands: wholehearted love for God and love for one’s neighbor as oneself. Jesus offers two commandments rather than one because the second flows from the first: “love for neighbor flows out of love for God.”1 Every other command in Scripture, on this reading, is itself an application of love rather than an independent rule alongside it.
Biblical Basis
When asked which commandment is greatest, Jesus answers with both love for God (Deut. 6:5) and love for neighbor (Lev. 19:18), then adds that “all the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands” (Matt. 22:37-40). Magnuson draws out the force of that last claim: “it is love that ties all the commandments together; they all depend or hang on love.”1 Elsewhere Jesus ties the same command directly to the Decalogue’s own second table, citing the fifth through ninth commandments before adding, “and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 19:18-19), and Paul makes the identical move: “the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Rom. 13:9).
This love is not an achievement believers work up on their own but a “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22), poured out because “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). John states the same order: “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19), and identifies love for fellow believers as the mark by which love for God is tested: “if anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John 4:20).