Love & God’s Commands

Amy K. Hall at Stand To Reason has decided to offer her own rationale for failing to love people in the manner that God requires of us.  Let’s take a look. 

Ms Rachel, a YouTuber who posts learning videos for toddlers, made waves this week when she posted a video

 celebrating Pride Month on TikTok. After receiving some backlash, she explained her position this way:

My faith is really important to me, and it’s also one reason why I love every neighbor. In Matthew 22, a religious teacher asked Jesus, “What’s the most important commandment?” And Jesus says to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. There’s no greater commandments than these. I believe it’s mentioned eight times: Love your neighbor.

So, yes, everyone belongs, everyone’s welcome, everyone is treated with empathy and respect. It doesn’t say, “Love every neighbor except….” There are so many reasons I stand strong in love. I stand with everyone. That’s who I am.

Rachel stands with everyone.  She gets it.  

Amy K. Hall replies…

It’s not unusual for people to cite the second great commandment as if it trumps God’s other moral commands: “See? What God wants most is for us to love. That’s what’s most important, so that’s all we should worry about.” But this is simply a misreading of the text.

Actually, no, it isn’t, insofar as there are 3 texts, which are all parallel to one another. 

Matthew 22:34–40 (ESV): But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” 

 

This text teaches us that the First Table of the Law is summarized by “Love God over & above everything & everyone else, & love your neighbor before yourself.  All the rest hangs on these two principles.  

How does Matthew define adultery? Does  Matthew 5:27 - 28 target the mere act of looking at someone who isn’t your spouse regardless of motive?  No!  According to the text, sexual immorality/adultery is defined by lustful intent - our inward love for God & neighbor must be reordered by God in order to avoid the charge of lustful intent.     

Romans 13:8–10 (ESV): Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 For 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.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. 

 This text informs us that perfect love for God & neighbor fulfills the Law. 

1 John 4:16–18 (ESV): God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 

This text teaches us that perfected love drives out guilt & fear.  If we love God first & foremost & then our neighbor before ourselves. we will find ourselves vindicated in the Judgment.  

Contrast this with Amy K. Hall on Religious Liberty.  She puts the CO baker’s religious liberty before the Civil Rights of his neighbors & she argues that his cause is morally & legally just because he was being oppressed by LGBTQ people & the Government, as if Roman oppression in Matthew 5 is a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” for complying with Matthew 5:41 - 48.  

When Jesus said, “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets,” he didn’t mean that love for God and neighbor should somehow trump the Law and the Prophets; he meant the Law and the Prophets exist for the very purpose of teaching us what love for God and neighbor looks like.

 

Neither did He teach that what defines “real” or “true” love - the sort that frees & liberates us is the target of our love.  Rather, by defining sexual immorality & adultery via the inward motive, not merely the outward target, He taught us that God condemns & commends based upon the correctly ordered quality of our love for God & neighbor (and thus ourselves).   He taught that loving God & neighbor before yourself is the essence of God’s Moral Law & the Civil Code derived from them & obedience to that body of Moral & Civil Law.   

The Law & Prophets deny justification by works & faith.  If God condemns anyone apart from their motives, then it logically follows that He commends them on the same basis.  If sexual sin is defined with little or no regard for the ordered quality of our love for God & others and the emphasis is put on the identity of the target of our love, then all we have to do to get out from under condemnation is comply by performing the requisite amount of spiritual rigamorole to earn brownie points with God.  That’s the essence of Situational Ethics.  In Situational Ethics, if the couple is homosexual or they demand you do absurd cake decorating  that you recognize as oppression, then you don’t look for exemptions from the Moral Law of God or, as in the cases of  the Colorado baker & the Colorado photographer, ways to dispense with the de facto oath that attaches to your business license. 

Consider these two passages that state this plainly:

Now I ask you, lady, not as though I were writing to you a new commandment, but the one which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to His commandments. (2 John 6)

 

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments. (1 John 5:2)

Consider 1 Corinthians 13. 

1 Corinthians 13:4–8 (ESV): Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 

8 Love never ends. 

 When Tim quoted from this passage, he left out Verse 7, which is clear that love protects, trusts, hopes, & perseveres. 

Sometimes what Paul says in Romans 13:8is used to support the idea that love trumps God’s commands: “He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.” Again, this is interpreted to mean that we don’t need to worry about all of God’s outdated moral commands—all we need to do is to love others.

But listen to the passage in its context:

 He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this [i.e., for love], “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Rom. 13:8–10)

 

It is for love that we follow the commandments! The commandments are there for the very purpose of prohibiting the things that “do wrong to a neighbor” and promoting the things that do right.

Notice that she didn’t explain how the context of this passage supports her point of view.  We aren’t told exactly how paracleting a gay couple by baking the cake or taking their wedding pictures or standing up for them in matters of employment, housing, & public accommodation or supporting them when they adopt, and any number of ways we ought to be replicating & restoring because of the decades of systematic abuse & general oppression of them by the Christian Community does wrong to them — It just does, and we ought to understand that.

This means that true love is defined for us by God’s commandments. It’s a false love that redefines what is good and bad for our neighbor apart from God’s revelation of his moral laws.

Generally speaking, this is true.  However, when we define love for others in a manner that looks to the Identity of their loved ones & other associates or the mere appearance of evil, like going to a nightclub or attending a Pride parade, etc., we are basing the truly loving thing to do on the identity of someone’s loved ones & other external factors.  That’s called Situational Ethics — and what makes Situational Ethics so reprehensible coming from Christians is the manner in which they rationalize their prejudices to give them the air of respectability by cloaking them in the veneer of “the most loving thing to do”  and then finding a way to fail their neighbors again, thusly continuing the cycle of mutual oppression emanating from themselves & their opponents. 

The reason for the confusion about this among Christians comes down to an equivocation on the word “love.” Too many Christians have been catechized into our culture’s understanding of love, and they’ve simply absorbed the new definition without realizing it. Love 2.0 now means acceptance and celebration, and if one of God’s moral laws seems to oppose acceptance and celebration, then obviously the second great commandment to love-2.0 your neighbor should trump that law. In other words, now love 2.0 trumps actual love.

So what she’s saying is that true or “real” love doesn’t accept & celebrate people who are sinning.   That’s odd, insofar as the Bible depicts God doing exactly that at the Tower of Babel.  Even though the Covenantal Cycle was entering or soon to enter a period of declension, God speaks to the Heavenly Court out of His beneficence by accepting them as His people & commending & celebrating them for their ingenuity, endurance, & unity — even though He sees ziggurats directed at their pseudodeities.  

The sad truth is that anyone who rejects God’s moral commands in order to love has missed love altogether. 

This statement is both funny & ironic coming from someone who is clearly going out of her way to reject God’s moral commands. 

Love doesn’t trump God’s commands; it’s defined by them.  

No, God’s love defines His moral commands.  Out of His attributes (God is love) come His commands.  

As a reminder, the tradition bound view, in addition to turning on 4 to 5 epistemic, logical, & exegetical fallacies, also results in people being condemned for sexual sin that isn’t defined by God’s evaluation of our inward motives. Rather, the determining factor is whether or not their partner is of the same sex or not.  That’s a direct result of defining “natural” in naturalistic fashion.

What makes homosexual behavior a sin, according to this view, has little if anything to do with love for God & partner. It has everything to do with the identity of the partner.    Baking cakes & photographing weddings are evaluated on the same basis.  If gay, it would do harm to the couple if you endorsed their sin, & their sin is loving one or more people of the same sex.  

Based on the identity of the couple (via their anatomy & physiology), this love is illicit.  Don’t bake the cake, because that means you are doing harm, & you might be temporarily suspending or permanently chaining your views on this issue.  Your views are rooted in your religion, & your Religious Liberty trumps their Civil Rights. 

In a similar manner, what makes a heterosexual couple’s relationship a sin isn’t their love for one another, it’s their lack of a marriage certificate.   After all, the traditional view on homosexuality is also frequently part of a package of beliefs that includes the belief that only sex within the bounds of holy matrimony is morally upright.  In American society that requires either a de jure marriage certificate or a de facto one in states that recognize common law marriages.  

The Bible’s says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. If God’s moral commands define love, then given the way she frames this issue - in terms of external factors - Sabbath violations are defined by one or more commands deployed legalistically, which is what the majority of the Sanhedrin was doing in the 1st Century AD/CE.  Additionally, in Romans, worship & sexual ethics are bound together. 

Her essay serves the same function.  Given what she believes about homosexuality, homosexual love isn’t really love, because it’s a sin to romantically love someone of the same sex because of a naturalistic teleological principle embedded in human anatomy & physiology (not the existence, attributes, & authority of God contrary to Romans 1:20).    If what makes homosexuality sinful is a choice to reject a teleological principle defined by human anatomy itself, then all homosexual relationships are illicit regardless of the love principle.  

On that view man was made for sex, not the other way around, & was made for worship / the Sabbath.  Yet the Bible tells us that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

In other words, while it is true that God defines our worship ethics in His commands, it’s also true that He has charged us with custodianship over that command.   We are to love God & neighbor  qualitatively in orderly fashion, and we are to govern the Sabbath accordingly.  The same is true when it comes to commands relating to romantic love & sex. Thus, when she writes that God’s commands define our love relative to sexual ethics, given her position, we can see that she also means that success or failure in loving others is related to externals like the sex/gender of an LGBTQ person’s present or potential spouse/partner (despite her standard issue disclaimers when writing about Relgious Liberty). 

The Bible’s way of defining our love via God’s commands is to remind us that love is a beneficent, covenantal, mutually submitting, committed bond in which 2 people think & act according to 1 Corinthians 13, **regardless of the sex/gender of their partner/spouse & / or that of another person or set of people.  In that sense, love is what defines God commands, not the other way around. 

Amy K. Hall writes for STR, where all the staff members affirm a view of homosexuality that conduces to a viciously circular view of homosexuality that results in the Is-Ought Fallacy writ large & Special Pleading on their part, and she also stands with the Colorado baker & not with the LGBTQ Community, whereas Matthew 5:41 clearly & unequivocally teaches otherwise.    

Unlike Rachel she doesn’t stand with everyone. She stands with the majority of the Sanhedrin, Zealots, & Romans in Matthew’s Gospel.    She rejects Matthew 5:43 - 48.   The LORD routinely gives sinners, even those of the highest order, what they want, even if that means allowing them to do heinous acts that will only incur judgment. That’s exactly what He did all through Ancient Israel’s history.    God uses His religious liberty to Paraclete everyone & is not in the habit of looking for ways to obviate His own commands.  

May God bless us all, every one, & “Go & Sin No More.”