Love Fulfills the Law

Laws. Commandments. Obligations. Debts. Admittedly, the Christian life can and sometimes does become a bewildering and frustrating exercise in trying to understand our duties and carry them out faithfully. We long for someone to reveal “the secret of following Jesus” or “three simple steps to faithful Christian living.” Surely, we cry, there must be a way to boil this thing down to a few principles.

Surprisingly, such a work of simplification has been done by the apostle Paul, that devotee of complex doctrine, though Paul borrowed it from Jesus Himself. The duties of the Christian life can all be boiled down to the one principle of love. “He who loves another has fulfilled the law,” Paul writes. Consider the magnitude of this—whoever exercises true love for others has fulfilled everything God requires. This is a stunning statement, but it squares completely with what Jesus taught. When asked to identify the greatest commandment. He named the top two: loving God with all our being and loving others as ourselves. He then added that “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40). But if two commandments are too many for our tastes, Jesus also showed that keeping the second commandment fulfills the first, for He said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15). Loving others fulfills the law, and obeying the law constitutes love for Christ. What could be simpler?

Of course, we need to understand the nature of love clearly. And that is no simple matter in our day, when all sorts of inaccurate ideas about the nature of love are extant. How do we learn the nature of the love God requires of us? We discover it by studying His commands. If we would love others, we will not engage in such behaviors as adultery, murder, theft, false witness, coveting—or anything at all that God’s Word prohibits. None of these actions can be called a “victimless” crime; every instance of each one causes harm to someone. And as Paul puts it, “love does no harm to a neighbor.” Thus, in a sense, the essence of the Christian life is seeking the best for others, first refraining from doing anything that would be detrimental to them, but also striving always to improve their lives spiritually, physically, emotionally, economically, and socially. We are called to “sincere, selfless, sacrificial, serving love,” as Dr. James M. Boice puts it.