The First and Great Commandment.
The following article is from Dr. Cumming’s Scripture Readings on Matt. 22: 34–40. It is a forcible exposition of the relation which exists between the law and the gospel, and adds another to the many existing proofs that no one ever thinks of taking the position that the moral law has been abolished till forced by the admission of its existence into conclusions which he wishes to avoid. Dr. C. says:— “Well, ‘when the Pharisees,’ after having been once repelled, ‘had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which—ποῖα—of what sort—what is your description of—‘which is the great commandment in the law?’ Jesus then summed up the whole decalogue in two short, but comprehensive, epitomes—the first embraces the first four commandments, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’—the second embracing the last six commandments, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ In the moral law on Sinai, it was negative—‘Thou shalt not.’ In the summary of it by Jesus it is presented in its positive aspect—‘Thou shalt love God, and thy neighbor as thyself.’ It is explained elsewhere, that love is the fulfilling of the law. The great question, then, is, How shall man get the seed of love replanted, or resown, in his heart? The answer is, We love God because he loved us. God’s intense love to us produces responsive love in our hearts to him. Thus, Christianity is the only provision for replanting love in the human heart, and giving, not only pardon by an atonement, but sanctification by the Spirit, or obedience to the moral law.” “The question put by the lawyer, whose object was to ensnare Jesus by provoking a reply that might be turned against his popularity with the crowd, and in favor of the designs and desires of the scribes and Pharisees, might be literally translated, and indeed ought to be translated, not, ‘which is the great commandment in the law?’ but, ‘Of what sort is the great commandment in the law? What is your description of it? What is its character? How do you describe it? In what language do you express the leading and prominent commandment in the law?’ He played into the hands of the scribes and Pharisees so far, because they often made the rigid, mechanical observance of one law an atonement or warrant for the breach of another law, the breach of which was agreeable to their taste, and convenient to their habits; and he, being accustomed to hear that one law was better than another, and that amid all the laws there was some chief and leading one, asked our Lord, ‘Which of the ten is the chief one? and what sort of one is it? and how does it bear upon our responsibilities? Tell me what sort it is.’ He did it, tempting Jesus, not for information, but in order to ensnare him; but our Lord, just as we saw he did on their asking him, ‘Is it lawful to give tribute unto Cæsar, or not?’ overlooked the motive that dictated the question, and replied to it with as much magnanimous forbearance as if they had asked from the purest motives, and desired from the very heart to have the best and choicest information. He answered at once, ‘The great commandment is not, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image;” nor is it, “Remember the Sabbath day;” nor is it, “Thou shalt not steal;” but it is, first and chiefest, the emotion that the heart should feel toward God; and second, what is its shadow, and never absent companion, the feeling that the heart should cherish toward every other heart that beats in the world. The first and great commandment is not one of the first four singled out for supremacy over the remaining three, but it is that feeling within which covers all the four commandments of the decalogue that relate to God; and secondly, and subordinately, the feeling within that covers the remaining commandments of God, and relates to all your duties to your neighbors and brethren of mankind.’ “Now, the first four commandments are embraced in the words, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’ Now this law man first broke. It was the chief commandment that man first violated in Paradise. He was placed under this law; he broke through it; and in doing so, he lost that tendency to God, that dependence upon his touch, control, and paternal government that would be equivalent in material things to the earth breaking loose from its attraction to the sun, and wandering eccentric from its orbit into the wilds of infinite and endless space. By the disruption of this primal tie, this first and chiefest affection, love to God, man lost his anchorage ground, and was at sea without star above, or hope before. He broke loose from the great central government, and became, in the language of Scripture, a lost son, a stray sheep, dead in trespasses, an enemy, a stranger, without hope, and without God in the world. “Now, after this, the Bible does not assert that no moral excellence survived in man, and experience does not warrant us in saying so. There are many beautiful traits that still survive man’s first loss; but these beautiful traits are like ivy about a ruin, they only serve to conceal the gigantic deformity that is within and beneath them. Whatever excellence survives in man’s heart is just the remainder of what he once was. There is enough to tell us how magnificent he was in his original relationship to God, and there is enough to prove to us what a terrible dislocation, what an awful wreck, sin has made of the once fair and beautiful vessel of humanity. The Scripture does not assert that man is without any trace of what he was, or that he has no moral excellence. ‘If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children;’—there is the affection of parents to children, and of children to parents. There are men constitutionally honest and generous—so just, that they would spurn to do an unfair thing—so honorable, that they would shrink from the thought of a mean thing; and these graces, if I may call them so, are in their place beautiful. But what we say is, that man has lost the spring and source of all virtue that is beautiful before God, and that he has parted with that supreme and vital feeling, love to God, which gives beauty to every grace, vitality to every virtue, and makes the good tree bring forth, not only fair and fragrant, but good fruit in the sight of God and man.” “Now, it is repeatedly asserted in Scripture that in the absence of this love to God no outward act has any excellence in his sight. It may, I repeat, be excellent in the sight of man; weighed in human scales, and submitted to human appreciation, it may seem most valuable; but till the fruit be connected with love to God, or the parent stem—till what you do springs from what you feel toward God, there is not that which will make it acceptable in the sight of God. There is no real, lasting, moral vitality in the branch, plant it in any soil you like, however fertile it may be in this world, until it be grafted in the parent stem, partake of its sap, and bear blossom from its union with it. The most splendid acts are but splendid sins, till they are quickened with this divine life. Whatever is done by an unconverted man is a sin, when tested by a holy and heart-searching God. It is our relationship to him, and his relationship to us—it is our restoration of sonship in reference to him, and the revelation of his Fatherhood in reference to us, that communicates a new beauty, gives real life, and makes truly useful and good all the fruits, virtues, sacrifices, or good deeds, that man is able to do by grace and through the Spirit in this present life.” “The constant assertion of Scripture also is, not only that nothing can be really good and lasting without this, but that man is by nature wholly destitute of this. He may not be destitute of many beautiful virtues, but he is wholly destitute of love to God. Nay, he is not only destitute of love to God, but he has the very opposite emotion, and cherishes the very opposite feeling; that is, hatred to God. He may love an idol he has cut from the marble, or a sentimental being he has called up in his imagination, and think that by loving such a being he really loves God. But this is only making an idol suitable to his taste, and loving that idol instead of the true and righteous God; and thus, love is not only withdrawn from God, to whom it is supremely due, but it is communicated and transferred to other objects, to which it was not due at all. The fact is, the feeling of love survived the fall, and man must have something to occupy the niche that God forsook when the sinner fell. The original law was, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ God has forsaken us, because we have forsaken him; but the feeling of love, with which man was created, is just as inseparable from his heart as the feeling of hunger or thirst is from his physical economy. Having lost God, the true object, whom he no longer loves, because that God condemns him for what he is and for what he has done, he finds other objects upon whom he concentrates that love, and who occupy the place that God originally filled. He puts the creature in the place of the Creator, and loves the former vastly more than he loves the latter. If man had no love at all surviving, then he would seek nothing to take the place of God; but because he has still the affection of love, though the Object be gone, he gropes about for another object to lean upon and love, and give the sacrifice of his feelings and his religious worship to. Hence, there never has been a nation without a god. An atheist really and speculatively is, I believe, an impossibility. We never can get rid of the impression that there is a God. We may modify our apprehensions very much of that God, or we may give our worship to an idol, an image, or a sentiment; but something greater than himself, and more lasting than life, man instinctively worships, adores, and trusts in. But supreme love to the true and the only God by nature he has not; on the contrary, I have said, he hates him.” ‘You say, “How can we hate God?” We do not know him. We love our natural conceptions of God. Poets write the most beautiful poetry, and orators make the most eloquent speeches, upon God’s beneficence and power; but God, as a holy God, who will hate, punish, and extirpate sin, is a God whom man cannot love. The best evidence of this is, that the intrusion of God many a day, many an hour, and into many a thought, would be so grievous an infraction of your peace, that your heart would recoil from it, and give utterance to the wish, not dogma, ‘No God,’ and show that there is latent in its depths an instinctive enmity, where you thought there was only approbation, complacency, and love.” “Whatever change has been wrought in man, the great requirement of God still remains, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’ This law is not repealed by the gospel. It is obligatory upon you and me, upon angels and archangels, and all created intelligences. It is binding on us all, it is the essence of Heaven, it is the atmosphere of the blessed, it is the tie that knits a happy universe to God, the disruption of which would be ruin and misery to the creature, and dishonor to that God who still says, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.’” “And, therefore, this leads me to notice how this love can be restored in the heart of man. How, then, is the element of enmity to be swept out, and the heart to breathe henceforth love to God, and the tie broken in Paradise to be reknit in more than its pristine peace and strength? That question meets its answer from the cross of Christ. The law is exacting love—‘Thou shalt love;’ the cross is pardoning love. We hear from the law the constant exaction, ‘Thou shalt love,’ and we feel that it is as impossible to love as to rise from the earth, and seat ourselves amid the fixed stars; and the longer we listen to a God exacting what we feel from our nature to be an impossibility, the more hardened and exasperated we become; and thus, the repetition of the law, instead of producing love, only increases the enmity that was within us, till we hate God only the more as he repeats the command, ‘Thou shalt love.’ But unless there be love, there is no life, there is no salvation, there is no happiness. The way, therefore, that God has taken to produce it, is by the cross. He there proclaims at once this great truth, ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish;’ and we, hearing that God so loved us, that, to express the intensity of that love, he spared not his own Son, listen to these glad tidings, and study the manifestation of this love; we learn that God, who loved us in our Eden glory, loves us as much in our ruins now, and our confidence is at once restored. We venture to approach a God pardoning, not exacting, proclaiming his love to us, and saying nothing about our love to him, and, in the language of John, ‘We love him, because he first loved us.’ In other words, the plan of the law is to insist upon love, ‘Thou shalt love;’ the plan of the gospel is to say nothing about what we owe to God, but to say much about what God has done for us. God’s way to produce love in the human heart is, silence about our duties to him, reiterated utterance of his love, and sacrifice, and interposition for us; and we come to regard God no longer as exacting duties that we cannot discharge, but only as bestowing blessings that we never deserve; and by the very nature of our constitution, and by the very nature of this manifestation of disinterested love, there is produced responsive to it in our hearts the beginning of that love which casteth out fear, and is only perfected in the everlasting life of the world that is to come.” “But even this manifestation of God’s love to us would not produce this love in us to him, did he not give also the Holy Spirit to take of the things of Christ, what he said, did, suffered, and purchased, and to apply them to us, so that, taught by the Holy Spirit, and having God’s love to us, revealed, expounded, unfolded, and impressed upon our hearts by him, we come by that divine influence to love him who first loved us; and the moment this is done, man is restored to the orbit in which he was first placed; he is restored to his original relationship to God; he no longer sees God on Sinai exacting duties that he cannot pay, but hears him in the still, small voice of Calvary, bestowing mercies that he did not deserve; and he cannot help breaking forth into feelings of gratitude and responsive love to him, who thus, in spite of our sins, loved us, and, in order to remove our sins, gave his Son to die for us; and we come to love him with all our heart, and soul, and mind, who so loved us that he spared not even his own Son, but gave him up unto death for us all.” “This love, then, when once implanted in the human heart, will grow day by day in vigor, in influence, and in power. It is not a dead thing, but a living germ planted in the living heart; and, nourished by the Holy Spirit of God, it grows up into increasing love, till it has no fear, and never can experience any failing. The more we contemplate the object that we love, the more we shall be struck with the greatness of his love. The more we study the cross, the more impressed we shall be with the magnificence of the love that raised it; and thus looking unto God loving us, we shall be changed from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord, growing in love to him, not by hearing his exacting law, but by ever studying, ever meditating upon the sin-pardoning sacrifice upon the cross; and we shall feel more an allegiance grow within us that has no comparison, and an affection nourished within us that can have no equal, till at last we, too, shall understand what that meaneth, ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’ Luke 14: 26.” “We have now, in this love planted in the human heart, the spirit of all obedience to God’s law. Plant the love in the human heart which the cross necessarily generates, and you put in every heart the root that spreads out in all the branches of the moral law. The law is fulfilled in one word—love. Love is the decalogue in a monosyllable; and the decalogue are but the branches that spring from this root—love in the human heart. Hence, evangelical preaching, which shows alone how this love can be generated, alone guarantees that there shall be obedience in the life. Justification by faith is the preface to sanctification of life, or obedience to all the requirements of the law. The believer obeys the law, not in order to be justified, but because he has been justified. Love to the Justifier necessarily delights in obeying the law that he has laid down. Outward obedience to holy law is just the outer life that springs and is developed from the inner life of love to God.” “And wherever there is this love to God, there will be assimilation to him. The very nature of love is to produce likeness. The painter who selects a great master for his study, instinctively catches his style, and imitates his painting. The poet or the musician, whatever be the profession, who prefers a certain master, naturally and instinctively falls into his modes, forms, traits, and distinguishing characteristics. And the Christian, whose heart is supremely set upon the great Master, and Teacher, and Legislator of all, instinctively but progressively will be assimilated to his character, and become like Him whom he so11truly and deeply loves. ‘Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect,’ is an absurdity as addressed to the unconverted man; it is the most beautiful, possible, and welcome address to him who loves God with all his heart, and soul, and mind. And the longer you live in the light of the countenance of Him who is love, the more sharply and distinctly the lines of the long effaced and faded image of God will be restored and thrown up, till at last you are found bearing the likeness of him who loved you, the sons and children of our Father who is in Heaven.” ‘And if you are the subjects of this love, you will love all that bears the superscription of God. You will love the Sabbath as an angel from the realms of the blessed, as an emissary from the brighter and the better land, as a fragment of Heaven, a foretaste and an earnest of the Sabbath that remaineth for the people of God. You will love it, not because it is a respite from the labors of the week, but because it bears upon its bright brow the signature of your Father in Heaven. You will love the house of prayer. It is a tent that is pitched on the Sabbath, in which God meets you, and holds communion with you, as he did with Adam in the cool of the day, and amid the bowers and walks of Paradise. You will prefer a day in God’s courts to a thousand in the Crystal Palace. You will regard every service that you join in, every sermon that you hear, as a spring in the valley of Baca, drinking from which you are strengthened for the journey that is before you.’