The Greatest Commandment Mark 12:28-34

28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” 32 And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. 33 And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.

Introduction

          As we come to and work through the passage there are some important aspects that we need to consider. I have decided to call these three sections: 1) Love God with Everything You Have. 2) The “hyperlink” Progression in Redemptive History and 3) Why Love without Faith Collapses.

          Before we jump in though I do want to reorient ourselves to the text as we have come to the end of another one of Mark’s sandwiches in the text. We have just seen Jesus answer the religious leaders of his day as they attempted to catch Jesus in his words to try and show him to be false. A Scribe came and asked a question. “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered him immediately and repeated the Shema from Deuteronomy 6 which is where we get the great commandment phrase you shall love the Lord your God with all your Heart, Soul, Mind* (Jesus adds this), and Strength.

Jesus quickly follows it up with the second greatest commandment which is to love your neighbor as yourself, there are no greater commandments than these. Jesus just stated the whole ten commandments: the first four being oriented to loving God and the last six being toward loving your neighbor. We in the 21st century, have simplified it to love God and love people; but the phrase means keep the great commandment, keep the ten commandments.

          There are many who think that everything that they do in the name of the law is what gives them assurance of their standing in the kingdom. And there are others who champion love and root it in the concept of love as the principle to live by and they measure one’s character on whether they check every box that they consider makes one loving and that’s how they know you are a good person and worthy of being commended. Yet both positions have the flaw of meeting a standard, they must complete the checklist to be loving, and they miss the heart of it.

Section 1: Love God with Everything You Have

          As we come to our first section, I want us to think deeply about what it means to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves, typically when you hear these two commands many people become paralyzed by them, they think to themselves “How can I ever fulfill these two commands? What does is it even mean to love God and love neighbor?” We wrestle with these questions and immediately we run back to the law to get a sense of clarity, but I fear that we may be running in vain, not because law is bad, but because love is greater. And so, I want to challenge us for just a moment to think deeper about each aspect of what Jesus commands us to do here in relation to love. And we do this not in reading this passage in isolation but rather by following the biblical hermeneutic by allowing Scripture to interpret and illuminate Scripture.

Starting with the first command to love God with all our heart, now this is interesting, Jesus tells us in Luke 6:45, “…out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” That’s important to note, because in biblical thought the heart is the seat of all our affections, desires, and will everything we love and are loyal to stems from here. So, the natural question for us to ask is this: “how do we align our heart to be able to love God in a way that he desires?”

          Well, it’s simple, we pray, not just to ask for things, but we pray to commune with God, to adore him, to confess our sins to him, to thank him, and to give him supplication—a humble and earnest plea. We sing privately and corporately aligning our hearts to the words that we offer in praise and worship. Lastly, we fast—we do this to expose that which we hunger for the most, disciplining it to desire God above all. This is not about following a set of rules but spending time with our Lord and his people.

          Next, we have the command to love God with all our soul. Now this one is fascinating. What does it mean to love God with our soul? Well, the soul refers to our very being. Think of what Paul said in Acts 17:28, “in him [Christ] we live, move, and have our being.” That means that every aspect of our physical and mental being is surrendered to God. Practices like Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are soul-level, because they root our very identity in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. We do these things to remind ourselves of who we belong to. To the One who died for us, the One who saved us, the One who we live for.

          Then we have the command to love God with all our mind. This is simple, this deals with our intellect, how we think and how we reason should be God-centered. Loving God with the mind can be the most practical, but the most difficult to do. It looks like reading the Bible, studying it, meditating on it day and night. It looks like what Paul says in Philippians 4:8, we think on, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

          Next, we come to the command, to love God with all your strength. Now a lot of people stumble over this one, because it’s so simple but so tough to conceptualize. But essentially this refers to our capacities, our bodies, our resources, our time, our energy. Think of what James says in 1:27 of his letter when he says that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” This is what it looks like to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice; it is to make it our mission to use whatever strength we have to care for the least of these. And this makes sense, after all, it is Jesus who said in Matthew 25:40 when framing the final judgment and the inheritance of the sheep, the elect of God, of the kingdom prepared for them before the foundation of the world, “…Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

          Now we come to our last command, to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is where all the previous commands find their natural expression, because if our heart is aligned to God, our soul anchored in him, our mind saturated with his truth, our strength poured out in service, then love for neighbor becomes the visible fruit of love for God. This command reminds us that love is not abstract or hidden in sentiment, but embodied in real tangible actions toward the people God has place around us. It is the Samaritan stopping for the wounded man, it is the church in Acts selling their possessions to meet needs, it is Paul carrying the burdens of weaker brothers and sisters. To love neighbor is to love God in flesh and blood terms, reflecting the reality that the God we cannot see has called us to demonstrate his love toward those we can see. And in so doing, we bear witness that the upward love we profess toward him is indeed genuine for it overflows outwardly into the lives of others.

Section 2: The “Hyperlink” Progression in Redemptive History

Now, as good as all of this may sound. This was not the goal of all of redemptive history. You see, the law was just the starting point. It was what Paul called the elementary principles of the world. Why? Because it was God teaching Israel on the basics. This was phase 1 in teaching Israel, a once pagan people, on how to live like a child of God.

Love, as you can see, was phase 2. It was the fulfillment or the heart behind what the law was aiming towards. In this phase, we have graduated from those elementary principles to the more mature aspects of the faith. Love, then, is not a replacement of the law, but its intended trajectory. Jesus Himself said in Matthew 22:40 that “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” In other words, the entire covenantal instruction given to Israel was always pointing forward to this reality—that love is the essence of obedience. The law trained the conscience, but love transforms the heart. The law restrained sin, but love compels righteousness. The law told Israel what to do, but love explains why it matters. And so, in this second phase, God is no longer merely shaping external behavior but drawing His people into the very heartbeat of His character, because “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

But notice how this progression functions almost like a hyperlink system in Scripture. Each command, each practice, each ordinance in the law hyperlinks forward to love and love forward to Christ, who embodies love perfectly. The sacrificial system hyperlinks to the cross. The purity laws hyperlink to holiness in Christ. The temple hyperlinks to God dwelling with us by his Spirit. The law wasn’t discarded; it was preparatory, setting the stage for love to be revealed in its fullest form through Christ. When Jesus comes on the scene, he doesn’t abolish the law but fulfills it by incarnating its true intent—self-giving love that reconciles sinners to God and restores broken neighbors to one another.

So, when we speak of loving God and loving neighbor, we are not talking about a new ethic detached from what came before. We are talking about the climax of a long narrative, the hyperlink destination that all redemptive history was always directing us toward. It’s as though every verse, every story, every symbol in the Old Testament carries us forward to this point: love is the maturity of God’s people, the goal of the commandments, the true sign that we belong to him.

If we reverse the order—making love the byproduct of law rather than law the shadow of love—we distort the very heart of the Gospel. Instead of leading people into the freedom of Christ, we drive them back into the slavery of Sinai. This is exactly what happens in movements like Torah Observant Christianity, Hebrew Roots, Christian Nationalism, and Theonomy. They preach that to truly love God, and neighbor is to return to the old scaffolding, to measure devotion by the keeping of feasts, Sabbaths, or civil codes; and in these is what makes us holy and righteous and worthy of being commended. But this regression produces only nominal faith, a religion of lips without life, all talk but no heart—no love. The tragedy is that such teaching mimics piety while leaving the heart untouched. It multiplies rules without multiplying love. And as Isaiah warned, “this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Isa. 29:13).

The danger is not hypothetical. Paul fought this battle head-on in Galatia. He saw the devastating logic: if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing (Gal. 2:21). To preach that love requires law-keeping is to deny that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness (Rom. 10:4). It is to exchange the freedom of sons for the slavery of servants, to embrace the shadow when the substance has already come. That is why Paul thunders, “You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace” (Gal. 5:4). The Gospel never calls us to do Christianity harder, to put on a yoke of slavery, but to cling to Christ alone, who fulfilled the law perfectly and poured out his Spirit so that love might be written not on tablets of stone but on hearts of flesh. For his yoke is easy and his burden is light (Matt. 11:30). To turn back is not just a mistake; it is a fall from grace, a regression that empties the cross of its power. It is to be close to the kingdom, but not in it.

Section 3: Why Love Without Faith Collapses

And so now that we understand the importance of following the hyperlink path through redemptive history—law to love and love to Christ—we must now face the problem that kept the scribe from entering the kingdom of God. You see, it is crucial that we do not stop at love as if it were sufficient in itself. Many in our culture affirm the idea of love. They champion kindness, tolerance, and even sacrificial service in some sense. But without faith in Christ, such love collapses under its own weight. Why? Because love without faith has no anchor.

It is self-defined and self-powered, inevitably bending inward toward self-interest. The world can speak warmly about love, but it cannot embrace the kind of love that Jesus commands—the love that lays down one’s life for enemies, that rejoices in suffering for righteousness’ sake, that treasures God above all else. As Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 2:14, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God. They are folly to him, because he is not able to understand them. Without faith, the love of God looks stupid and offensive.

This is why unbelievers cannot love in the biblical sense. They may display affection, loyalty, or even benevolence, but these fall short of true love, which is rooted in God himself. Think of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:46–47: “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” In other words, the world can mimic love at a surface level—loving family, friends, or those who reciprocate kindness—but this is not the radical, Spirit-empowered love God commands. Remember that biblical love flows upward before it ever flows outward. You cannot love neighbor rightly if you do not first love God, and you cannot love God if you do not have faith in him. Love divorced from faith is not love at all, but a counterfeit of it.

Even among believers, we recognize that faith is indispensable. We do not perfectly love God or neighbor even after we are born again. Paul calls the Corinthians “infants in Christ,” still in need of milk rather than solid food (1 Cor. 3:1–3). Our growth in love is progressive, uneven, and at times faltering. But the difference between the believer and the unbeliever is this: the believer’s imperfect love is animated by faith. It is empowered by the Spirit. It is directed toward God’s glory. And as faith matures, love matures. Faith and love are inseparably joined; faith clings to Christ, and love flows from him. Without faith, love stagnates. With faith, love deepens and endures.

But faith does more than empower our love—it secures our standing before God. This is the heart of the gospel. When God looks upon his people, he does not measure our worth by the degree of our love, but by the perfection of Christ’s love credited to us. By faith, his obedience is counted as ours. By faith, his sacrificial love on the cross is reckoned to our account. Hebrews 11:6 makes this plain: “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” That is not because God despises human effort but because he has given only one name under heaven by which we must be saved—Jesus Christ. Faith unites us to him, and only in him do we fulfill the law’s demand to love perfectly. Without faith, our love—no matter how sincere—remains fatally flawed.

And this is why the scribe stood so close yet remained outside the kingdom. He could affirm that love was greater than ritual. He could admire the beauty of the commandment. But he did not yet see his own inability to keep it, nor did he see his need to receive Christ’s righteousness by faith. To be “not far from the kingdom” is still to be on the outside. The same is true for us. Admiring love, even desiring to be loving, will not save us. Only faith in the One who perfectly loved God and neighbor will. By faith, his love becomes ours, and his Spirit produces in us what we could never manufacture ourselves. This is why love without faith collapses—it cannot save, it cannot endure, and it cannot bring us into the kingdom of God.

Conclusion

And so, when Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, he is not laying before us a checklist to measure ourselves by, but a mirror to show us what true love looks like and where we fall short. These commands expose the depths of our need for grace, because no one has ever done this perfectly except Christ. Yet at the same time, they cast before us a vision of the life we are called into by faith—a life fully oriented toward God and poured out for others. To love God with everything is not to give him a portion of our heart, or a corner of our mind, or some of our time and energy. It is to give him our everything, because he first gave us his everything in his Son.

The beauty of it is that these commands are not burdensome when seen through the lens of the Gospel. They are not chains to weigh us down but wings to lift us higher into communion with God. To pray, to sing, to fast, to surrender, to study, to serve—all of these are not mere duties but expressions of delight in the God who has loved us with an everlasting love. And when that upward love takes root, it necessarily bears fruit outwardly, spilling over in tangible, sacrificial care for the people God places in our path. To love God and love neighbor is not two separate loves, but one love expressed in two directions, and both are anchored in Christ.

This is why the call to love God with everything you have is both convicting and liberating. Convicting, because it reveals how far we fall short. Liberating, because it points us to the One who has already fulfilled it perfectly on our behalf. And now, by his Spirit, we are invited to walk in His love—not flawlessly, but faithfully, learning from the only teacher, who is the Christ. Growing from one degree of glory to another. This is the heart of discipleship, the essence of holiness, and the goal of the Christian life.