Love Thy Neighbor

For brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.

For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other; so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. (Gal. 5:13-18)

Perhaps no single word in the Bible has been so misused as “love.” An entire theology (or more properly anti-theology) of love has come to dominate many churches. Our interest here is on how the law is often seen as having been replaced by love, which is then denigrated to a subjective emotion which, we are told, must control our every relation and thought.

No emotion we feel, however, can honor God or our neighbor more than our obedience to the law of God. The Ten Commandments became the foundation of Western law because they were viewed as foundational to a just (meaning righteous) society. To view the emotion of love as the standard of our social responsibilities is to deny the reign of sin in our hearts and the struggle with the flesh Paul speaks of in this passage (v. 17). It is the desire to “be as gods, knowing [determining] good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).

The love that we Christians feel for God does not come from within us. It is the gift of God's Spirit which regenerates our cold, dead hearts and leads us to repentance and faith. We are by grace led to seek after God. The Spirit then begins the work of sanctification in our lives. It leads us increasingly, by degrees and imperfectly, to put the lusts of the flesh behind us and to desire the things of our Heavenly Father.

Paul speaks in this passage of spiritual liberty and how we use it. Our spiritual liberty is the freedom we feel from the curse of God and condemnation by His law. We feel free because we are told Christ has paid our penalty on the cross and that we have been adopted as the children of God and fellow heirs with Christ. Unfortunately, the Galatians had compromised their spiritual liberty by listening to those Judaizers who taught that they were justified by works.

Paul's warning is that the Galatians not take liberty to mean license. License is self-serving rebellion. Spiritual liberty before God allows us to serve one another. Paul is really speaking of our actions as stemming from our love of God. When Christ was asked which was the great commandment in the law, He responded by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment” (Mt.22:37-38). This is the beginning of any understanding of love. We begin with a love of God which we seek to increase day by day and year by year. Loving God with our “mind” requires that we try to understand the will of God with much more than emotion. Having a mere emotional feeling for God does not require much effort on our part: Christ thus added that,” If ye love me, keep my commandments” (Jn. 14:15).

Spiritual liberty allows us to focus on our love for God. Ceremonies are one way we bear witness to this. But ceremonies are often abused by the worst sorts of hypocrites, false teachers, and Pharisees of all eras. More is demanded of us. Christ continued, “And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Mt. 22:39-40). The summation of the law was in these two fundamentals—the love of God and the love of our neighbor. God has demanded that we give to others what springs from our love of Him. This may be as little as a cup of cold water in the name of Jesus. It certainly includes the commands of Scripture in both Old and New Testaments: “Love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom.13:10). To act in terms of the law of God to those around us is the highest honor we can give them. To separate love to our neighbor from our love of and sense of responsibility to God is humanism no matter how piously it is presented.

When Paul commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, he does not intend that we transfer a selfish love to others. He merely means that love for others should be a natural part of us. But we cannot truly love others until we understand what our attitude toward ourselves ought to be. If we see ourselves as created in the image of God, with regeneration, the key to finding purpose in life, then we will see more clearly our attitudes and duties to other men. If we ourselves act and think in terms of our responsibility to God, we see more clearly our duties to all around us.

The Galatians did not show love to one another. Rather, they chose to “bite and devour,” an apparent reference to bickering and accusations of some sort. The end was that they “consumed” each other. All false ideas of righteousness and sanctification (which is what the modern gospel of love is) are destructive of individuals, organizations, and societies because they deny God's law in favor of a human stand. When it comes to believers, we not only must demonstrate our love for others in terms of our responsibilities to God; we must also thereby demonstrate our love for Christ. When Peter three times professed his love for Christ, our Lord responded, “Feed my sheep” (Jn. 21:15-17).

The solution to biting and devouring is to “walk in the Spirit” (v. 16) so that we do not “fulfill” or serve the “lust of the flesh.” We may, as sinners, still be subject to sin but we are not its subjects or slaves. As free men we have free consciousness before God. We know we have been freed to serve God in joy and gladness. It is because “the flesh lusteth against the Spirit” (vs. 17) that we cannot equate human emotion with the love God expects of us. Our emotions come from our flesh, or human nature. They are transient and unstable. Our love for others must be measured in terms of something other than human nature and its fleeting emotions. Our love is only of God If it is in terms of His law. “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” Nothing sounds so strange to pietistic antinomians. We show our love to God by obeying His commandments. We show our love to Christ by “feeding” His sheep. We show our love to others by obeying the law of God in all respects in our every dealings with others. Will an emotion offer them more?

If we are led by the Spirit, we are not under the law, Paul adds. Now as this is often taken, Paul is saying the law is abrogated and we have no obligation to it. That sounds strange from an apostle who quoted from the law so much and spoke so much against sin. We are not under the dominion of its curse. We now have spiritual liberty. We are not (and never were) under the law as the means of justification, as the Judaizers were telling the Galatians. When Paul used the same language of “not under the law” in Romans 6:14, he said sin should not have dominion over us but that we should yield ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness. Did “not under law” there imply freedom to sin under grace? “God forbid,” Paul replied to his own question. Rather, we are to obey “from the heart” (v. 17).

The proponents of pious love would have us believe that the Spirit of God would lead us to do other than the law of God. They would have us believe that the will of the Spirit is different than the Word of God so that walking in the Spirit is different than obeying God. Such disjointed theology is an abomination that leads to a disjointed church.