Anyone who has bought furniture in recent times will probably be familiar with a flatpack. If you have never heard of a flatpack, when people purchase an item, such as a bookshelf or an entire kitchen, it will come with a set of instructions for the purchaser to follow so they can assemble the product when they get home. Some of these instructions are simple and easy to follow. Others, however, can be very complicated and much more difficult to follow.
When Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to Mount Sinai, God gave this new nation his own set of instructions to help them build a healthy and life-giving community. We can read God’s instructions in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These books contain the Law God wanted his people to follow when they entered the Promised Land. The purpose of God’s Law was to help the Israelites live as God’s holy people so they could witness to God’s glory and goodness as a nation.
The basis of God’s Law is the Ten Commandments. Most of us would have learned about the Ten Commandments in Sunday School or Confirmation lessons when we were younger. We read them in two places in the Old Testament: Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. They were the founding Laws of the Israelite Old Testament community, and they are still important to the way Christians understand the way God wants us to live today.
Over time, the Jewish people expanded the Ten Commandments to 613 Commands based on other instructions in the Books of Moses. At the time of Jesus, every Jewish person was expected to know and follow all 613 of these commands. One of the reasons Jesus continually challenged the Pharisees in the gospels was because they insisted on the strict obedience to these 613 Commands. They had taken ten relatively easy to understand instructions and had complicated them by expanding and applying them to almost every aspect of their lives. Even today, people who adhere to a strict interpretation of the Jewish religion are still expected to follow these 613 instructions for life.
When Jesus was asked which of these 613 Commands was the greatest, he replied that it is loving the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and loving our neighbour as ourselves (Matt 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28). Jesus didn’t further complicate an already complicated understanding of God’s instructions for us by adding more rules. Instead, Jesus simplified them by teaching that the Ten Commandments are all about love: the first three teach us how God wants us to love him, and the fourth to tenth teach us how to love our neighbours. Jesus simplified a complicated system of religious law, summarizing it in one command with two sides: loving God and loving others.
The Apostle Paul follows Jesus in this morning’s New Testament reading when he writes, ‘If you love your neighbour, you will fulfill the requirements of God’s law’ (Romans 13:8b NLT). Again, Paul writes, ‘Love does no wrong to others, so love fulfils the requirements of God’s law’ (v10). Paul echoes Jesus by giving us a simple way to understand God’s instructions for healthy, life-giving faith communities. Instead of a complicated system of religious rules that we are expected to follow, Paul provides us with Jesus’ simple instruction: love your neighbour. When we love each other, we fulfil everything God wants of us.
Sometimes it seems that people prefer complicating rather than simplifying things. We can see it in the way the Old Testament Jews expanded the Ten Commandments to 613 Commands, but we can also see it among Christians. Many pastors have extensive libraries of theological textbooks which explore and explain the Bible. Theologians argue about the correct interpretation of certain passages and their meaning for us as church. In our own Australian Lutheran churches we have argued and divided over doctrinal issues pretty much since we arrived in Australia. It’s like we can’t agree on the way to build a healthy, life-giving community of faith, so we keep arguing over and complicating the instructions.
What if the life God wants for us is as simple as loving one another? When Paul writes that love fulfils God’s law, he points us to Jesus’ teaching that the most important command is to love one another, and in loving one another we fulfil everything that God wants us to do as his community of faith. Instead of complicating the Christian life with rules, laws and other legal document, what might our churches be like if we listened to Paul, trusted that we fulfil everything God wants us to when we love others, and simplified everything around that?
Some people criticise Paul for not including the first three Commandments in this passage. We fulfil the First to Third Commandments through faith. When we love God by trusting what he has done for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, then faith fulfils the first three Commandments. Jesus has already fulfilled all of God’s requirements for us on our behalf. In his sinless life, innocent death & resurrection to new life, Jesus has done everything necessary for us to enter the Promised Land of the God’s Kingdom. We receive all that through faith in him, in the same way that the Old Testament Israelites entered the Promised Land not by keeping the Ten Commandments, but through faith in God and his promises to them. The Ten Commandments were God’s instructions to help them build a healthy and life-giving community which honoured God and shared his goodness with the world. Jesus’ instructions help us, as God’s New Testament people, to build a healthy and life-giving community which honours him and shares his goodness with the world. These instructions aren’t a complicated set of rules or theological system. We fulfil everything God wants of us and for us when we follow his one simple instruction: to love each other.
Life gets complicated enough without unnecessarily adding to its complexity. Instead of complicated systems of rules, demands and expectations which we can place on ourselves and each other, we need to listen to what Paul says when he writes that ‘love fulfils the requirements of God’s law’ and re-think what it means to be ‘church’ from that perspective. Jesus freed us from a complicated system of religious rules by giving us one instruction: to love God and love others. It isn’t always clear or easy what that looks like in life, but when we trust that Jesus has already fulfilled God’s Law for us, and all he asks of us now is to love each other in the same way, he helps us through the Holy Spirit to build healthy communities of faith where people can find the life God wants to give us in Christ.
More to think about or discuss:
- Has our experience of Christianity tended towards being more complicated or simple? Can you give some examples or explain your answer?
- What do you think your local church might be like if it simplified things by making loving others in the way of Jesus central and most important in everything it does? What would that look like practically?
- What is one way you can ‘fulfil the requirements of God’s law’ by loving someone in the way of Jesus this week?
Pastor Eugene Online 
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