THE NEW COMMANDMENT

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, May 13, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 20

THE NEW COMMANDMENT.

“A NEW commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another: as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” John 13: 34, 35. The command is new, not in the essential principle of it, love, which He had taught before as the very sum of the moral law, but in the extent, motive or example of it, which is that ye, My disciples, should do to one another as I, your Lord and Master, have done to you. The key to the interpretation is in the clause, “As I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” He had just said, “I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” He had just illustrated the measure of his own love in the menial service of washing their feet, and in telling them further that it was a love even unto death; “the Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.” It was new also in being now enjoined as the very badge and test of all true discipleship. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

The apostle John, who, in his Gospel, has recorded these impressive words and the circumstances in which they were uttered, evidently refers to the same thing in the second chapter of his first epistle. “Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from the beginning. Again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in him and in you.” Here the context shows that it is this highest form of brotherly love, as illustrated in the example of Christ, which constitutes the essential feature of the new commandment. For this is the thing Christ says, this living illustration of it in him and his disciples, which is “love in him and in you.” The commandment is at once both old and new. It is old as to the essence of it, which is love; for the moral law always required love, and could be fulfilled only by love. But it is new as to the form and expression of it, being perfectly illustrated and fulfilled only in Christ, and in his disciples just so far as they imitate Christ and are like Christ. The word love had not indeed been used in the decalogue in the commands of either table. The precepts of the decalogue, being mostly negative prohibitions of wrong-doing, had not been expressed in the positive form of love’s high requirements. But the thing itself had always been there, as we see from Deut. 6: 5: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” There could be no true obedience, no acceptable fulfillment of any command, without love to God or man. This is plain from Christ’s own exposition of the decalogue, as given in Matt. 22: 37–40: “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. 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.”

The apostle James also refers to this condensed statement of the law by Christ in the second chapter of his General Epistle, where he calls it the law of liberty and the royal law. He says: “If ye fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well; but if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors.” If we put all these passages together, we shall see how perfect is the agreement of Scripture; and how the old commandment given to Moses in the decalogue, and interpreted by Christ as the law of love to God and love to man, becomes the all-comprehensive new commandment of the New Testament church, illustrated by the living example of Christ himself, and requiring the most intense self-sacrificing love in his name to the whole brotherhood of his disciples, and universal good-will to our fellow-men as neighbors and brothers. And we shall see, too, with what wonderful comprehensiveness of application, and what depth of spiritual import our Saviour summed up the whole of this new and old commandment, when in his sermon on the mount he expounded the second table of the decalogue and gave the golden rule for all the church and all the world: “Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.” Matt. 7: 12.

Still further: an interpretation is sometimes put upon this law of love, which virtually reverses it. Christ requires us to love one another, even as he loves us, and not only to love our fellow-Christians as being his disciples, but to love all men, even our enemies, with the love of kindness and good-will. We are commanded to do good unto all, especially to those who are of the household of faith; for all men are our neighbors, according to his teaching, and all Christians are our brethren. Are we living up to this law? It has certainly been enjoined, and it has never been repealed. But many professing Christians act as if the Golden Rule ran thus: Do unto others what they do to you,—treat them as they treat you. And in most cases those who adopt this low, selfish rule do not even live up to their own interpretation. They do not, in fact, treat their fellow-men or fellow-Christians half as well as they are treated. It is of the nature of selfishness to aim low in morals, and then to fall even lower than it aims.

A man is not often better than his principles. If his moral principles are lax and selfish, there is nothing to elevate his character. If he begins by injuring those who injure him, speaking evil of those who speak evil of him, he will end by failing to return good even for the good he receives. His low moral aim will lead him to construe and measure the good conduct of others by his own selfish standard of action. What a blessed thing it is that Christ has given us . . . a pure and spiritual standard of action, the highest and the purest ever propounded to man. He only will attain to true excellence who adopts this lofty standard of right, and aims at it perpetually in his daily life. All others fall short and miss the mark. Though the Christian man may be all his life approaching and never quite attaining this perfect standard of the Golden Rule and the New Commandment, still he will approximate it more and more, and in the end rise immeasurably higher than the man who has no higher law than the wretched selfishness of his own heart.—Interior.