The highest commandment (Mark 12:28-34)

[Stephan Choe]

July 11, 2025

Key verses 30-31:       "and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The other is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these."

We find various commandments in the Bible, e.g. the Ten Commandments and others.

To better keep the commandments of God, we need to understand the spirit of the commandment correctly.

The story in this passage begins with a scribe asking Jesus which is the highest commandment.

We Christians need to know what is the highest commandment of God so that we can lead a blessed life of faith.

One of the scribes, seeing that Jesus had muzzled the Sadducees when discussing the resurrection, asked Jesus, “Which is the highest commandment of all?”

A scribe dealt with texts and their interpretation.

The term “rabbi” or “rabbi” also appears in the Bible.

A rabbi is a Jewish scholar and religious leader of a community who teaches and interprets the Torah (the five books of Moses) and the Talmud. They are teachers and interpreters of Jewish law.

The terms “rabbi” and “scribe” are not completely congruent.

There are numerous commandments in the OT, e.g. the Ten Commandments and others. There were 613 commandments in the OT.

The scribe asked Jesus: Which commandment is “the highest”, the most important commandment?

When I was studying at Dortmund University, I asked a student in the canteen: "What is the highest commandment in the Bible? He replied: “The Ten Commandments!”

What did Jesus answer to this question?

Jesus gave the scribe's answer without any ifs or buts:

"The greatest commandment is this: <Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is the Lord alone, 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> (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). The other is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). There is no other commandment greater than these." (verses 29-31).

Jesus teaches us that we should love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves.

Let us first learn how we are to love God.

Jesus said in verse 37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Why should we love God like this?

There are two important reasons:

The first reason is that God is our Creator and our Lord.

Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God has created us very good and beautiful and has blessed us.

He has been there from eternity and will be there for eternity. In Genesis 6:4, God said to us: “Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”

He is the Creator of all things. He created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. He created everything in the world. He created each of us personally. He created us very beautifully.

Because God alone is our Creator and our Lord, we should thank him and love him. We can best express our gratitude through our love for him.

Our God is also our Lord. He is the owner of our lives and guides our lives according to his best will. And his guidance is perfectly good.

Our God is also our Lord because he has bought us through the sacrificial death of Christ. Through his death on the cross, Jesus Christ freed us from the burden of sin and gave us eternal life and the kingdom of heaven.

So God is our Lord in two respects: He created us and redeemed us from the power of sin and death through the sacrificial death of Christ. He is therefore our Creator and our Lord.

The second reason that we love God is because God first loved us and loves us very much.

When we were far from God in the shadow of death, God loved us first and saved us from darkness and the power of death. When we were still unbelievers, he loved us, bore us with all patience and helped us so that we could finally believe in him. And God continues to love us and care for us. That is why it says in John 3:15: “For God so loved the world, that is, all of us, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

So God bore and loved us with all patience so that we could finally accept his love and believe in him through Jesus Christ. God's love is wonderful. God has forgiven us all our sins and accepted us as his children and heavenly princes and princesses. He has given us eternal life and his kingdom.

Therefore, it is right that we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

I explain what loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength looks like.

“Loving God” means first of all that we accept God's grace of salvation.

We can automatically love God if we accept God's love for us and are grateful for it. When someone is saved by a human being during an attack by murderers, the saved person automatically becomes very grateful to the savior.

God saved us from Satan's attack through Jesus Christ so that we could escape eternal death and hell. Can't we be grateful for that?  Yes, we will be very grateful for it.

Secondly, “loving God” means loving to hear God's Word and loving to talk and pray with Him.

We can cultivate our gratitude for God's love well by listening to his

Secondly, “loving God” means enjoying hearing God's word and speaking and praying with him.

We can cultivate our gratitude for God's love well by listening to his word well, talking to him and praying.

This point names our right attitude towards Jesus, our Savior. When we are saved from the power of death, we become grateful for it. Unfortunately, we may forget this gratitude after a while. To keep this gratitude fresh, we need to listen to his words again and again, talk to him and pray. This is how we learn that God always loves us and cares for us. This can also be explained by the marriage relationship between a man and a woman. If a man loves his wife, he would like to have fellowship with his wife. If a man says that he loves his wife and hardly takes time to have fellowship with her, his love can grow cold. That is why we should always have fellowship with God by listening to his voice and speaking to him. So we should read the Bible daily, listen to his voice and talk and pray to him.

Thirdly, “loving God” means trusting God and believing in his word.

Love is somewhat mysterious. When one loves another, he trusts him. So it is with believers. When we receive God's love and love God, we trust God and believe in his word. Because of our trust, we have deep peace in our hearts. And we can overcome various difficulties and be victorious. And our trust and faith give us the victory of life.

Fourthly, “loving God” means obeying God or his word and his will.

Those who believe in God and his love become grateful and gladly obey him. However, those who do not believe in God's love have difficulty obeying God.

Jesus Christ is a good example of how he obeyed God because he believed in God's love for him. He even obeyed God's will and died on the cross (John 10:17, 18).

Fifthly, “loving God” means thanking and praising God.

When we love God, we become very grateful to Him, so that we praise Him and proclaim His grace and benefits. Our lives are full of gratitude, and we want to pass on his benefits. In this way, we become good witnesses of God. And God's blessings are spread through us.

How should we love God?

Jesus said to us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” (30).

We are to love God with all our heart. The heart is the seat of feeling, thought and will. We should therefore use all our feelings, gratitude, and willpower to love God.

Everyone has an emotional faculty. We should not use our emotions negatively, for example by making God and other people sad with a bad mood. We should use our emotions positively by praising God and encouraging other people.

The soul is the seat of the Holy Spirit. We should make full use of our spiritual powers to thank God and to share the gospel with others in a credible way.

“To love God with all your mind” means “to love God with all your thinking and understanding.”

We can now say that we should love God with an undivided heart and with all our emotions, willpower, and energy.

If we love God with all our heart and forget to love our neighbor, we will go astray. That is why Jesus did not forget to teach us that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.

So Jesus said: "The other is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these." (31).

Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself - these two commandments should always go hand in hand.

You should love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. This summarizes all of God's commandments. These are the correct standards for Christians. We should always be guided by these two commandments. In this way, we can act as salt of the earth and light of the world and God will be glorified through us and our neighbors will be blessed.