Love Toward God Is Keeping His Commandments

A word for love, in Greek or in Hebrew, cannot by itself tell whether a love is holy, and that makes the question very practical. If agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay can be given to darkness and ahav to a bribe, what makes a love toward God holy? When the Bible speaks of loving God, what does that love consist of?

There is no need to guess. Scripture does not leave the definition of love to feeling or to poetry. John answers in a single sentence, and he answers in the form of a definition.

“For This Is the Love of God”

1 John 5:2-3 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God — that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.

The sentence is built the way a definition is built: “For this is the love of God — that …” What follows the “that” is not a feeling. It is “that we keep His commandments.”

The noun is agape (ἀγάπη), the verb for keeping is tereo τηρέω tay-reh'-o, to keep, to guard, to hold fast, and what is kept is entole ἐντολή en-tol-ay', commandment, in the plural: His commandments. The first verse of the passage turns the same truth into a test John gives his readers, so that loving God’s children is known by loving God and keeping His commandments.

Then John adds a line that answers a fear many people carry: “and His commandments are not burdensome.” The love of God is not described as a heavy yoke that crushes the one who wears it. It is the keeping of commandments that are not a burden.

There is real comfort in this. Many believers wake on an ordinary morning, feel no warmth toward God at all, and fear that their love for Him has failed. John does not measure love that way. If you rise and keep His commandments on a day when you feel nothing, you are loving Him, and that is the love John names.

What Yeshua Said About Loving Him

John did not invent this. He heard it from Yeshua on the night before the cross.

John 14:15 If you agapao ἀγαπάω ag-ap-ah'-o(love) Me, keep My commandments.

Loving and keeping stand in one breath. There is no gap between them where a love that does not keep could live.

Six verses later Yeshua says it again, and this time He turns it around.

John 14:21 He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who agapao(loves) Me; and he who agapao(loves) Me will be agapao(loved) by My Father, and I will agapao(love) him and will disclose Myself to him."

When Yeshua names the person who loves Him, He does not point to the one who feels most deeply or sings most loudly. He says, “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who agapao(loves) Me.” And to that person He makes a promise: the Father will love him, and Yeshua will love him and disclose Himself to him.

Two verses later He says it a third time, first as a promise and then from the other side.

John 14:23-24 Yeshua answered and said to him, "If anyone agapao(loves) Me, he will keep My logos λόγος log'-os(word); and My Father will agapao(love) him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. He who does not agapao(love) Me does not keep My logos(words); and the logos(word) which you hear is not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me.

The promise and its reverse stand side by side, and Yeshua adds whose words these are: “the logos(word) which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.” To keep Yeshua’s words is to keep the Father’s words. So on that one night, within the space of ten verses, Yeshua says the same thing three ways: love keeps His word, the one who keeps it is the one who loves Him, and the one who does not keep it does not love Him.

What John Heard From the Beginning

Years later John was still saying it, in his second letter.

2 John 1:5-6 And now I ask you, dear lady — not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning — that we love one another. And this is love: that we walk according to His commandments; this is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, so that you walk in it.

Again the sentence has the form of a definition, and this time what follows the “that” is a walk. The verb is peripateo, to walk about, and in Scripture walking is the ordinary way of speaking about how a person lives from day to day. The verse also turns in a circle: love is “that we walk according to His commandments,” and the commandment is given “so that you walk in it.” John does not allow the two to be pulled apart. And he adds that none of this is new: it is what “we have had from the beginning.”

Not New in the New Testament

The definition is older than John’s first preaching. The Ten Commandments said it at Sinai.

Exodus 20:6 and doing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and to those who keep My commandments (mitzvot מִצוָה mits-vaw').

This verse stands inside the second commandment, right after the warning against bowing down to carved images. God describes the people to whom He shows lovingkindness twice over: “to those who love Me and to those who keep My commandments (mitzvot).” The word for love is ahav. And what God does for them is chesed חֶסֶד kheh'-sed, lovingkindness. Moses said it again before Israel entered the land.

Deuteronomy 7:9 And you shall know that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God (El), keeping the covenant (berit בְּרִית ber-eeth') and the kindness to those who love Him and to those who keep His commandments (mitzvah מִצוָה mits-vaw'), to a thousand generations,

The same two phrases stand side by side again, and what God keeps for them is “the covenant (berit) and the kindness,” His chesed. On one side is the people’s love for God, described as keeping His commandments. On the other is God’s chesed toward them. The two loves meet in the covenant, and the commandments are its vows, not arbitrary rules handed down by a distant officer.

Marriage shows what that means. A husband stands before witnesses and vows to forsake all others. If he later breaks that vow and comes home saying that he feels a deep warmth for his wife in his heart, she will not weigh his feeling. He has broken faith. In a marriage, keeping the vow is the love, and that is exactly what chesed is.

Is This Not Legalism?

An honest objection belongs here. Defining love as keeping commandments can sound dry, even transactional. It can sound like the Pharisees, who were known for their zeal about commandments, and whom Yeshua rebuked again and again. But Yeshua Himself said what He rebuked them for.

Matthew 15:3; 15:6 And He answered and said to them: "Why do you also parabaino παραβαίνω par-ab-ah'-ee-no(going-ahead-and-departing, transgressing) the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? … he is not to honor his father or his mother.' And so you have nullified the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition.

He did not rebuke them for keeping God’s commandment. He asked, “Why do you also parabaino(going-ahead-and-departing, transgressing) the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” And He said, “you have nullified the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition.” Their fault was that they set God’s commandment aside to keep their own.

Nor does keeping earn God’s love. As Book 2 of this series showed from Galatians, a sinner is justified by grace, through faith, as a gift. What Exodus 20 and 1 John 5 describe is what the love of a person who already belongs to God looks like. It looks like keeping.

So the claim of that familiar sermon has the direction backward. Scripture never sets love and keeping against each other; from Sinai to John’s last letters it defines love toward God as keeping His commandments. That leaves the other half of the same sermon, the idea that phileo φιλέω fil-eh'-o is a lesser love a rung below agape, and the Gospel of John answers it by using phileo for the love of the Father Himself.