across the page you’ll see today’s scripture, Mark chapter 12 verses 28 through 34. This is God’s holy word. And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, Which commandment is the most important of all?
Jesus answered, ìThe most important is, ìHear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, 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.î The second is this, ìYou shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.î And the scribe said to him, You are right, teacher.
You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding, with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, You are not far from the kingdom of God. And after that, no one dared ask him any more questions.
Thus far, God’s holy, inspired, and infallible word. Thanks be to God. Lord in heaven, we pray now to have clear minds, cogent thoughts, careful examination, We pray, Lord, that we would put off the temptation to say that your word applies to other people but not to us. We pray it would indeed be relevant to our lives and so relevant, Lord, that it’s worth sharing with those that we know. We do pray that the words of our mouths, the thought of our hearts would be acceptable in your sight. In Jesus’ name, amen.
I’ve titled this today, At Last, A Decent Question. Because a lot of the questions that were brought to Jesus, and in the Scriptures, some of the more recent ones that we’ve looked at, seem to have tried His patience. He had to answer them. He wanted to answer them to correct things, but He would have been happier if the questions asked to Him were really what we would call decent or useful questions that would be helpful in the lives of people.
When Jesus was only 12 years old, he found his way into that area of the Jerusalem temple where religious scholars discussed various spiritual matters. His parents had been looking for him and, and I’m quoting now, they found him in the temple sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. That’s Luke chapter two, verse 46. We have to assume that even when he was back home in Nazareth, he spent some of his free time doing this sort of thing at the local synagogue or wherever people were gathered for this kind of discussion.
Well, by the time he was 30 years old, he had probably heard and responded to every conceivable question, both good questions and silly ones. In this incident today, he shows relief that even a scribe can have a good question. So our points this morning to consider are these, which commandment is the most important of all? That was the immediate question at issue there that he called a good question, a decent question.
And then we will consider Jesus threefold response to the scribe’s question. Thirdly, the scribes’ warm response to Jesus, which was a surprise, incidentally. Usually they didn’t respond warmly to anything he said. But we have this warm response. It was complete, it was orthodox, and it was satisfying. And then finally, Jesus’ closing is kind. That is how he closes off this conversation. It’s very kind, but nevertheless, it amounts to a warning about falling short, and we’ll see what that means when we come to it.
Well, first of all, which command is the most important of all? I don’t know if you’ve ever had somebody pull this on you when you’ve gone in to take a test of some kind. I remember in our indoctrination into college, they gave out a paper like this, and it had a number of things to do. We wouldn’t call them commandments today, but we’d say they’re instructions to do.
And the first one was to read everything carefully before you begin. And then when you got down to the last one, it said, disregard questions two through nine. There were 10 of them. Disregard instructions two through nine and sign your paper and turn it in. But I would say 90% of the people tried to answer all the questions in between.
Well, it’s not quite that serious a matter here, but it’s a commandment that Jesus, or really more than one commandment, that Jesus would have his disciples and those who are listening, especially the scribes, to think about. We can imagine that this particular question, what’s the greatest commandment of all, had been debated for years. And I mean years and years and years, probably all the way back to when Moses wrote down these commandments. It was the Lord who actually wrote them, but at least when Moses carried them to the people, which is the greatest of them all. Jesus discerned that this particular scribe, not the scribes in general, they were a hostile bunch, but this particular scribe was serious, sincere.
And so he rejoiced in that and he wanted to answer this question the best way that he could. And one of the reasons that he rejoiced was that there was no trickery involved here. All these other encounters that he had with people who were his opponents, they had some trick folded into them. He’ll say something that we can use against him or he’ll misspeak in this way or that way. But as he understood this man very well, he said, this one is serious and I want to give him a good answer.
Now, I think we can say safely that all the Lord’s commandments are important. In other words, when you say, which is the most important one? Well, there’s an answer to that, but don’t discount the others. They’re very important indeed. But there are a few that influence all the rest, and I think that’s what he’s driving at when he does provide an answer here. The critical matter is the scribe’s conviction that Jesus has better wisdom than his colleagues. Now that’s saying something.
Because the scribes, and the word scribe of course has to do with things that are written, they weren’t doing the writing, but they were reading the writings, but the scribes were the experts. You had a question, Well, you could take it to your neighbor, or more seriously, you could take it to the Pharisees, those people that were very serious about the Judaistic religion. And if you really needed a good answer, you could go to the scribes because they were the experts. And yet this scribe is willing to say, you know, this man is really smart.
This man has good answers. I want this man to tell me about the greatest commandment of all. Let me say this, that if any of us has a spiritual question, You can take it to Jesus. He’s the wisest man of all. You say, how can I do that? He’s long gone up into heaven. He’s left us here. But He’s left us His Spirit, you see. And He’s left us the Scriptures.
And we can find answers to the questions that we have in the Bible. The Holy Spirit will direct us to those answers, and it is as if Jesus himself were speaking to us. So while this incident may have been something that we could not participate in from a distance of years and centuries, we can still take our questions to Jesus. And this is a question that we might well ask. What is the most important commandment of all? Which brings us then to the second point that we want to consider today and that is Jesus threefold response to the scribe’s question.
Now remember We’re assuming, and I think rightly so here, that the Lord Jesus wanted to give a good answer here. He didn’t want to just be on the surface. And I think all of his answers were good answers, wherever they were given. But this one especially, for this man’s sake. In fact, you’ll recall, he says to the man, you’re not far from the kingdom. Your seriousness here is quite obvious, and I’m glad to speak with you about what concerns you.
So there’s a threefold response here. there is this Shema that it’s called. The Shema is what the Jewish people often say when they rise up and when they sit down and when they lie down and when they’re involved in different situations, the Shema, hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one and you shall love the Lord your God and so forth after that. But that introduction there was usually called the Shema. So the Lord begins His answer with a recitation of that, and then also He goes on to talk about loving the Lord your God with all of your being, and then loving your neighbor as yourself. So you can see it’s a three-fold response to the man. What’s the greatest commandment?
Well, let me just kind of introduce that by saying there are three things that usually are involved in making a relationship strong. There’s truth. If you’re deceiving someone that you’re trying to have a relationship with, there’s not going to be much of a relationship, is it? You want truth. And then, of course, you want devotion. If it’s a religious question, then you want to know, how can I truly show my devotion to the Lord? And then finally, it’s caring. In a relationship, there needs to be caring for one another. Love your neighbor as yourself, and so forth. Well, you can see how these all blend together as they do.
Well, the Shema itself is a confession of faith. Now, I suppose that the most used and the best known of all the confessions that we have is something called the Apostles’ Creed. I believe God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and so forth. You know that confession that’s often used in churches. And confession is important.
And this is a brief one, but it’s certainly a very powerful one. That the Lord is one. There’s one unique God. And then on the basis of that, there’s then a way that we should respond and behave. Shema, hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one. This is a confession that everyone really ought to hold in their hearts and lives. There’s one God to whom we must give an account. There’s one God to whom we must respond, to whom we must submit.
So this is the truth. Remember, the first element in any relationship is the truth. And if you’re just making up your religion, if you’re just trying to think, how can I be a very sort of righteous person and so forth, I’ll follow some creed or something, you don’t begin there, you begin with the Lord. The Lord is one. The Lord our God is one. Well, that’s the confession that starts off this answer. Jesus makes it important to state the truth. You want a relationship with God? You want to know which of His commandments is important? Be sure that you recognize who He is. How can we find that out? Well, that’s what’s revealed in the scriptures. In the beginning, God, the one God, created the heavens and the earth. This God said, there are no other gods besides me. This God said, any others that you worship are false gods, that’s idolatry.
That’s where you have to begin. Then we move on to devotion and we move on to caring. Jesus is God. That’s what’s interesting about his answer here. He confesses this himself because he knows that he himself is God. And it would be a misleading of the person who asked it to tell anything else. There’s one God and you should respond to that God. And this scribe said, I’m responding to you.
You’re such a great teacher. You’re such a wise man. But Jesus is presenting himself as the wisest of the wise, as God himself, as God come among us, God with us, Emmanuel. And he says, you want wisdom? Come to me. Because as I have come into the world as a man, I’ve come bringing wisdom. I’ve come able to be a teacher and to share these things with you, to take the scriptures, which are my word to begin with, but to explain them and apply them. And that’s how we’re going to begin to answer this question.
And what’s the greatest commandment? Well, that greatest commandment has to do with the greatest of all, the greatest being of all, God himself. And then you have these two chief commandments that follow upon this confession of faith, this Shema. Let me say, both of them are really inextricably connected. Because you have a love for God, and if you love God as you should, you’ll love your neighbor also. These are the two chief commandments. The Shema and the two commandments are universal.
They’re not just for the Jews. Now, that confession is, Hear O Israel! And you might think, well, this is just for Israel and these pagan people over here or this group over there, they have their own gods and they can figure out how to get along. But no, he is saying there’s one God. So everybody ought to respond to this one God. He hasn’t isolated himself among the Israelites. He’s given them more attention and he’s given them his word, which brings a deeper understanding, but The greatest thing of all is that he’s everybody’s God, and everybody’s invited to come to this God, and everybody is warned that if they don’t, consequences will be tragic. So, Shema and the two commandments are universal. This that he answers to the scribe is not just for Israel. But it’s to the Israelites who’ve received so much preparation that they should know by now clearly that there’s one God and not be led astray to worship other gods.
You might say, well, how could they possibly do that? Well, just look at their history. Look at the history of the Israelites. Over and over again, they brought in other gods. Now, usually they didn’t exclude Jehovah completely, the God of Israel. They just said, well, there’s Jehovah, and then there’s all these others too, and we’ll just lump them all together. But what God is saying here is that He’s one, and if you have a question, He’s the one who’s going to give you the answer to that question.
And you should serve Him in regard to your neighbors as He loves them, you love them as well. This is universal. response, universal commitment to God. And to have these commandments is also a matter of keeping them. If you just say, well, we’re God’s people, we have the commandments, well, good so far, but do you keep them? And then over and over again in the scriptures, as I’ve pointed out, they didn’t keep them. Certainly the first one about having only one God, And then how they treated one another, how they were to behave in their marriages, how they were to look at other people’s property, how they were to think about father and mother and how to respond there and so forth.
All of these things you see are not just for the Israelites, but for everybody. It’s universal. Some years ago, one of the courts in Georgia, I forget in which one now, had the Ten Commandments put on a stone and set outside the courtroom about, you know, obeying God and all these different things. And somebody challenged this in court and said, you have to get rid of the Ten Commandments, that’s religion, and we don’t have any established religion here. And it wasn’t good for Georgia, it wasn’t good for the people that they threw out the Ten Commandments as though they weren’t necessary. They’re for everybody.
I remember when I went to public school, and I’ve said this here before, but as you walk down the hall to your classroom, the Ten Commandments were hung on the wall. They wouldn’t do that today. but they were there. We saw them every day. We passed by them.
And what the law does is tell you you’re a sinner and you need a Savior, and it leads you to the Lord Jesus Christ if you take it in the right way. Well, which is the chief one? That was this man’s question. Which is the chief one? And as I said, all of them are important, but the ones that concentrate on God Himself and on how you treat your neighbor, they influence all the rest of them.
So to have them, is to keep them, or else it’s not worth very much. So it’s a good thing to have them hang on the wall in the hall of the school, but if you don’t keep the commandments, then they just become your judge at some point. You pass them every day, God says, but you’re not doing any of them.
Well, we come to our third point then, and that was how the scribe responded to these commandments or the summary of them that Jesus gives him here. We said his answer was complete. His answer was orthodox. What do we mean by that? Well, orthodox means right and straight and true.
In other words, this is the truth and it’s very satisfying when you keep the commandments. When Jesus was raised from the dead, he was walking to a town called Emmaus with a couple of disciples, and he taught them the scriptures concerning himself, but their response was, did not our hearts burn within us as we talked with him? along the path in the way there. That’s something of what this scribe was trying to say to Jesus, trying to say to those who are listening to him. When you listen to this man teach and you push your prejudices aside and listen to what he says, your heart really burns within you. It really cuts down to the depths of your being.
And the scribe was saying, in a way, this is what I’m looking for. This is what I’ve been trying to find out all the years I’ve been a scribe. We don’t know how many that was. But all the years that I have been a scribe, I’ve always sought to find that place where my heart really burns, where the depths of my being is touched by what is said. so that we’re blessed, of course, to have God’s commandments, and we’re blessed, of course, when we keep them and do them, but the ultimate thing is that this becomes our way of life.
This becomes what we follow. Now, I want to say again that when you try to keep the commandments, you’re always going to fall short. Some of them you’ll keep some of the time. You won’t keep all of them, and you won’t keep all of them forever. It is only as God gives you grace to do some of them and only when you look to Christ to save you from your sins and then to give you a place in heaven where you will live according to them whether you even think about it or not.
The scribe, as far as we know, was never himself hostile to Jesus, although some of these others, as we said, were hostile toward him. And that’s why they didn’t have any burning recognition that this is the truth, that this is where I want to be going.
As far as we know, the scribe was in favor of everyone’s obedience, which is really unusual. Now, if he had read Isaiah 11, verse 10, which is quoted in Romans 15, he would have known that everyone is supposed to believe in the Lord. In that passage in Romans and in Isaiah, it says, in him the Gentiles, the non-Jews, will hope. And he says, that’s where I want to go, right there. And all of his colleagues were saying, no, no, Jesus is not right. God is only our God, and the others can’t have him unless they go through a certain pattern of conversion that we will prescribe for them. But as far as we know, this one scribe, he said, you know, this is something that everyone ought to know and have.
And I think that’s when Jesus said to him, you’re not far from the kingdom. You’re not far when you know that this is a salvation for people everywhere, that they may be saved, that they may be happy people, that they may have confidence in their own lives.
So, when he talks to Jesus, when the scribe talks to Jesus, he has nothing to add. He doesn’t say, well, yeah, that’s good, Jesus, but what about this commandment and that commandment? And what’s missing here? He was satisfied that Jesus had laid it all out right there. He had nothing to add.
And he goes on to say, he says, all the sacrifices that are offered in the temple and all that, he says, they have their place But he says, all those really can’t really save you in themselves. And that’s what scripture says in Hebrews. It says all the blood of bulls and goats and all those sacrifices, they really can’t save you. Only Jesus can save you. And His blood shed upon the cross. And His resurrection from the dead.
You’ll notice that this man, he doesn’t have any desire to argue with Jesus. Everybody else, when they didn’t have anything else to say, they just went away. But this man says, I’d like to hear more. Now, he doesn’t say that for us here, but you get that impression. I could listen to this man all day, he says. And I’m sure he tried to do that as much as it was possible. So he had nothing to add. He agrees that sacrifices are not what people need, but real righteousness.
How do they get it? By having Jesus’ righteousness credited to them. And then they’re righteous. And having their sins all forgiven. Having that place in heaven. There’s nothing to argue about that, if you really understand it. And this is, of course, what this man really, really wanted.
So he publicly commends Jesus. And you’ll notice that he calls Him Teacher. Now I don’t think anybody else who had a different frame of mind than this man ever called Jesus teacher. They may have in a kind of informal way or something, but I think he really meant it, teacher, my teacher. And what he was saying there was, I’d like to be a disciple of yours. Now remember, he’s not the first one that ever said this to Jesus.
What must I do to inherit eternal life, said the rich young ruler. Others that are unnamed said, Lord, I’ll follow you anywhere you go. I’ll do anything you say. And Jesus had to say to him, well, follow me right now. He said, no, I gotta go home and take care of business, take care of my family, and so forth. Well, it’s right to call Jesus teacher, and this man does, but are you willing to follow him? Not just to agree with him, but to follow him. And then notice that Jesus never says to him, and I think this is a critical absence here. Jesus never says to him, come, follow me.
He just lets it go on. Because the man is not ready, he’s not in that position yet. He’s like the rich young ruler, who when Jesus told him, okay, you want to follow me, here’s what it means, and it says he went away sorrowful. And you have to wonder if this man went away sorrowful or if he kept after Jesus until he finally understood what he needed to do and he did it. It doesn’t tell us what his future was. But he just never says to him, alright, now, come on, follow me. because he wasn’t ready yet. The man wasn’t right at that point yet. And that brings us to our closing point this morning. That is, the Lord says that the man needs to re-examine his heart and mind. He doesn’t say that in so many words.
But the point is, if you’re not far from the kingdom, what’s it going to take to get you the rest of the way? And what it’s going to take, first of all, of course, is the work of the Holy Spirit. Everybody will come short. Everybody will fail to get there unless the Spirit of God helps them. Unless he has a change of heart, a new birth. If you’re not born again, you can’t see the Kingdom of God. If you’re not born again, you can’t enter the Kingdom of God. And this man needed to be born again, just like the rich young ruler needed to be born again.
He’s on the right track. Let’s give him credit for that. All these other people, by and large, we don’t know everybody’s heart, but by and large, all these other people were not on the right track. They may have kind of brushed against it from time to time, but they weren’t on the right track, but he was on the right track. If he would just continue in this way, he could be saved and have a full life and go to heaven.
But we don’t know. It’s not really told to us. One time the Apostle Paul went and he talked to Governor Felix, who was the governor and Paul was a prisoner, but he talked with him. The governor liked to talk to him. But at one point, the governor said, some other time, some other time. He never quite got there. Never quite made it the rest of the way.
And the word to us is, don’t fall short. Bible says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but don’t fall short if you’re on the right track. Don’t fall short. Well, what do you have to do? You have to just wait the Spirit of God to change your life, yes, but from the standpoint of what you can do, you just need to sell out to Jesus. If you’re not willing to sell out to Him, you’ll never cover that portion of ground that you need to. Jesus actually calls this a wise man. He says he’s wise because he was an earnest seeker and not an opponent. But if you’re wise to the point of salvation, then you believe that Jesus died for you and rose again for you and is coming for you.
And that’s what was lacking as far as the narrative goes here. Mark and Peter, as they write this, they describe the scribe as daring because his peers had no openness, but he did. If you don’t go ahead and surrender to Christ, in these circumstances, it’s a terrible tragedy. How many people have almost, have almost come, and yet never made it? There’s a hymn we sing sometimes, almost persuaded, almost, but lost. Don’t be like that. If you’re on the right track, if you believe Jesus is the wise man, if you believe he can save you, then close that distance.
If he says, give it all up for me, give it all up for him. Be like the man who was looking for the treasure in the field. He sold everything he had to go and get that treasure. If it’s your treasure today, if Jesus’ salvation and life is what you need, then go for it. Don’t matter what other people say, go for it. Doesn’t matter that you have some doubts or thoughts, but go for it.
If you believe he’s the wisest man, the man with the answers, the man who has the answer to what the greatest commandment is and all these things, go to him. And he will enable you to keep God’s commandments in this life in a great way, but ultimately, he will keep them for you and give you everlasting life. Lord in heaven, we pray that we would close with Jesus, not be like one who stands off, but when Jesus says, follow me, that we will follow him, nothing holding back. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen. So let us sing a closing hymn together.