 People like to handle the Bible as though it were a mysterious or complicated story that can't be easily explained in clear terms. We do so precisely because the content of the Bible is crystal clear and at the same time totally inconvenient. That's why the Sadducees in Mark's Gospel can't comprehend Deuteronomy and why the Pharisees along with the Herodians unwittingly follow after false gods. It was a lone scribe, a man whose only job was to make handwritten copies of Scripture who grasped the point that Jesus has been emphasizing throughout Mark. Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Not only is he the one and only Lord, but you are not him and neither is your Caesar, your temple, your teachings, your possessions, or your armies. Richard and I discuss the Gospel of Mark chapter 12 verses 28 to 34. You're listening to the Bible as literature. Do you are listening to episode 190 of the Bible as literature podcast? I love an episode that ends with the expression, you are greatly mistaken. It's satisfying to hear Jesus be so direct. In the last episode, he talked about his adversaries or his detractors as being mistaken because the premise with which they approach their loyalty to God is framed in terms of loyalty either to their own teaching, to their own temple, or loyalty to Caesar. And that was the reason they were mistaken. And what God wants is loyalty to the commandment. And what we said last week was that loyalty to the commandment produces dedication not only to the teaching, but to your neighbor. The Lord is God. This is the basic teaching. I've just been working on Joel and Joel's name means the Lord is God. He is the son of Patuol, which means God opened. When God opens his word, you learn that the Lord is God. And anything that goes against that basic teaching is incorrect and moves you farther from him. And this is the problem that they've been running into over the past several pericapies because they don't understand that the entire land belongs to the Lord. They don't understand that even if there is a Caesar who happens to be doing some work on this land, it's not Caesar who owns the land. It's the Lord who is God. The Lord provides. It is always from the Lord and they want to have their own teaching about resurrection and marriage and theology and dogma. And it doesn't matter if it doesn't teach that the Lord is God. Right on the heels of this exchange with the Sadducees, one of the scribes came and heard them arguing and recognizing that he had answered them well, asked him what commandment is the foremost of all. Now this is a good question. Not which Caesar should I follow, which Pharisee or which Herodian has the valid claim? No, not who owns the land, but which commandment should be my priority. Now one might think that this sounds like the rich man who says, what must I do to enter the kingdom? But the rich man is trying to get something out of this. The rich man is not learning his duty. This scribe, what is the commandment that I have to do first? There is no discussion about reward. There's no discussion about what's in it for him. He is interested in learning what his duty is. It goes back to the question of one's premise. The rich man approaches Jesus with a premise and his premise is quid pro quo. The scribe approaches Jesus with a different premise. His only premise is that the commandment is what we're here for. And this is what Jesus has been fighting for all along. Are you here for the commandment or are you here for something else? For people who are scriptural, there is no something else. And as a pastor, I find that I have to make this case over and over and over again. Everyone who comes forward comes forward with something else. They want to justify it. They want to impose it. They want to explain it. They want to rationalize it. They want to cling to it. And the main argument I keep making with people is scripture is the priority. Scripture is the priority. Nothing else matters. And this causes a lot of emotional stress for people because the things that they claim matter are the foundation upon which they build empty false houses. Is the Lord God? Is what you're doing what you're committed to proving that the Lord is God? This is the question. And if you're not answering that question first and foremost, that's how easy it is to get off onto an incorrect presupposition. Another thing I find interesting about this is that it's one of the scribes. This guy is a renegade. He's leaving the rest of the scribes behind to come and listen to Jesus because he thinks that what Jesus is saying sounds reasonable. That as they're all arguing, this sounds like it could be the case, which is one step closer as opposed to trying to trap him. Now one thing that's important to emphasize here, Richard, you've said repeatedly, the Lord is God. In the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, very often in Proverbs and in other texts, you will hear a reference to the Lord's precepts, to his commandments, and then a direct reference to the Lord. If you follow the flow of this poetry, precepts, commandments, instruction, Lord are all used interchangeably. So Richard is saying that if your priority is the Lord God, nothing else matters. And then we're saying nothing else matters with the commandment. But understand that loving the commandment of the Lord is what Scripture means by loving the Lord. This is an important point because everyone in the Gospel of Matthew gives lip service to God. In Isaiah, people give lip service to God. So what does it mean when you say, I love the Lord. I love Jesus. Praise Jesus. I love God so much. People talk this way because they pick up on this language. But they're not talking about loving His commandment. They're talking about something psychological, something theoretical, something, dare I say, platonic that has nothing to do with the love of instruction, which is what Deuteronomy keeps driving at. When you get up in the morning, when you go to sleep at night, when you walk along the way with your children, teach them to recite the commandment, the instruction. Make them memorize Exodus. Remind them that they were once strangers, that they were once foreigners, that they were once in bondage. Teach them, teach them always to breathe the commandment at all times. Jesus answered, the foremost is here, oh Israel, the Lord, our God is one Lord. This verse has a long history of interpretation trying to understand exactly what it means. But in a nutshell, it means the Lord is God. Here that the Lord is God. Now, is Baal God? No. Baal is a false idol that you think is God. But the only one who is God is the Lord. And so you follow Him. But what does it mean to follow Him? It doesn't mean, like you said, praise Him. I love Him. It means do something. If I tell my wife, I love you, I love you, I love you. She'll say, then why are there still dishes on the counter? Go wash the dishes if you love me. It doesn't mean anything. So like you were saying, Father, without a commandment, without a word to follow, to show one's loyalty, then whatever lip service you may pay, it's not worth anything. In Deuteronomy, where this text is taken from, the Lord brings His people into the land and shows them the others being taken out as a warning and then gives them instruction. And your value, your place isn't who you are. Your value, your place pertains to your submission to this instruction. Deuteronomy is one of the books of the law. So the Lord that is being imposed on you, the one Lord is the instruction. Don't follow after other things, whether it be other people, other teachings, things that you want, things that are interesting to you, things that will profit you. All of that has to be cast aside and you have to have a purity of heart where you are loyal and completely dedicated to one thing, which is your Lord who is God and He is one Lord. I mean, what's the difference between Israel and the other nations? Paul addresses this. The only difference is that they receive Torah. In the land, what's the difference between the Canaanites and Israel? Because the Canaanites were let in and then they were sent out. The Israelites were let in and then they were sent out. What's the difference between them? Israel had the commandments. Israel was taught that the Lord alone is God. God shows no partiality. There is no difference between a Gentile and a Jew. None whatsoever. The commandment is the differentiator. Now the rub in Scripture is that once you receive the commandment, it shows you not only that you're no better than anyone else, but now you're probably worse because you have the commandment and you still act like a Gentile. So all of this theology about chosenness is completely misplaced. This Sunday, Richard, when I was preaching on the selection from Matthew, I talked about the Kingdom coming and the uniqueness of the scriptural tradition is that the commandment tells you to lose to your enemies, which means that if everyone followed the commandment seriously and you were overrun by your enemies and the disciples of the commandment were wiped out on the cross with Jesus, it might be that your enemies conquered, but because you followed the commandment, the Torah has hegemony on the earth. That's a radical teaching. That's the stance Jesus takes on the cross that's the extent to which we have to take seriously the hegemony of the commandment because the commandment is what will usher in the Kingdom of God. And I don't know if people really understand how strong this word hegemony really is. Whether you win or lose depends exclusively, uniquely, on whether one follows the commandment or not. That is it. That is the Alpha and the Omega. You cannot succeed outside of following Torah and you cannot fail outside of rejecting Torah. That is the only question. And so when this scribe comes and asks this, this is potentially the only question that you're allowed to ask. Now, significantly, it's not one of the disciples that asked this. It is a scribe, someone who's not part of Jesus' school, who asked this question, but someone who has immersed themselves in Torah who at least has a chance of understanding. Now, the nice thing about a scribe is a scribe is a copyist. You don't hire a scribe for his ability to explain the text. You hire him to make copies of the text. And I think even on this level, it's interesting that a scribe who simply repeats Torah was the one who had the best chance of understanding the priority of the commandment. Let me push that idea one more step. Hanging around with Jesus, thinking he's a great guy, did not lead the disciples to ask the correct question. But sitting 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day, I don't know how long the scribe's work day was, and reading and copying Scripture did lead him to this. So, maybe a piece of advice for the listener hanging out with Jesus is not as good as reading the Gospel. So for all you people out there who want to draw on your personal experience as opposed to your knowledge of some old book that was written, I don't know, millennia ago, my advice would be ignore your personal experience and your intuition and go in the room, close the door, and hang out with the old text for as long as you can. 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. And this is what we've been talking about. One of the things I mentioned in my own commentary on Galatians is the quote from Matthew where Jesus talks about seeking and knocking, seeking you shall find, knocking that shall be open to you. For as long as I can remember people talk about this verse as being a justification for asking God for something you want, but that is incorrect. The thing that you're supposed to seek is wisdom and knowledge of Scripture. And if you seek, if you pursue it, if you knock on Scripture's door, you will be rewarded with what you're seeking. This is all about pursuing wisdom and knowledge from the text. And as long as that knocking is infused with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, then it's valid. If you're knocking and then standing and waiting for him to come and answer the door, that's not what this means. Any piece of your body, any piece of your person has to be not just pursuing, but obedient to the commandment. Until you're sitting in a church meeting and you get irritated when people talk about something other than Scripture. I mean, fine. There has to be some administrative discussion about paying the bills, keeping the lights on if you happen to have a building. But my point is beyond that, if you start talking about how do we grow our church? Or how do we reach our teens? Or how do we do this? Or how do we become more relevant? Should we have a class on how to sing better? All of this is waste of time. The only thing that matters is Scripture. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't try to improve your choir or your church's program. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying your priorities have to be correct. If your priorities are not correct, everything you do will be corrupt. If your priorities are correct, if you happen to have to do something like improve the singing, you'll do it, but you won't be living for improving the singing. And if you're not living for improving the singing, then you won't abuse each other over the worship service. Realize the singing is not going to get you into the Kingdom of Heaven. Everybody says, Lord, Lord, big deal. Now, we're going to go for two hours on a Sunday and sing. So the singing should be nice. But if there isn't a word preached, there's no point. It's empty. And don't you dare ever make a big deal out of anything you do in church. Because nothing you do in church, nothing is on a par with the reading. First, the reading. Secondarily, the explanation of the reading. And you can even do without the sermon so long as the reading is there. But you can't do without the reading. Jesus continues, the second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. My sincere apologies, Anne Rand. Everything you wrote is baloney. It's not compatible because loving your neighbor as yourself not only is the most important thing we can be doing here on earth, but it only functions subordinate to the first one, which is that the Lord is God, the Lord alone. And you have to love him with this loyalty. But what does it mean to love the Lord God with all these things? How do we love God that we can't see? As John says, we have the neighbor who we can see. Now, you don't love the neighbor because of the good feeling you get. You don't love the neighbor because he's going to weep in front of you and you're going to feel very noble. You don't help them even because they're suffering and you want to relieve their suffering and feel better that there's less suffering in the world. All of these pursuits are empty. The only reason you go and you help the neighbor is because you're commanded. Because the only thing you're going to be judged by if you go out to relieve suffering in the world, the world belongs to God and the Lord is God. You have to make that primary and then this flows from that and you only love the neighbor because you're loyal to the Lord God. Now, when you're loyal to Caesar, which we saw in the previous episodes, you are in this position where you are rooting for a camp. We often critique Hellenism. I'm very outspoken about the critique of Hellenism on this podcast, but if you look at the tradition of the Greek mythologies, of the classical literature, if you look at the paradigm in the ancient world, each city had a God and you rooted for your God and you rooted for your city the way kids today root for their high school, the way people in politics root for their nation. It's the same old nonsense. It builds their God, whatever it is, their idea that they rally around and then they smash people who come from other camps or other groups or other ideologies. That's how your pagan gods function, whether it's an actual statue of Zeus or it's your flag or it's your company logo or it's your religious group, whatever it is, whatever your tribe is, you're picking one God and then in the name of that one God, smashing people who are under other gods. In scripture, you're presented with the commandment of the one God and that commandment sets you up not only to not fight but to lose to the others. It's so powerful in Deuteronomy that it's explicitly stated here that to love this one God has to be the same as loving the neighbor. They go together. Imagine if in your school song when you're fighting the other school the song said you have to love the people from the other school in the same way you love the people from your own school, so much so that in the basketball game or the homecoming game, you have to lose so that they can enjoy the feeling of victory which will be your victory even though your team loses. It's deconstructing the way human civilization works and it's a frontal assault on Hellenism because Hellenism is the perfect expression of the way human beings work naturally but that's what scripture is fighting. You know, here's how I can prove to you that your leader is not God. Caesar is not God. How do we know that? Well, he was called Caesar of the world or the civilized world or the known world. Well, if Caesar is God how come he has to go and conquer other lands so that they belong to Caesar? He is not God because he does not own the land but he lives for land. The one who created the land the one who put the land there owns the land. That is his land. Even if the President of the United States wants to be the policeman of the world there are still places outside of his jurisdiction. He can't be the policeman of North Korea. He tried it, didn't work. You don't have that power. Now, if you are a citizen of God's kingdom those are all fellow citizens and you treat fellow citizens as your own. When you are a citizen of the United States then you treat the Syrian differently than you treat the American. You treat the illegal immigrant from El Salvador differently than you treat the one who was born in the United States because you are a citizen of the world. You are a citizen of the President of the United States. When you are a citizen of God who owns all the land there is no boundary. You can't be me or you because everyone is within the land, within the boundaries of the Lord's kingdom. And for all of you who want to feel Jesus in your heart and answer from your personal experience and your feelings and your inspiration describe the guy who sits down as you said Richard for eight hours a day copying texts and back then he couldn't watch Netflix while he was doing it, okay? The scribe said to him Right teacher, you have truly stated that he is one and there is no one else besides him and to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength and to love one's neighbor as himself is much more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. Now what's notable about his answer is that he's quoting a text. This is the point. He didn't say you're right because I agree with you. He said you're right because if I look at the text that's exactly what it says. The scribe only uses as his reference the text not what he thinks is happening with the resurrection and divorce and marriage. Correct. It's not his theology. He is a man of scripture. He is a man literally of the word, a person of the book and he and Jesus are engaged in an intelligent discussion about Deuteronomy. It's like two scholars sitting down in Deuteronomy what is prioritized as the most important commandment in Deuteronomy. This according to Deuteronomy is what's most important. Yes, you're correct. I see here in Deuteronomy that this is corroborated by this text. Thank you very much. I just had Bible study with Jesus Christ. And how did Jesus respond? This is unprecedented. Jesus is not a guy who throws out compliments. When Jesus saw that he had answered intelligently, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God. He is ascribing intelligence to the commandment. You've answered intelligently because the commandment makes you intelligent. It's like in church Richard when a 13 year old or an 11 year old reads the epistle. They don't have to know what they're talking about, but because they're reciting the words of Paul, they sound intelligent. So Jesus is saying you answered intelligently, parenthetically, because Deuteronomy is intelligent and you're reflecting its intelligence by digesting it and repeating it. You are not far from the kingdom of God. And note, he didn't say good job. He said even though you answered intelligently you're still not there yet. You're not in the kingdom yet, but you're getting there. And this is what we were saying in the beginning. What is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is the kingdom that's ruled by the Torah, just like the United States is the kingdom that's ruled by the Constitution in the exact same way. So if you are acting according to the Constitution, no matter what country you're in, you're acting according to the laws of the United States. Now the difference about the United States is that the United States does not have jurisdiction in France. So it doesn't matter if you follow it or not. But God who is the king of all, wherever you go on the earth the Torah always applies. Why is he not quite in the kingdom yet? He recited the text, but he's not yet doing it. We'll see how well he does it, because God always wants to be sure that it's not lip service, but in fact he is acting according to the commandment. That's why in Mark you call no man good. It's a reflection of Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians chapter 4 that you should withhold judgment until the time. Because God will decide whether or not you followed the commandment. But at least as you said, you now acknowledge that your priority is the commandment. It's amazing how many people who are all talking about the kingdom of God haven't taken step one which is to throw everything away except the commandment. After that, no one would venture to ask him any more questions. And I love this example in Mark because it reminds me of a classroom. There are people who ask questions that they pull out of nowhere, because they're wandering off and thinking about nonsense. And there are people who ask questions that are useful. Jesus, like a classical professor not the modern professor who is a friendship with his class and lets them call him by their first name and wants to meet them at coffee shops and understand where they're at. That's baloney. All that is a waste of time. All that matters is the content of the lecture. What is the priority? What is being fed to you in the lecture? So your question has to be germane and it has to reflect an understanding of the content of the lecture. So what's happening is that there are no more questions because people are not serious about the content. No, in fact, their heart has been hardened. They have not been humbled by Jesus. They're just turned off. They are set in their ways because if they actually cared about what scripture said they would start asking him more questions so that they could learn more. Like you said, asking intelligent questions because this is what the scribe does the scribe asks an intelligent question Okay, I want to be loyal. So what do I need to do? Do these things? Sounds very reasonable based on what I read in scripture. Okay, you're on your way then. That's all he says. You're on your way. He doesn't say you're there. He's not putting an A in the grade book. He said there's a possibility that you're going to get an A. We'll see how this plays out. The reason there are no more questions is because the people who want Caesar or who want the temple or who want their religious ideology already have what they want. They've been shut out by Jesus because he's not interested in talking to them. Conversely, the scribe doesn't need to keep talking to Jesus because he and the Lord just discussed Deuteronomy. And he knows that what he needs is in Deuteronomy. There's nothing left to discuss. This is the problem. There's too much vain talk. It's a zero-sum game. Either you're interested in the commandment or you're not. If you aren't, yalla bye. If you are, go study Torah. What are we doing standing here?