Love One Another
Romans 13:6-10
Tomorrow is June 6, the 70th anniversary of the Allied offensive that turned the tide of the war in Europe in the invasion known as D-Day. I had the privilege about twelve years ago to walk the beaches of Normandy and to visit some of the museums and to walk through the cemeteries of the men who gave their lives for our liberty on the beaches of Normandy. That was a very moving experience. If you've never done that, I hope you get a chance to do that. I think it's something that every American should be required to do before they exercise their voting privilege.
In Israel they, of course, have mandatory military service for everyone at the age of 18 in the IDF. If for some reason you are a conscientious objector you can serve your nation in the ambulance corps or medical corps or for something else of that nature. But if you go into your national service at the age of 18 one of the things that's part of your basic training is that they take you to all of the battlefields, all of the significant sites in the history of that nation, so that you understand the background of the nation, the history of the nation and an understanding of what makes Israel as a nation important. Israel is a young enough nation where they can go to these battlefields and have men and women who fought in those battles be there to tell them what they went through on those battlefields. It draws a connection for them. They understand that if they're going to put their life on the line for their country they know what they are fighting for and what they might be called upon to give their life for. I think that's important.
Another thing they do that's interesting but I'm not thinking that we should do this but their Memorial Day is the day before their Independence Day. I've heard this from American young Jewish men who've gone over and served in the IDF and it's a jarring thing for them to watch what happens here on Memorial Day. Memorial Day isn't Veteran's Day. Memorial Day is to remember those who have given their life for their country. In Israel it's a day of reflection, a day to focus on those who have given their lives for the independence of the nation and the freedom of the citizens. They don't have 2-for-1 sales. They don't have appliance sales and car sales. They don't have all of that. They just focus on the reality of the day and at midnight someone rings a bell and they go from Memorial Day to Independence Day and the mood in the nation changes from a time of somber reflection to a time of rejoicing and exhilaration. Independence Day then becomes a great national celebration. So this is a meaningful juxtaposition for them.
[Next Dr. Dean read a couple of selections from a book called 101st Airborne: The Screaming Eagles at Normandy by Mark Bando. He highlighted heroic stories about Jacob Fuss and Manny Gesulga, two of America's unsung D-Day heroes.]
Let's open our Bibles to Romans 13. Our focus tonight is on the title for this section which covers basically three verses from Romans 13:8-10 on love one another. Now remember the context. It's always important to remember the context. As Paul comes to this section of Romans he's dealing with a lot of application. Romans 1-11 dealt with a lot of what people would mistakenly call just theology. But theology is always applicational and any theology that is sound Biblical theology is always applicational. If it's not, it's not good theology.
Just think about it. Paul spends eleven chapters on theology. In most churches today people say just skip the theology. They just want to be told what to do. But Paul takes painstaking effort to go through eleven chapters to help us understand the nature of sin and our justification. He points out it's by faith alone and that all we have to do to be saved is to believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. We just need to trust Him. At the instant we trust in Christ as Savior we have eternal life because Christ paid the penalty for our sin. You can't add to it. You can't take away from it. Jesus paid it all. All that's required of us is just faith or trust in Him and Him alone.
In the first two and a half chapters Paul explains that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Following that is justification by faith. Then he goes by that into now that we are justified how do we live? Romans 6, 7, and 8 deal with the issues of the Christian life. Then in chapters 9-11 he talks about God's righteousness in relation to Israel. After those eleven chapters he begins to transition to key points of application.
Romans 12:1-2 sets the framework. Paul gives the command, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your body…" He says body because it's not just the physical person but your soul and your spirit. "That you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world." So what we're seeing in the last part of Romans, there's a contrast between how the world does it and how Christians should live. We're not to be pressured into the modus operandi of the world around us. We're not to be conformed to the ways of the world or the actions of the world but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. That means studying the Scripture, reflecting upon it, giving time in our lives not for just going to Bible class but for reflecting upon we've learned, reading through the Scriptures daily and thinking about what that means in terms of our own thinking and in terms of our own lives. The result will be that we can prove or demonstrate in our own lives that God is good and acceptable and perfect.
As part of this we dealt with government and issues related to authority in Romans 13:1-7. Now at the end of that sections in Romans 13:6-7 he comes to the application of the authority principle of government to paying taxes. He makes it clear hat all citizens are required to pay taxes and it doesn't matter what the percentage is or whether you think the tax code is fair or balanced. What matters is that this is the law. So he says in Romans 13:6, "They, (the government leaders) are God's ministers attending continuously to this very thing." That means it's for our good as indicated in the first two verses of this chapters. The command is to give to all their due, "taxes to whom taxes are due." That word actually refers to giving tribute to the empire. Then comes "custom to whom custom is due". The word there for customs is the word that we would relate to as taxes. Then he goes on to say to give "fear to whom fear is due and honor to whom honor."
Obviously that context is saying something about money. For that reason a lot of people think that this first phrase in Romans 13:8 "owe no one anything except to love one another" is talking about money. In fact, you've probably heard that. I've heard that from lots of Bible teachers over the course of my life. In fact there was one some of you may have heard or been to one of his conferences, a guy by the name of Bill Gothard who had a two-day conference called "Basic Youth Conflicts." A lot of people went to that and he built a whole financial policy off of this one clause that this teaches us to pay cash for everything and not to use a credit card or go into debt. He didn't believe churches should get a mortgage or you shouldn't personally get a mortgage because it's not God's will.
In fact, there are not only people like that but there are some well-recognized scholars and exegetes who try to make that connection. All my life I've heard different people make that statement but it doesn't fit the context. I've always had a sense of what this said but I couldn't demonstrate it until I just happened to run into something, some information, as I was reading in a totally different passage, totally different context. I was working through the Sunday morning material in the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 where there's a similar vocabulary. The material I was reading was for last Sunday and this Sunday and it directly correlated with the vocabulary here. It was some of those things you read and it's just a great blinding flash of the obvious. As soon as you read it you know that's absolutely right. This is the issue in terms of talking about owing no one anything except to love one another.
Is this talking about money? As we get into these three verses I want us to just do a little flyover of these verses. I want to just point out a few things to you in terms of its organization. Let me read through the three verses and then we'll look at some of these observations. Romans 13:8-10, "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled {the} law. For this, 'YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, YOU SHALL NOT MURDER, YOU SHALL NOT STEAL, YOU SHALL NOT COVET,' and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of {the} law."
One of the first things we note is that twice in this passage you have the phrase related to fulfilling the law. In Romans 13:8 Paul says that when you love another you have fulfilled the law. In verse 10 he says that love is the fulfillment of the law. So what do you think these three verses are all about? It's how love fulfills the law. He states it at the beginning. He states it at the end. He's very clear that this is what he's talking about.
At the beginning in verse 8 he says not to owe anyone anything and then he says that he who loves another fulfills the law. That verse is parallel to verse 10 which says that love doesn't do any harm to anyone so therefore love fulfills the law. The phrase "love does no harm to a neighbor" is expressing a parallel or synonymous concept to "owe no one anything". Whatever "owe no one anything" means it's parallel with not doing something evil or bad to a neighbor. From the context we can see that it seems that "owing no one anything" isn't really talking about financial indebtedness.
Now what sandwiched in between Romans 13:8 and Romans 13:10 is verse 9. It talks about the Mosaic Law. The five commandments he lists here in verse 9 are the second half of the Ten Commandments. So that tells us right away that when he says law in verses 8 and 9 he's not talking about something in the New Testament. He's referencing the Mosaic Law, specifically the Ten Commandments which are the prelude or the beginning of the Torah, and the Mosaic Law which actually contains 613 commandments. That's 603 commandments beyond the 10 in the introduction. So that's sandwiched in between there.
Let's look at Romans 13:8 in detail. Notice that it says not to owe anyone anything except to love one another. Now the main thing he's driving toward here is that loving one another fulfills the Mosaic Law. The standard explanation of this verse is one that is given in a commentary by Rene Lopez called "Romans Unlocked". I've known Rene for many years. He's a guy involved in the Free Grace Society. I've heard him speak. He has a doctorate from Dallas Seminary and he now teaches at Dallas. He takes a pretty standard view of this passage. He says, "Still thinking of the Christian's obligations to fear and honor the state, verses 1-7 focused on our response to the authority of the state."
The problem with this explanation is that there's a shift that takes place in verse 8. Now in the original Greek I've told you there's no verse breakdown. There's no sentence breakdown; there's no commas or semicolons or paragraph breaks. In fact, in your Uncial documents which have all the letters in upper case, there's not even a space between the letters. You wonder if you see something like that how in the world you would ever be able to break it down to sentences and paragraphs. That's the brilliance of Greek in that the grammar is used to identify all these things so there's not a matter of dispute as to where the sentences should be in the Greek.
Every now and then someone will break a long sentence in a Greek text into two sentences. Pretty much, though, the Greek text according to the editors and translators who handle it are consistent in where they see the sentences and where they break the paragraphs. Now that's important because in all the Greek texts I consulted they all break the paragraphs between verse 7 and verse 8. The grammar indicates there's a shift that takes place because of the way the language is structured in the Greek. Paul is closing out one topic and he's shifting to another topic. The new topic starting in verse 8 is very clear that this is a new subject.. The focal part of this sentence when you compare it with verse 10 introduces the new topic.
So, just in terms of the language, we know we're not talking about submission to authority anyone. We're now talking about loving one another. So owing no one anything doesn't belong with the previous section. It's part of the new topic, not the old topic. Rene Lopez says, "What happens here is that Paul is still talking about the Christian's obligation to fear and honor the state and he transitions with this command to owe no man anything. Instead the translation saying let no debt remain outstanding in the NIV captures the correct meaning."
They try to make this work. This idea they say is that there's some obligation there of not letting any physical debt or financial obligation remain. He explains, "One must repay all financial debts, not that one should never borrow." Of course, that's true, but that's not what this passage is saying. Sometimes we hear pastors teach true things but you look at the passage but that's not there. That thought is in Proverbs and Psalms but that's not necessarily in that passage.
So when Rene is saying we should pay our financials debts it's not saying that one should never borrow. And he's accurate there. Some people get the idea that the Bible says we should never borrow. Many times it's based on this verse. The Bible never says that. In fact, if you study the history of economics you learn that a sound economy is driven by credit. You don't want to get overextended in your credit. You don't want to get into deficit spending like our federal government because you can never get out of it and you become a slave to your debt. But credit is important to build and grow the economy. You had this sort of hypocritical two-faced attitude about this topic in the Middle Ages. The Roman Catholic Church taught that no one should charge usury or interest, period. But they couldn't live like that. You needed to be able to have credit for an economy to function. You had to borrow from someone and if you couldn't borrow from a Christian, who did you go to? You went to the Jewish community and borrowed there.
The point that I'm making is that the idea that you don't borrow at all is not a Biblical concept. It's not even reflected in good economics. Look at these two passages. Psalm 37:21 says, "The wicked borrows and does not pay back, But the righteous is gracious and gives." This is the type of parallelism called an emblematic parallelism. The first line isn't synonymous to the second line like a synonymous parallelism. The second line isn't the opposite of the first line. That's an antithetical parallelism where you have opposites. The second line here is an expansion of the idea in the first line. The idea in the first line isn't that it's wrong to borrow. It's wrong to not repay the loan. The wicked borrows and the reason he's wicked is that he doesn't pay you back. The second line shows that the righteous is generous and not only pays back but he's also generous and gives. This second line assumes there's repayment but it expands on that.
Matthew 5:42, a passage we studied not long ago, says, "Give to him who asks you and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away." Jesus is not saying it's wrong to borrow. So the idea that "owe no one anything" means that you can't borrow and that's it's wrong Biblically to borrow is not correct. To teach that is bad exegesis and bad economics. What's interesting is this word "to owe". Owe no one anything is the verb opheilo. It means to be obligated or to be indebted to someone financially. Here it's a present active imperative which means it's a command which should characterize your life at all times.
The word opheilo is the verb cognate or the verb form that we find in Matthew 6:12. In the Lord's Prayer Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who have a debt against us or our debtors." So the word for debt or debtors is based off this noun opheilema. This noun and this verb are just cognates. One's the verb form of the noun. Now I'm building an important point here. So when we look at this in Matthew 6 we wonder why in the world this is talking about debts.
Turn over to Matthew 6:12. After the prayer is over with Jesus makes a teaching point in Matthew 6: 14–15. Is this talking about financial debt or something else? Jesus says, "For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions." See, the word here is transgressions. This is used here as a synonym for debt.
In the Luke account we read, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." So obviously in both Matthew and Luke the word for obligation or debt is parallel to the word for sin. Now this is backed up by understanding language. What I read briefly in one source last week is that the concept in Judaism of sin was that you sinned against God. You are now indebted to God. If you sin against your brother you have created a spiritual debt to your brother.
Now this was built off of an Aramaic word that was used. Remember Jesus taught in Aramaic as well as Greek. I believe he taught in Greek here but in Rabbinical thought they used this idea meaning debt to communicate sin. You created this obligation against another. Don Carson, who is a Greek professor at Trinity University School with whom I have many disagreements in terms of his theology, in his commentary on Matthew in the Expository Commentary writes, "More important the Aramaic word hova…" This is a broad word encompassing both spiritual and financial debt. "…is often used in the Rabbinical literature as sin or transgression. Then he quotes Adolf Deissman, a Greek scholar at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Carson says, "Deissman makes the point in his analysis of Greek that hormatium opheilo means "I owe sin", Probably Matthew has provided a literal meaning of the Aramaic Jesus commonly used in his preaching. Even Luke uses the cognate participle in "everyone who sins against us". There is therefore no reason to take debts as meaning anything other than sins. It's a synonym. This is how the rabbis talked about sin as something owed God."
Now I thought that was an interesting thing and I went back and found the original quote by Adolf Deissman in his Biblical Studies. This guy was absolutely brilliant. He knew Greek, knew the Koine Greek, knew the earlier forms of Greek and really was a breakthrough scholar in showing that the Koine Greek of the New Testament wasn't some Holy Spirit language but was common, everyday Greek. His studies published in the late 19th century and early 20th century were breakthrough studies. These guys just breathed classical literature and they could quote lengthy passages from just about any ancient Greek document verbatim upon request. He says that "In the directions (preserved in a duplicated inscription) of the Lycian Xanthus for the sanctuary, of Men Tyranos, a deity of Asia Minor…" He cites the source and says it was found near Sunium which is in modern Turkey saying it was not older than the imperial period roughly during probably the Greek Empire rather than the Roman Empire. He says "there occurs the peculiar passage which he quotes in Greek. At the end he says that the phrase "I owe sin" in this passage is also very interesting. It is manifestly used like I owe debt."
I'm going into detail on this because you can read commentary after commentary where they talk about this passage Romans 13:8 as focusing on financial obligations. It doesn't even fit the context. Paul is telling us not to become spiritually indebted to another. In other words don't sin against your fellow man, which is parallel to the idea that love does no harm to a neighbor. What's important here is that here you have the verb used whereas in Matthew it's the noun that's used. I'm just showing that you have documentation that both the noun and the verb were both used to show spiritual debt, not financial debt.
So "owing no one anything" is an idiom for don't sin against your brother. Don't create a spiritual obligation of sin in regard to your brother. And that parallels to the idea that love does not harm which is a Greek word meaning sin or evil. Love does no evil to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law.
Now when we look at Romans 13:8 and compare it to Romans 13:10, both talk about a fulfillment. In Romans 13:8 it uses the word in the Greek for fulfillment. That's the same word that's used in Ephesians 5:18 for being filled by means of the Spirit. That's a little bit different concept. The word group for pleroo has a broad range of meaning so you really have to look at how it's used each time. We've studied this before so I'm not going to go through it again but we've talked about the four different ways you have the word fulfillment used in the New Testament.
In Matthew 2 we have Matthew reciting four different Old Testament passages and he says "it is fulfilled". Jesus was to be born in Bethlehem. It is fulfilled in Micah 5:2 that this was a literal prophecy with a literal fulfillment. You have three other uses that aren't literal prophecy. This word was used in a comparison mode, as a depiction of typology and they also used it to sort of summarize New Testament teaching. I've gone through all of that in detail. What we have here is a verb in the perfect tense which indicates completed action. When you love one another you have completed what the Law says to do. You have obeyed the Law.
The Law has been fulfilled. In Romans 13:10, though we have the noun form pleroma. pleroma also has a broad range of meaning. You can't come along and say that every time you see the word pleroma that it always means the same thing because it doesn't. It has a lot of different meanings and you have to look at the context each time to see what it means. pleroma means a fullness in the sense of that which is brought to fullness or completion. So Paul is saying that since love does no harm to a neighbor, therefore, love is the completion, the fulfillment or the full application of the Law.
Now what does he mean by that? In between verse 8 and verse 10 we have verse 9. Romans 13:9 lists five commandments: you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, and you shall not covet. Those are all taken out of the prelude to the Mosaic Law which we call the Ten Commandments. So it's clear that what Paul is saying here is how to fulfill the law in terms of your love for one another.
It goes back to an interchange had in Matthew 22:36. Before we get there, though, I want to make one other comment about this phrase fulfillment of the Law. Does that sound familiar to anybody about what we've studied on Sunday morning? In Matthew 5 as Jesus was shifting from talking about the Beatitudes to talking about the correct way to interpret the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law, He says to his disciples to not think He came to destroy the Law or the prophets but that He came to fulfill the Law. What he's showing is that He fulfills the Law. It's the same verb, the same language that Paul is using here.
Jesus brought the Mosaic Law to complete application. He's not talking about a fulfillment of prophecy. He's talking about the full application which he then contrasts with the Pharisees. The Pharisees were those who broke the least of the Law in Matthew 5:19. Jesus says He didn't come to teach them that it was okay to violate some of the laws in contrast to some of the Pharisees. He says He came not to destroy the Law but to completely fulfill it in terms of application.
Now later on in Matthew he's got a little confrontation here with the young man who comes to challenge him. To pick up the context, this is a lawyer who comes. That means he's an expert in the Mosaic Law so he's probably a Pharisee. Mathew 22:36-40 says, "One of them, a lawyer, asked Him {a question,} testing Him, "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And He said to him, "YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.' This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."
The first five commandments and the Ten Commandments all relate to our obedience to God. Things like having no other gods before God, not worshipping idols, observing the Sabbath, and all of those all relate to our obedience to God. The second five have to do with loving our neighbor. This was just a way of referring to the Old Testament Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. They refer to it as the Law and the Prophets.
In other words He's saying that everything else in the Old Testament depends and develops these two basic commandments, to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor as yourself. So what Paul is talking about in Romans is that loving one another fulfills those five commandments. If we're loving one another, then we're not going to be committing adultery, we're not going to be committing murder, or stealing, or bearing false witness, or coveting. That would be excluded if we're loving our neighbor. So that's the focal point of Romans 13:10. And this is a foundational command in the New Testament. Now the New Testament develops this in terms of a new commandment. Galatians 6:2, "Bear one another's burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ." What was the law of Christ? That takes us back to what Jesus said in John 13. The word fulfill here is a form of the word pleroma. It has a prefix in front of it, anapheroo, and it basically has that same idea that you'll certainly bring to completion the law of Christ.
I'm going to run through sixteen passages. We have one already in Romans 13. This is the impact of Scripture. Sixteen times in addition to the one we're looking out for a total of seventeen we have these commands. In John 13:34-35, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." Now this is just one passage but it states it three times.
In John 15 Jesus repeated it. In Romans 12:10 Paul said, "Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love." This is the only time he uses a different verb. He uses philostorgos instead of agape but it communicates the same principle. In Galatians 5:13 he says "Through love serve one another."
In Ephesians 4:2 he says "With all lowliness and gentleness with longsuffering bearing with one another in love." In 1 Thessalonians 3:12 he says, "May the Lord make you increase and abound in love toward one another and to all just as we do to you." In 1 Thessalonians 4:9 he says, "But concerning brotherly love you have no need that I should write to you for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another." 2 Thessalonians 1:3, "We're bound to thank God always for you brethren as it is fitting because your faith grows exceedingly and your love for one another abounds towards each other."
1 Peter 1:22, "Since you purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart." Then again in 1 Peter 4:8, "Above all things have a fervent love for one another for love will cover a multitude of sins." In 1 John 2:7-8, "Brethren, I write no new commandment to you but an old commandment which you've had from the beginning. I write to you because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. He who says he's in the light and hates his brother is in darkness until now. He who loves his brother abides in the light [fellowship]."
1 John 3:11, "For this is the message you have heard from the beginning that you should love one another." Then 1 John 3:23, "We're to love another as He gave us commandment." Then in 2 John 5 he says, "And now I plead with you, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment to you but that which we have had from the beginning that we love one another."
So we have this command to love one another coming out of the Old Testament commandment in Leviticus 19:18 which is quoted in Romans 13:8-10. "You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord." This quote is quoted in Matthew 5:43, 19:19; 22:39; Mark 12:31, Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:14, and James 2:8.
So you add these eight references to what we've had in the "love one another" passages and we have an overwhelming emphasis in the Scripture on what it means to love one another. James 2:8 says, "If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you do well.' " This takes us up through Romans 13:10. We'll come back next time to finish Romans 13 with some more key principles on living the spiritual life in the last part of Romans 13.