Christ’s New Commandment

By Lillian Howard

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:34-35).

For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why this was considered a “new commandment.” After all, when Jesus was asked about the Greatest Commandment, “love God” was first, and “love your neighbor” was the second. Leviticus 19:18 reads, “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the LORD.” So you see, love has been a commandment of God for a very long time.

But perhaps we’ve been looking at the wrong part of the verse. Perhaps love is not the new commandment, but the extent of it. The old command was to love people as you love yourself. The new command tells us to love as Jesus loved. 1 John 3:16 reads, “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” And 1 John 4:11 reads, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” In other words, if God loved us this way, we should love each other in the same way.

As in so many areas of Scripture, a more perfect law has replaced the original. We are no longer to just love as we love ourselves – we are to love as Jesus did.