Jesus Summarizes the Bible in Four Verses

"On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."

Okay, I have to admit it. I never read all of Moby Dick. The book was assigned as part of AP English class in high school.

Photo by Claudia Rancourt on Unsplash

I started it. I really did. But it just wasn’t happening. The more I read, the more my eyes glazed over.

Fortunately, when it came time to write my essay, I could fall back on the secret weapon of 1980s high school slackers students — CliffsNotes. CliffsNotes are condensed summaries that give you the overall plot and theme of a major novel without all the… words.

To make this a bit more numeric. Answers.com says Moby Dick is 1946 pages long. In contrast, Amazon.com says the CliffsNotes on Moby Dick is only 148 pages long. That’s a win.

Sometimes Christianity seems complex. At more than 1000 pages, 31,103 verses, and 750,000 words, the Bible is comprehensive. But life is coming at you fast, and sometimes you don’t have time to digest everything before you need to start moving forward, day by day. If only there was a CliffsNotes for the Bible. (It turns out that there is, but I would skip that and focus on the hyper-summarized version that Jesus gives you, below. Better to get it from the Word of God himself.)

It turns out, Jesus summarized the whole Bible in four verses. Yep. Four verses. (Well, in Matthew 22, it’s four verses. If you want the super, super condensed version, he gets it down to one verse in Luke 10.)

You want to know what the whole Bible is trying to tell you? What’s the most important thing?

³⁷ 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.’ ³⁸ This is the great and foremost commandment. ³⁹ The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:37-40 (NASB)

So, that’s it. I’ve quoted from the New American Standard Bible (NASB).

In the New David Roberts Translation (a much looser translation), it says

1. Love God completely.

2. Love other people as much as you love yourself.

When Jesus says “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” he’s commanding you to love God with all your being. He’s saying to love God with everything that you are. Literally, no part of you should not be loving God.

Notice how Jesus really hammers that home in verse 38: This is the great and foremost commandment. If there’s one thing you must understand about the Bible, it’s that you must love God completely.

Then, when He says to “…love your neighbor as yourself,” he means that you should give your neighbor everything that you want other people to give to you. You want people to be kind to you? Be kind to your neighbor. You want respect? Respect your neighbor. You want friendship? Be a friend to your neighbor. You want help? Help your neighbor. And finally, you want love? Then love your neighbor.

Jesus ends the passage by saying, “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” The Law and Prophets was another way to say the whole Bible during Jesus’s time. In essence, Jesus is saying that everything in the Bible — the Law, the Psalms, the Proverbs, the historical stories, and everything spoken by the prophets — ultimately can be distilled down to these two commandments.

That’s the ultimate message of the Bible. The rest of it is embellishment and exposition to help you understand how to do those things and stories about people who did and didn’t do them.

Is that simple? You bet. Is it easy? No way. The implications of these verses are huge. Gigantic. Epic.

The Christian life, therefore, boils down to this. Every day, in all things, large and small, love the Lord completely, and love the people in your sphere of contact in a sacrificial way. Love God. Love people.