Who Is My Neighbor?": Ordered Love, Covenant Priority, and Christian Duty
In Luke 10:29, Jesus is asked a fundamental question: “Who is my neighbor?”Regrettably, modern Christians often stumble over this concept, and do so with the boastful pride of a Cock strutting the farm. The question posed is ancient; the confusion, however, is not. In our sentimental, globalist, perverted, gay, transexual, immigrant age, “neighbor-love” has become flattened, abstracted, and universalized into a guilt-driven ethic that dissolves proper distinctions ordained by God. While we are screamed at to love the foreigner as our neighbor, our capitulation to that end is actually a violation of this command. Love for the foreigner actually becomes a Christianity without priority, and a Christianity without priority is the kind that will end up hearing, “depart from me, you worker of iniquity, I never knew you.” Why? Because Christ said, ‘If you love me, you will do what I say, the way I say it, how I say it, and in the order I say it—we won’t pick and choose, or placate with lip service.’
Scripture never commands disordered love. The God who is love (1 John 4:8) is also the God of order (1 Cor. 14:33). Therefore, Christian love must be ordered, not chaotic. Loving the foreigner, then, rather than your own countrymen, is rebellion. Augustine called this concept the ordo amoris—“rightly ordered love,”—and the Reformed tradition has always upheld it, until very recently, upon the advent of blue hair dye. The question is not whether we love, but which people we are to love. We are called to love the foreigner, but how we love them in proportion to the love God Himself has assigned to us is of vital importance.
Christ’s answer to “Who is my neighbor?” does not, therefore, erase distinctions, but it clarifies priorities. Properly understood, it frees Christians to love wisely, responsibly, covenantally, and without the paralyzing burden of global sentimentalism and liberal screams.
