Day 15 Love is the Fulfillment of the Law
Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law Romans 13:8-10
Paul turns now from the ministry of the state to the duties of individual Christians, here, our duty to love. The passage about the state (13:1-7) is wedged between the command to love our enemy (12:20) and the command to love our neighbour (13:9).
Paul has already referred to the importance of paying debts: to the unbelieving world to share the gospel with it (1:14), to the Holy Spirit to live a holy life (8:12f) and to the state to pay our taxes (13:6f). This last reference to debt transitions us to our text: ‘Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another’ (13:8). We can pay out most of our debts in life so we owe nothing more; most, but not all. Our duty to love others will never have “paid in full” stamped over it. We can never stop loving someone because we’ve loved them enough. On the other hand, we will never be able to say we’ve loved our neighbour in exactly the way Scripture commands. We constantly fall short of it. The NIV calls this ‘the continuing debt’ to give the sense of Paul’s thinking and not because these words are in the original text.
‘For he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law’ (13:8). This is the second half of the verse. Putting it with the first half, Paul is saying: loving our neighbour was what the law wanted to produce in the lives of those who obeyed it. Part of the problem was our inability to love others to the degree the law demanded.
Paul’s statement about love being the fulfillment of the law has to be understood against the background of Romans 7. There Paul argued that we were incapable of fulfilling the law by ourselves because of our fallen, self-centred nature. He went on to write that God has done for us what the law (weakened by our sinful nature) could not do. He has rescued us from both the condemnation of the law through the death of His Son, and from the bondage of the law by the power of His indwelling Spirit. God did this ‘in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met [fulfilled as in 13:8] in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit’ (8:3f).
But here in chapter 13 when Paul repeats his statement about our fulfilling the law, he changes his emphasis from the means of the fulfillment (through the Holy Spirit) to the nature of it (through love). Law and love are not necessarily incompatible as advocates of “new morality” might claim. They say that because love is the end of the law (the goal the law aims to see outworked in our lives), we can dispense with law altogether and simply elevate love. They would claim love has its own built in moral compass that protects us from the very areas the law previously protected us from. But the truth is that love needs an objective moral standard. This is why Paul didn’t write ’love is the end of the law’ but that ‘love is the fulfillment of the law’ (13:10). Love and law need each other. Love needs law for its direction and law needs love for its inspiration.
Paul now explains how neighbour-love fulfills the law. ‘The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself” ’ (13:9). Jesus said the same thing in Matthew 22:39f. Why does love sum up the commandments? Paul answers: ‘love does no harm to its neighbor’ (13:10). The last five forbidden sins in the last four commandments of the ten (adultery, murder, stealing and coveting), harm people. Love does the opposite. It helps people; it builds them up; it makes them strong and whole. This is why ‘love is the fulfillment of the law’ (13:10).