This week we turn our attention to the second table of the Ten Commandments which are about love of neighbor.

The perennial temptation of the church is to split the two tables of the Ten Commandments apart. This causes us to imagine that we occupy two different realms or spheres: God on the one side and the world on the other. The split filters into every area of life: religion and politics, church and world, private and public, soul and body.

God has something to say about my personal salvation and spirituality (i.e. “going to heaven when I die”) but nothing about my politics.

This diseased imagination—which is the result of making this split—has plagued the church often and it can especially be seen in the churches in our circles today.

The truth, however, is that the two tables cannot be split apart. We are not called to love God and then love our neighbors. When we meet this strange God we find out that the way we love Him is by loving our neighbors (1 Jn. 4:12, 20-21). When we see the face of the God of the first table (Commandments 1-3) we find that he is also the neighbor of the second table (Commandments 4-10). Jesus said that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him.

God and the world are not two separate realities. The two tables are not two separate spheres of life. Why? Because in Christ God has reconciled the world to himself. God and the world are brought together in his name (Bonhoeffer). To see God we must look at the face of the human Jesus, and to see the truth of the world we must look at the face of God in Jesus. The truth of the two tables comes together in the incarnation.

As Jürgen Moltmann put it: “In Christ, God and our neighbor are a unity, and what God has joined together, let no man tear asunder…”

Peter Leithart’s book on the Ten Commandments can be found here: The Ten Commandments.

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