What would Adam have made of: "You shall not commit adultery"?

The pharisees used their greatest legal scholar to interrogate Jesus about the law. The answer Jesus gave when deposed does not get the respect it deserves, because the clear and straightforward interpretation is counter to Covenant Theology’s complicated view of the law. The familiar passage is:

³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 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.” (Matt 22:36-40)

These were not new laws; both are found in the Old Testament, and this is in fact a feature, not a bug. For if they, as I believe, represent the purest, fullest, and simplest ^[1] revelation of God’s absolute law, law that supersedes any covenant laws, then they should be found across all (i.e., both) covenants.

The importance of the passage is not merely the reiteration of these laws, but the fact that in answering the lawyer’s question, Jesus has elevated these two commandments to the supreme position. All other laws, Jesus tells us, descend from these two.

Covenant theology reverses the rankings, and elevates the Decalogue to the supreme position, even though Jesus, when asked directly, chose to answer with the “two great commandments” rather than, say, “You shall have no other Gods before me” or “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.”

It is interesting to imagine what pre-fall Adam would have made of the two great commandments and what he would have made of the ten commandments. He certainly, or at least arguably, would have grasped the two greatest. But several of the ten commandments would have been without context. What would pre-fall Adam have made of “do not take the Lord God’s name in vain”? What of honoring his mother, when he had no mother? Would he have even understood the sin of adultery?

Even if the text weren’t clear, though it is crystal clear, I believe that pondering what the two sets of laws would have meant to a pre-fall Adam is a good exercise in establishing the plausibility that the smaller set is eternal and absolute, and the bigger set is not. There was a time when the Decalogue, at least parts of it, would have made no sense. There was never a time when the two greatest commandments would have been puzzling.

 I’ll end with a picture that summarizes my view on God’s law. Hopefully it is self-explanatory.

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^[1] Covenant theology teaches (correctly) that God is simple , but it sort of excludes God's law from that simplicity. ^[2] Instead of taking the simple great commandments as God's own summary of absolute moral law, they take the Decalogue, a more complex set of laws that were given to a particular nation under a particular covenant for a particular time. (Perhaps they imagine, as the old quip goes, that if God had more time he could have written a shorter letter.)

^[2] Although some believe they can, not through scripture but through highly fallible human philosophy, extrapolate that simplicity to absurd unsupportable in-the-weeds conclusions about the nature of God, when the only scriptural answer to the details of God's simplicity is: it's a mystery.