Deuteronomy 6:5

When I read Deuteronomy 6:5 I thought the verse should be complete with the first phrase: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” I wondered why add soul followed by a word that doesn’t necessarily mean strength, but a noun form of the adverb “exceedingly.” If it applies across the entire verse, it would be saying you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul exceedingly so. So the likelihood is that the word “strength” in the translation is not referring to physical strength, “Yield your members as instruments onto righteousness,” in reference to your body. If it were, Moses was saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and body.” But I think this is a stretch.

The soul may refer to the person themselves as for example in Psalm 103, “Bless the Lord oh my soul.” Here David is saying to himself “Self, Bless the Lord,” it’s probably another example of David encouraging himself in the Lord or he is simply praising the Lord. If that’s what it is in Deuteronomy, then we might be saying love the Lord with all your heart and then you will love him with all that you are. What is being implied in the statement is that when the Lord has your heart he has you and that would line up with a few sayings of Jesus, Matthew 12:34-35, for example, “…out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart brings forth good things.”

And the “muchness,” which is what the word “strength” really means in Hebrew, even though we do not have this word in English, is added on to indicate emphasis, and dedication. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart because then he will have all of you in every way and in every situation.”

Whatever a believer is thinking when they read this commandment must run the gambit of human thought. In Swahili, the translators have come upon another idea. It is not based on the text in Deuteronomy, but on Jesus’ words in Matthew 22 where we are exhorted to love the Lord our God with our whole heart, soul and “mind” or “understanding.” In Swahili, the word “soul” can also mean “spirit,” and this could lead to an interesting reading. In this reading, the soul or spirit can refer to our will; the last word “understanding” can refer to our intellect; and heart can refer to our emotions. If that’s the case, the scripture would be saying, you shall love the Lord your God with your whole will, intellect, and emotions.

I want to say that in Mark and Luke, which uses all four “heart, soul, strength, understanding” – or understanding and then strength – the words used are simply a product of tradition. They knew what they read in Moses and they knew how Jesus interpreted it and so they put it all together in one line. If this be the case, it doesn’t add anything to our discussion.

But we may want to ask why Jesus removed the word “strength” from the Mosaic tradition and replaced it with the word “understanding.” My suggestion would be that “understanding” is a function or attribute of the heart in Old Testament teaching [Proverbs 15:14], and therefore Jesus wanted to emphasize this truth and there was no need to add the word for “muchness” – especially since the New Testament is in Greek and they don’t grammatically use the word “exceeding” this way. The Old Testament Greek exhorts us to love the Lord “from [with] all our abilities.” [Not a bad translation: We have been empowered through Christ to Love Him as He wants us to.]

But while we are reviewing this multifold aspect of our being: heart, soul, understanding, we should consider the three changes that come about with the new birth, or when we become believers or when all things have been made new within us [John 3:3; 2 Corinthians 5:17]. First and foremost, according to Ezekiel 36:26 and Jeremiah 31:33 and 34, God gave us a new heart so that we could begin to know him. Is this not the heart that we are talking about in these verses? Love the Lord your God with your whole new heart. The old heart according to Jeremiah 17:9 was incurably ill and we needed a spiritual heart transplant. Then there is the word “understanding.” According to Paul, we needed to have our “minds” transformed that we might be able to know that the will of God is good and acceptable and perfect for us, according to Romans chapter 12 verse 2. But what about the “soul.” We can view the word soul as it is understood in Psalm 103 in the general sense that when God has given us a new heart and a transformed mind, our soul has been given a brand new beginning, but we might want to use the Swahili idea and view it to include talk of our spirit. According to Romans, 8:16 “the Holy Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit” now that we are born again. According to Colossians 2:13 we were once “dead in sin, [but now] He [the Lord] has quickened us alive [resurrected us] together with Christ,” God brought us alive in Christ. We are now spiritually capable of hearing His voice [John 10:27].

The word love would make no sense if God had commanded us with hardened hearts, corrupted minds, and spiritual deafness to love Him. We don’t even know what the word “love” means, nor would we be capable of expressing it.

Now the idea of loving God makes more sense. He gave us new hearts, transformed minds, and he brought us spiritually from death to life to be able to hear, know, and love Him. This is the person from whom He asks love. And even the “muchness” [exceedingly] is understood. Now our love is as eternal as His toward us, it is mutual and infinite because it is a reflection of His love toward us. It is the brightness of the full moon in a dark world because it is the light of the sun [Son].

[And like a marriage relationship is exclusive because of “love” and for “love’s sake, the Shima’ has greater meaning with verse 5 added.]

Is it not correct to think that Deuteronomy was written knowing how Israel of Old would fall short [Romans 3:23, 25] but wrapped in this verse, this thought, was the promise of its fulfillment in Christ.