The Sheet Music Was Never Wrong: Leviticus 19 and Christian Love

The Sheet Music Was Never Wrong

How the Law of Moses Became the Backbone of the Law of Christ

Bruce Mitchell · Agapáō Allelon Ministries · www.allelon.us

Most of us skip Leviticus. But the most quoted command in the New Testament, “love your neighbor as yourself,” was first spoken there, in a chapter about field edges, fair wages, and grudges. This devotional traces how the Law of Moses became the backbone of the Law of Christ, and how Jesus filled it full: love your God, love your neighbor, love your enemy, and love each other.

Four Lines in a Pocket Notebook

I almost didn’t hear it.

Not because the sound was bad or because I was sitting too far back. I almost didn’t hear it because I had already decided what I was going to hear.

It was a Sunday morning in Renton, and I was visiting East Renton Community Church. New faces. A new row of chairs. I like visiting. There is something good about sitting where nobody knows your story and letting the Word come to you as one more sheep in the pen, rather than the one holding the staff.

I settled into my seat and started paging through the bulletin. On the very last page, under the heading “Sermon Notes,” was the text for the morning.

Leviticus 19.

And I’ll be honest with you, because honesty is the only way I know how to do this: my heart sank a little. I braced. I have sat under a lot of sermons from Leviticus over the years, and too many of them end up in the same place. Here are the rules. Here is how far you are from keeping them. Clean yourself up, and grace will be waiting for you on the other side. Obey first. Receive later.

So I reached into my pocket for my notebook. I wanted my anchor in front of me before the preaching started. I wrote down four lines, the four loves that hold up everything I teach:

Love your God.

Love your neighbor.

Love your enemy.

Love each other.

I underlined them. I was getting ready to defend the grace of the Law of Christ. Quietly, politely, in the margin of my own little notebook. But defend it all the same.

Then Pastor Jeremy Roh stood up to preach, and within a few minutes I set my pen down.

He wasn’t preaching law before grace. He was preaching a grace that gives the law a home. He said God was not telling Israel to make themselves holy. He was promising to make them holy. He walked from “love your neighbor as yourself” in Leviticus straight up the mountain to “love your enemies” in Matthew 5. And then he walked to the cross, where Jesus did exactly that while the nails were still going in.

I sat there with my four underlined lines and thought, if I didn’t know better, I’d think this man had been reading my book.

He didn’t need to. He had been reading the same Bible. And when two people sit with the same chapter long enough and let the Spirit do the teaching, they tend to end up standing in the same place.

That Sunday sent me home to Leviticus 19 with new eyes. I want to take you there with me. Because the chapter I braced against turned out to be the backbone of everything I believe about the Law of Christ.

The Chapter Most of Us Skip

Picture where these people are standing.

They are camped at the foot of a mountain in the wilderness. Not long ago they were slaves, stacking bricks for Pharaoh under a hot Egyptian sun. God brought them out with a strong hand. He split the sea. He dropped bread on the ground every morning. And then, at this very mountain, while Moses was up on Sinai receiving the Law, they melted down their earrings and bowed to a golden calf.

That is the congregation God speaks to in Leviticus 19. Rescued. Fed. Unfaithful. Still His.

And here is what He tells the whole assembly:

“You must be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2, NLT)

Read that the way many of us were taught, and it sounds like a locked gate. Get holy, then you can come in. But look at the order of the story. God never said, “Become holy, and I will bring you out of Egypt.” He brought them out first. The sea had already parted. The manna was already on the ground. These commands come to a people who already belong to Him.

Pastor Jeremy put it like this. Picture a parent kneeling down to a child who just grabbed a toy out of someone else’s hands and saying, “You’re my child. You’re going to be kind.” The child isn’t kind yet. The parent is promising what that child will grow into.

That is Leviticus 19. A Father kneeling in the wilderness dust, telling His children who they are going to become.

Then the chapter gets ordinary. Wonderfully, stubbornly ordinary.

When you harvest your field, don’t cut all the way to the edges. Leave some for the poor and the foreigner. Don’t steal. Don’t lie to one another. Don’t hold a worker’s pay overnight. Don’t curse the deaf man who can’t hear you, and don’t put a stumbling block in front of the blind man who will never know who tripped him. Don’t tilt the courtroom toward the rich, and don’t tilt it toward the poor either. Don’t go around spreading gossip. Don’t hate your brother in your heart.

And under all of it, like a steady drumbeat: I am the LORD. I am the LORD your God. Again and again, God signs His own name at the bottom of a command.

He never says, “Do this and then I’ll be your God.” He says, “I am your God,” and then He describes what His family looks like.

Then, tucked at the end of a sentence about grudges, almost like it was hiding there, comes a line you already know by heart:

“Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against a fellow Israelite, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:18, NLT)

I have met lifelong Christ-followers who were surprised to learn that line comes from Leviticus. They thought Jesus said it first.

He didn’t. Jesus was quoting Moses.

The Backbone Under the Four Loves

Here is what opened up for me in the days after that Sunday. Every one of the four lines in my notebook has a bone in it that came from Moses.

Love your God. Long before Jesus said it, Moses stood before Israel and cried out, “Listen, O Israel!” Then he called them to love the LORD with all their heart, all their soul, and all their strength (Deuteronomy 6:4–5). Leviticus 19 starts in the same place: keep what God has made holy, and don’t turn to idols. So when a teacher of the law asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, Jesus didn’t invent an answer. He quoted the Shema, the prayer every Jewish child learned at home.

Love your neighbor. That’s Leviticus 19:18, word for word. Jesus called it the second commandment, “equally important” with the first, and then said the entire law and all the prophets hang on those two (Matthew 22:39–40). Paul told the Galatians the whole law is summed up in this one command (Galatians 5:14). The bone is Moses. The voice is Jesus.

Love your enemy. This is the one thing people think Jesus made up out of nothing. But keep reading Leviticus 19. Sixteen verses after “love your neighbor,” God draws the circle wider:

“Treat them like native-born Israelites, and love them as you love yourself. Remember that you were once foreigners living in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 19:34, NLT)

The foreigner. The outsider. The one who doesn’t share your bloodline or your history or your holidays. Love him as yourself. And back in Exodus, Moses had already written something that sounds a lot like the Sermon on the Mount: if you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering loose, take it back to him. If you see his donkey collapsed under its load, help him get it up (Exodus 23:4–5). The seed of enemy love was planted at Sinai. Jesus came and let it grow into a tree.

Love each other. Look at who is standing inside that chapter. A mother and a father. A brother. A neighbor. A hired worker. The poor. The deaf. The blind. Almost every command includes another person. And God spoke it to “the entire community of Israel,” not to one man alone in a tent. Holiness in Leviticus was never a private hobby. God’s people lived it together, in the field and the marketplace, in the courtroom and around the family table. So when Jesus gathered His friends in the upper room and told them to love one another, He was speaking to a family that Leviticus had been shaping for well over a thousand years.

Four lines in a pocket notebook.

Every one of them standing on Moses.

What Jesus Finished

So if the backbone was already there, what did Jesus do with it?

Picture Him on a hillside in Galilee with the crowd pressing in. Fishermen with nets still drying at home. Farmers. Tax collectors nobody trusted. People who had heard the Law read in the synagogue their whole lives and had heard the teachers explain it every Sabbath. And one of the first things Jesus said was meant to settle a nervous crowd:

“Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.” (Matthew 5:17, NLT)

The word Matthew uses is plēroō. To fill something full. To carry it all the way to the place it was always heading. Not erase. Not re-impose. Fulfill.

Then He does something remarkable. Over and over He says, “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you.” And by the end of the chapter, He arrives at Leviticus 19:

“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!” (Matthew 5:43–44, NLT)

Here is what I want you to see. Leviticus never says hate your enemy. Not once. Somewhere along the way, the teachers had shrunk the word “neighbor” down to “people like us.” And once they did that, they felt free to hate everyone else. Jesus wasn’t correcting Moses. He was correcting what people had done to Moses. Pastor Jeremy said it plainly that morning: Jesus corrected their reading, not the Scripture.

Jesus kept the Law. Every line of it. He is the only person who ever loved God with everything in Him and loved His neighbor as Himself without a single gap.

He also pressed the Law inward, off the outside of a person and into the heart. And notice, Leviticus 19 was already pointing there. Don’t hate your brother in your heart. No court in Israel could ever prosecute a grudge. Nobody can see one. God was always after the heart.

And then He raised the measure. On the night before He died, in an upper room with the Passover meal still on the table, Jesus said this:

“So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.” (John 13:34, NLT)

Moses said Love your neighbor as yourself. The measure was you. Jesus said Love each other as I have loved you. The measure is the cross. That’s why He called it new. The Greek word is kainos: new in kind, not just new on the calendar. The love was old. The standard was brand new.

Then He went out and lived every word of it. Hours later, stretched on Roman wood, with soldiers gambling for His clothes and religious leaders mocking Him from below, He prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Love your enemy. Not as a lesson on a hillside this time. As a prayer through nail-pierced hands.

Two Words on the Last Page

Now I have to tell you the part that’s hard on me.

I walked into that church with an open heart. Then I turned to the last page of a bulletin, and in the time it took to read two words, Leviticus 19, I had a judgment sitting in my heart and four lines about love in my notebook. I had decided what kind of preacher this was before he ever opened his mouth. I had my rebuttal ready. In my own mind, I was defending grace.

And the chapter he preached from was the very chapter that should have stopped me cold.

“Always judge people fairly,” Leviticus 19:15 says. “Do not nurse hatred in your heart,” verse 17 says. I had brushed up against both before the sermon even started. A judgment made too quickly. A brother held at arm’s length in my heart. Not out loud. Nobody in that room would ever have known. That’s what makes this chapter so piercing. It goes after the things nobody else can see. The deaf man never hears the curse. The blind man never learns who moved the stone. And I never said a word about my suspicion to anyone.

But God heard it.

I think a lot of us who have been hurt by legalism carry this. We spent years under preaching that made us feel like God’s love was locked in a safe and obedience was the combination. When grace finally broke through, we were so grateful, so relieved, that we started guarding it like a watchdog. That’s good. Until the watchdog starts barking at every brother who opens Leviticus.

Here is the irony I had to sit with. Legalism says, I will love you when you measure up. And I had turned that last page, thinking I would receive this brother’s preaching when it measured up to my theology.

Same spirit. Different clothes.

Maybe you have your own version of this. Maybe you hear “Old Testament” and flinch, because somebody once used Moses as a club. Maybe you’ve decided the first half of your Bible belongs to an angry God who got replaced somewhere around Matthew. Or maybe you live on the other side of the road. You keep the Law like a ledger, checking boxes, quietly afraid that one missed line will cost you the Father’s smile.

Both of those are heavy. Most of us have carried some of each.

Breathe here for a moment. Let the weight be what it is before we go on.

The Sheet Music Was Never Wrong

Then Pastor Jeremy gave us a picture I haven’t been able to set down. He said:

“Leviticus is the sheet music. It reflects God’s eternal character. And Jesus is the one who finally gets the sheet music, and He says, ‘Guys, the sheet music isn’t wrong, but let me play it for you.'”

Music has been part of my life for a long time. I hold an honorary degree in Music Performance from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and that image has settled deep within me. Anyone who has stood in front of a music stand knows this: the page is not the song. The notes can be perfectly written, every rest counted and every dynamic marked, and the paper will still sit there silent. Sheet music is true. It just can’t play itself.

That’s what Paul meant when he said the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and right and good (Romans 7:12). Nothing was wrong with the score. The trouble was the players. We picked it up with stiff hands and stone hearts, and it came out sour. The teachers in Jesus’ day tried to conduct it themselves, and they penciled in notes that were never written, such as “hate your enemy.” It sounded terrible.

Then Jesus picked up the same score and played every note the way it was written. Every rest. Every swell. All the way to the last measure on a hill outside Jerusalem.

Paul says it this way:

“The law of Moses was unable to save us because of the weakness of our sinful nature. So God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son…” (Romans 8:3, NLT)

And the very next verse tells us why: so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us, who now follow the Spirit (Romans 8:4). Fulfilled in us. Not by us. In us.

That’s the part that undoes me. Jesus didn’t play the piece and leave us in the audience clapping. As Pastor Jeremy said, He now gives us His Spirit, like a conductor living inside us. And the prophets saw this day coming centuries ahead. Through Jeremiah, God said, “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33, NLT).

Same Law. New address. The Law moved indoors.

Moses wrote the score on stone. Jesus played it in flesh and blood. And the Spirit is writing it on us.

The Law of Moses was never the enemy of grace. It was grace, waiting for a heart to live in.

When the Music Still Comes Out Wrong

I want to slow down here for anyone who has been trying to play this music for a long time and feels like it still comes out wrong.

Maybe you’ve walked with Jesus for decades, and you still lose your temper with the same person. Maybe there’s a grudge you keep in a drawer and take out at night to look at. Maybe you know the four loves by heart and you still can’t love your enemy. Not really. Not without your jaw tightening.

Here is something every musician learns early. The rests are written into the score too.

There are whole measures where your instrument says nothing. You count. You wait. You keep your eyes on the conductor. That silence isn’t failure. It’s part of the piece. Some seasons in your walk with God are seasons of rest. You aren’t producing much. You’re healing. You’re learning to listen again. The Spirit has not stopped conducting just because your part has gone quiet.

And there are seasons when you play the wrong note. Every musician does. You don’t throw the score in the trash when that happens. You don’t decide the composer was cruel. You look up, find the conductor again, and come back in at the next measure.

That is exactly what Ezekiel promised: “I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart” (Ezekiel 36:26, NLT). Responsive. A heart that hears the conductor and comes back in. God is not waiting for you to become a virtuoso before He calls you His. He called Israel His at the Red Sea, before they had learned a single statute. He called you His at the cross. Everything after that is lessons.

And hear this. You were never meant to play solo.

Pastor Jeremy told about his years as a youth pastor in Dallas, when many of his students played in a youth orchestra. After every concert, he’d tell each kid, “You sounded great.” Then he admitted it was a kind of lie. He hadn’t really heard any one of them. He’d heard the symphony.

The church is like that. Your one note may feel thin and shaky. But next to your brother’s note and your sister’s note, under the same Conductor, it becomes part of something that sounds like Christ.

Leave the Edges

So what do we do with Leviticus 19 on an ordinary Tuesday?

Start with the edges. God told farmers who didn’t even own fields yet to leave the corners of their harvest for the poor and the foreigner. Generations later, a widow from Moab named Ruth went out to glean behind the harvesters in the field of a man named Boaz. Boaz knew his Leviticus. He told his workers to pull out some extra stalks and drop them on purpose so she could gather them (Ruth 2:16). That foreign widow ended up in Jesus’s family line. One farmer left his edges uncut, and the story of the Messiah ran right through his field.

What are your edges? Pastor Jeremy asked it this way: “Do you even have something budgeted out somewhere where you’re like, ‘Lord, You do whatever You want with that’?” A margin of money. A margin of time. A margin in your week for someone who can never pay you back.

Leaving the edges is simply love with a margin. It is the Law of Christ written into your checkbook and your calendar, the place where “love your neighbor as yourself” stops being a verse you know and becomes room you’ve made.

Pay people fairly and on time. “Do not make your hired workers wait until the next day to receive their pay” (Leviticus 19:13, NLT). I spent more than 45 years in accounting as an accountant, accounting manager, controller, and CFO, and I still prepare payroll today. In all those years, I learned that a paycheck is never just a number on a ledger. For the person waiting on it, a check that’s late by one night can be the difference between dinner and an empty table. God knew that at Sinai.

Go to your brother. Leviticus 19:17 doesn’t tell you to swallow it. It says, “Confront people directly.” Jesus gave the same instruction: go to him privately and talk it over (Matthew 18:15). The opposite of a grudge is not pretending everything is fine. It’s an honest, loving, sometimes uncomfortable conversation.

Love the foreigner as yourself. You were a foreigner once too. Every one of us stood outside the family until God brought us in.

Pray for the person you’d rather God didn’t bless. That one stings, I know. But the Father sends His sun and His rain on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45). If He’s that generous, so can we be.

And here’s one I’m adding for myself. The next time you open a bulletin, in your own church or someone else’s, and see a passage you’ve heard misused, keep listening for grace before you start building a defense. You might be surprised. I was.

Then take out a notebook, or the back of a receipt, or the notes app on your phone, and write the four lines down where you’ll see them this week:

Love your God.

Love your neighbor.

Love your enemy.

Love each other.

Each of them was originally written by Moses. Every one of them was played perfectly by Jesus. And every one of them is being written, line by patient line, on your heart by the Spirit of God.

There is no exception clause to the love we are to show.

Sit With This

Take a few quiet minutes with these questions. Don’t rush them.

•         Where have you been bracing against a brother or sister in Christ before you’ve really heard them out?

•         Which of the four loves feels most like sheet music you can’t play yet?

•         What is one edge you can leave uncut this week, in your budget, your calendar, or your work?

•         Is there a grudge in your heart that Leviticus 19:17 is asking you to bring out into the light?

•         Do you hear God’s call to holiness as a demand to meet, or as a promise from your Father?

A Prayer

Father,

You have not changed.

The God who spoke at Sinai is the God who bled at Calvary,

and You have loved Your people the whole way through.

Thank You for the Law You gave through Moses,

holy and right and good.

Thank You for Jesus, who played every note of it

and never missed a measure.

Forgive me for the judgments I carry into rooms

before I’ve heard a single word.

Forgive me for the grudges I keep in the dark

where only You can see them.

Take out my heart of stone.

Write Your love where I could never carve it.

Teach me to love You with everything I am,

to love my neighbor as myself,

to love my enemy as You loved Yours,

and to love my brothers and sisters as You have loved me.

Keep my eyes on You, my Conductor.

In the long rests and the wrong notes,

bring me back in.

In the name of Jesus, who fulfilled it all,

Amen.

Moses wrote the music down. Jesus played every note. And now His Spirit is teaching us to play it together.

———  ✝  ———

If you’ve read this far, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I write every word prayerfully—not to impress, but to reflect Christ’s love and grace—in theology, yes, but especially in relationship. I pray something here has whispered to you:

You are not alone. You are deeply loved.

Grace. Always grace.

With love, prayer, and expectancy,
Bruce Mitchell
Agapao Allelon Ministries
A voice of love & grace—always grace
Bruce@allelon.us
allelon.us
@AAllelon on X
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“Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love conceals a multitude of sins.” —1 Peter 4:8

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With gratitude to Pastor Jeremy Roh and the family at East Renton Community Church, whose sermon, “Holy Like God Is Holy” (October 18, 2026), from the series Blood, Smoke, and Mercy, sparked this devotional. Quotations from Pastor Jeremy are drawn from the church’s small group leader packet for that Sunday.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.