The Love You Never had to be Commanded to Have
There’s a detail hiding in the Great Commandment that most people walk right past.
Jesus is asked which commandment matters most. He answers with two: love God with everything you’ve got, and love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:29–31). Two commands, three objects. God, neighbor, self. But here’s what’s easy to miss: only two of those three are commanded. The third is simply assumed.
You are never told to love yourself. Not once.
Think about what that means structurally. “Love your neighbor as yourself“ treats self-love as the known quantity, the baseline measurement against which the other loves are calibrated. Jesus doesn’t say “learn to love yourself and then extend that to your neighbor.” He says: you already love yourself. Now do that for someone else.
Paul makes the same observation in Ephesians 5:29, and he states it as bare fact: “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” That’s not an aspiration. That’s an anthropological claim. Every human being, without exception, already operates from a posture of self-regard. You feed yourself. You protect yourself. You advocate for your own interests. You don’t need a commandment for any of it.
So the question becomes: why do we need commandments for the other two?
The answer cuts against almost everything modern culture tells us about human nature.
The therapeutic consensus, both inside and outside the church, has diagnosed humanity’s core problem as insufficient self-love. We don’t value ourselves enough. We need to practice self-care. The first step toward loving others is learning to love ourselves. Entire ministries are built around this framework. Entire therapies. Entire industries.
Scripture’s diagnosis runs in the opposite direction.
The Bible never treats self-love as something humans lack. It treats self-love as the one thing we reliably have in abundance, so much so that Jesus can use it as the measuring rod for the loves we do lack. The command structure of the Great Commandment assumes that loving yourself is the natural, default, pre-installed orientation of every human being. The problem is never that we value ourselves too little. The problem is that our self-valuation has crowded out everything and everyone else.
This doesn’t mean self-hatred is virtuous. Pay attention to what Jesus actually says. He doesn’t tell you to stop loving yourself. He tells you to love your neighbor as yourself. The standard holds. Proper self-regard is woven into the fabric of the command. You’re supposed to care about your own flourishing. The issue is one of ordering, not elimination.
Now, if you’re not a Christian, you might hear all this as confirming your suspicion that Christianity breeds guilt. “You’re saying humans are fundamentally selfish? That’s dark.”
But sit with the observation before you evaluate it. Is it actually wrong?
You don’t need a commandment to look out for your own interests. You do need commandments to look out for other people’s. You don’t need a commandment to feed yourself when you’re hungry. You do need parables about feeding strangers. Children don’t need to be taught to say “mine.” They need to be taught to share.
Every legal system, every moral code, every social contract in human history has been primarily concerned with constraining what people do to each other. Nobody legislates against self-preservation. We legislate against theft, murder, fraud, exploitation. The entire apparatus of human ethics exists because the outward-facing loves don’t come naturally.
Even secular psychology confirms this. The fundamental attribution error, in-group bias, self-serving bias, confirmation bias: these all point in the same direction. We are wired to prioritize our own perspective, our own group, our own interests. The capacity for genuine self-sacrifice is rare enough that we give medals for it.
So the biblical diagnosis, whatever else you make of it, is observationally accurate. Self-love is the given. Other-love is the project.
For Christians, this pattern is even more revealing, because it maps the precise shape of what went wrong.
The creation account presents human beings as made in the image of God, the imago Dei (Genesis 1:27). The term refers to the unique status of humans as creatures who reflect God’s character and capacities in ways no other part of creation does. Part of what that means is that we are self-relating beings. We are aware of ourselves as subjects. We reflect, deliberate, evaluate. We relate to ourselves as beings who matter. This is built into the architecture of being human. It is good. A creature incapable of self-relation wouldn’t be a moral agent at all.
But Genesis 3 describes an inversion. The serpent’s pitch is revealing: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The temptation is to take the self-relation that God built in and elevate it above the God who built it. To make the self the final reference point. To love the self instead of God rather than under God.
And that is exactly the disorder the Great Commandment addresses.
The command to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength isn’t competing with self-love. It’s re-ordering it. When God occupies the center, self-love finds its proper place: real, legitimate, but subordinate. When the self occupies the center, everything else gets consumed. Augustine had the diagnosis right: the city of man is built on love of self carried to the point of contempt for God. The city of God is built on love of God carried to the point of proper subordination of self.
The two commandments recalibrate what the Fall disordered. They don’t introduce new capacities. They redirect existing ones. You already love yourself. Now aim that same energy at the God who made you and the neighbor standing next to you.
There’s one more thing worth noticing.
The fact that self-love is presupposed rather than commanded actually dignifies it. Jesus doesn’t say self-love is the problem to be eliminated. He says it’s the standard to be extended. “As yourself” is the benchmark. That’s a remarkable affirmation of human value, baked right into the command structure.
Christianity doesn’t teach self-hatred. It teaches self-ordering. You matter. Your neighbor matters. God matters most. The trouble is we’ve always been inclined to flip that sequence, putting ourselves at the top and wondering why the world is broken.
The therapeutic gospel says: your problem is that you don’t love yourself enough.
Jesus says: your problem is that you’ve never loved anything else as much.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission.