Love Your Neighbor Is Also Leviticus, So Who Is Cherry Picking?

Every June, Christians are bombarded with LGBTQLMNOP+ propaganda, and every June some Christian answers it by quoting Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Within the hour someone replies with a bacon joke. Leviticus 11:7-8 says, “And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you. You shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.” So, the reply goes, you are a hypocrite. You quote the one verse and ignore the other. You had a ham sandwich last week. Either every command in that book binds you or none of them do, and since nobody is stoning shellfish eaters, the conclusion is that none of it binds anyone.

Then comes the part that is supposed to settle it. The old law is finished. Jesus replaced all of that with one command: love your neighbor. That is the whole religion now. Anything that makes a person feel unwelcome fails the test.

The people making this argument are not all pagans. A good number of them have church memberships, and some of them have pulpits. That is the part worth noticing. The argument requires almost no biblical knowledge to make and it has enormous social payoff, which is exactly why it spreads inside “churches” as fast as outside them.

Notice also what the argument never does. It never tells you what Leviticus 18:22 actually says. It never engages the Hebrew, the context, the covenant, or the New Testament’s own treatment of the verse. It changes the subject to pork.

Christians have had a coherent response to this for a very long time, and it is not an invention of embarrassed apologists. The Bible itself distinguishes between kinds of commands. Our confession states it plainly: the ceremonial laws are now abrogated under the New Testament, the judicial laws expired with the state of that people, and the moral law forever binds all, justified persons as well as others (Westminster Confession 19.3-19.5).

You do not have to take the confession’s word for it. Leviticus 11 marks its own food regulations with a limiting phrase. The pig is “unclean for you,” lakem, unclean to Israel. The remedy for contact is a wash and the setting of the sun: “whoever touches their carcass shall be unclean until the evening, and whoever carries any part of their carcass shall wash his clothes and be unclean until the evening” (Lev. 11:24-25). Compare the closing of Leviticus 18: “for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants” (Lev. 18:24-25). The dietary restrictions were covenantally imposed upon Israel as part of its ceremonial holiness, whereas the sexual prohibitions of Leviticus 18 are explicitly presented as grounds upon which God judged the nations. The Canaanites were not under Israel’s dietary covenant. Yet God held them accountable for the practices listed in chapter 18 and expelled them from the land for them. The text is doing something different with the two bodies of law, and it says so.

I will not press that further here, because it deserves a post of its own and because it is not necessary for what follows. And whether the objector accepts the categories is beside the point. The distinction is in the text, and his refusal to look at it does not remove it.

Their own principle, turned against them

Set the categories aside entirely. Grant the objector his rule for the sake of argument. His rule is this: you may not treat some commands in Leviticus as binding while treating others as obsolete. You take all of it or you take none of it.

Now ask him where he got “love your neighbor.”

He thinks Jesus introduced it as a new command starting with the New Testament. Jesus cited it, and He cited it from the book his objection was meant to discard. “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD” (Lev. 19:18). That verse sits one chapter after Leviticus 18:22, in the same book, the same section, and the same covenant document, and it closes with the same divine speech formula.

And this is not a loose thematic parallel. When Jesus names the second great commandment in Matthew 22:39, the words Matthew records reproduce the central Septuagint phrase of Leviticus 19:18: ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς σεαυτόν. Mark has the identical phrase at 12:31. Paul quotes it in Romans 13:9 and again in Galatians 5:14. James quotes it in James 2:8 and introduces it with κατὰ τὴν γραφήν, according to the Scripture, identifying it as Scripture rather than issuing something new. Four New Testament writers repeatedly use the very Levitical command that the objector claims Jesus replaced.

So the man who says you must take all of Leviticus or none of it has built his entire ethic on Leviticus 19:18 while discarding Leviticus 18:22. He is doing the exact thing he accuses you of doing, in the same book, one chapter apart, and he is doing it while accusing you.

It gets worse for him when he stays in chapter 19. If everything in Leviticus stands or falls together, then Leviticus 19:19 stands with 19:18: “You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material.” Nobody making this argument in June is checking labels for cotton-polyester blends, and nobody is demanding that you do. The all-or-nothing rule collapses within one verse of the command he wants to keep. He does not believe his own principle. He has never believed it. He deploys it against you and exempts himself in the same breath.

It gets worse still in chapter 18. Ask him directly whether these remain morally wrong: “You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech” (Lev. 18:21). “And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion” (Lev. 18:23). Then put the incest prohibitions of 18:6-18 to him as well. If he says those practices are still wrong, he has conceded that Leviticus 18 contains moral norms that remain binding today, which means he has already abandoned the principle that everything in Leviticus is either binding wholesale or obsolete wholesale. The only remaining question is which commands express the enduring moral law and on what basis, which is precisely the discussion he was trying to avoid. If he says those practices are not morally wrong, he has a far more serious problem than the bacon objection.

He has also misread the command he kept

The command he salvaged does not mean what he needs it to mean. Read the verse immediately before it: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him” (Lev. 19:17). The Hebrew there uses the infinitive absolute with the imperfect, hokheach tokhiach, “you shall surely reprove.” It is emphatic. And the verse frames the failure to reprove as a form of hatred and as guilt incurred by the one who stays quiet. The very paragraph that gives us “love your neighbor as yourself” commands the confrontation of a neighbor’s sin and treats silence as the opposite of love.

Paul understood the command the same way. In Romans 13:9 he says the commandments “are summed up in this word: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The verb is ἀνακεφαλαιοῦται, built on κεφάλαιον, the sum at the bottom of a column of figures. A total does not erase the entries above it; it presupposes every one of them. And Paul has just listed the entries: adultery, murder, theft, coveting. Love therefore does not abolish those commandments. It sums them. Paul then closes the argument this way: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:10). The Greek is πλήρωμα νόμου ἡ ἀγάπη, love is the fullness of the law. The law is the thing that supplies love its content. Love is not a rival authority to the commandments. It is what obedience to them looks like when the heart is engaged.

That is why the appeal to love as an escape from law is incoherent on its own terms. Strip love of the commandments and you have emptied it. Whatever is left will be filled by something, and what fills it is invariably the desire of whoever is doing the defining. Yet, John states the standard without ambiguity: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3).

One more piece of evidence settles the matter. When Paul lists those who will not inherit the kingdom in 1 Corinthians 6:9, one of the terms he uses is ἀρσενοκοῖται. The word appears in no surviving Greek text before Paul. It is a compound of ἄρσενος, male, and κοίτην, bed, the two words that stand side by side in the Septuagint of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, which is almost certainly where Paul took it from. The apostle who tells us that love fulfills the law names this particular sin with vocabulary drawn from the Greek text of Leviticus. He then repeats the term in 1 Timothy 1:10 and files it under what is “contrary to sound doctrine.” The New Testament did not quietly retire Leviticus 18:22. It reached back into it and used its language to identify a particular category of sexual sin.

What the argument actually is

Put the pieces together and it is clear. He keeps Leviticus 19:18 while discarding Leviticus 18:22. He ignores Leviticus 19:19 because nobody cares about fabric. He must now explain why Leviticus 18:21 and 18:23 are morally binding while Leviticus 18:22 is not. The question he raised against Christians has come back upon him: by what principle are you sorting these commandments?

He does have a rule for sorting Scripture. It is simply not the one he claims. His rule is that commands that he thinks affirm him are eternal and commands which restrain him are Jewish ceremony. That is not exegesis. It is appetite with a proof text, and it is cherry picking in the strictest sense.

The Christian sorting principle is not that. It is the covenantal structure of Scripture itself, taught by the text, worked out by the apostles, and confessed by the church. It yields a result the sorter did not choose in advance and may not even like, which is the mark of an actual principle rather than a preference.

And the point of saying any of this is not to win an argument in a comment thread. Paul finished his own list this way: “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). The verb is past tense, and Paul chose it deliberately. He wrote that to a church that included former idolaters, adulterers, thieves, and men who had done exactly what Leviticus 18:22 forbids. The verse is not there to end the conversation. It is there so that the washing can begin.