Through keeping the Law, the people of Israel lived according to God's Covenant and were pleasing to God. Through keeping Jesus' new commandment of love, we live lives that are pleasing to God in the New Covenant

We should not think, however, that God's guidance comes to us only in the form of laws and commandments. It is a rich insight into Scripture to affirm that every statement about God contains an implicit guideline for our lives of faith, or indeed about the mystery of our own lives.

This is spelled out for us in the "law of holiness" in Leviticus 19:2, "You must be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy". If we grasp anything of the mystery of the holiness of God, we will know instinctively that we must respond to that holiness by being holy ourselves. God's holiness enables us to be holy. St. John follows the same line of thought. God has loved us. If we grasp anything of the meaning of that wondrous affirmation, we will instinctively know that it follows that we must love each other. Indeed, it is God's love for us that enables us to love each other.