Agape

This book began with a question: what does Scripture itself call love? It has answered from the text alone, and now the whole line can be read in one sitting.

He Loved First

Everything begins on God’s side. He set His love on a people who were the fewest of all peoples (Deuteronomy 7:7), loved them with an everlasting love and drew them (Jeremiah 31:3), and showed His love in that Messiah died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8). “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Every love toward God in this book answers His.

The Words and the Definition

Many words are translated love, and none of them is holy in itself. Men can agapao ἀγαπάω ag-ap-ah'-o darkness or the world, and the Hebrew ahav is used of good and evil loves alike. Love is named by what it loves, and there is no ladder between the words: the Father loves the Son with phileo φιλέω fil-eh'-o.

Scripture’s own definition of love toward God is plain.

1 John 5:3 For this is the love of God — that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.

The same definition stands in Yeshua’s words, “If you agapao(love) Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15), and in John’s, “this is love: that we walk according to His commandments” (2 John 1:6). The greatest love is to lay down one’s soul for friends, and Yeshua named His friends: “You are My philos φίλος fee'-los(friends) if you do what I command you” (John 15:14).

One Flesh, Knowing, and Life

God made the man and the woman, told them to be fruitful and fill the earth, and joined them as one flesh, made one with spirit (Malachi 2:15). Scripture’s word for their union is yada, to know. The same word runs from “Adam knew Eve” (Genesis 4:1) through Hosea’s “you shall know the LORD” (Hosea 2:22) to Yeshua’s definition of eternal life: “that they may know You, the only alethinos ἀληθινός al-ay-thee-nos'(true, genuine) God” (John 17:3). And to those who work the anomia ἀνομία an-om-ee'-ah He will say, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23).

The Husband Who Would Not Let Go

The Song says love is “strong as death,” a flame of Yah that many waters cannot quench (Song 8:6-7). Hosea lived it out: a wife of harlotries and a Husband who speaks to her heart, betroths her for ever, and will not give her up. He is the one God and the one Savior, and beside Him there is no other husband.

That same love is long of nostrils, slow to anger. It waited in the days of Noah, for the Amorite, for Nineveh, and it waits for us, “not wishing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9). But the great and terrible day still comes. And before it, the Servant poured out His soul, the Shepherd laid down His psyche, and the blood of the covenant was poured out for the release of sins.

Tend My Sheep, Keep My Commandments

To Peter, who had denied Him three times, the risen Lord put the question of love three times, with a charge each time. Peter fed the sheep with the word, from the lambs up, and taught them to be holy as God is holy. Daniel and his three friends kept the commandments in Babylon when the furnace was hot and the lions were waiting. Read again, First Corinthians 13 describes the same love, a love that keeps. At the wedding door and at the gates of the city, those who do His commandments go in. And the one who keeps them is not a person who never falls. He falls seven times and rises, nails the old nature to the cross again, confesses, and keeps walking.

Born, Grown, Conformed

The barren woman sang that her children would outnumber the married woman’s, and the unmarried apostle begot children through the good news. Born of the imperishable seed, the word of God, they grow from milk to solid food toward the stature of the fullness of Messiah, and they walk in His steps: some, conformed to His death, go on into the ranks of the martyrs, and some are taken up like Enoch and Elijah. At the end they are conformed to the body of His glory, sons who cannot die and partakers of the divine nature. They are gods in the sense Scripture uses the word in Psalm 82 and John 10, and for ever the servants of the only true God and of the Lamb.

The Age of Cold Love

Beside all this stands the warning of Matthew 24:12: because anomia is multiplied, most people’s love will grow cold. When the Torah is taken away, no one can see the line any longer, and love toward God, which is keeping His commandments, cools. The answer is not a warmer feeling. It is the ancient paths, the turning of hearts, and the restoration of all things. That call is for Christians and Messianic believers alike: to return to the faith of the first-century ekklesia ἐκκλησία ek-klay-see'-ah.

Fruit in Its Season

If the child of God is begotten of the imperishable seed, which is the word, then keeping the word is not a load laid on him from outside, carried only to prove that he loves. It is the natural life of one born of that seed. God’s seed abides in him (1 John 3:9), and the Spirit put within him causes him to walk in God’s statutes (Ezekiel 36:27). That is why John can say that His commandments are not burdensome. The first psalm gives the picture.

Psalm 1:2-3 But his delight is in the Torah of the LORD, and in his Torah he meditates day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by streams of water, which gives its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither; and all that he does, he makes prosper.

A tree planted by streams of water does not strain to bear its fruit. It gives its fruit in its season because of what it is and where it has been planted. So it is with the one whose delight is in the Torah of the LORD.

Abide

Yeshua summed up the whole of it in one sentence.

John 15:10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay(love); just as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide in His agape(love).

This is agape as Scripture defines it. It is not a feeling that rises and falls. It is the way the Son Himself walked: He kept His Father’s commandments and abides in His agape. He opens the same way to all who belong to Him. Keep, and abide.

On the night He said these words, Yeshua went on to pray for the ones who would keep them, and He sent them into the world with a single commission. That one prayer and that one commission are where this series goes next.