Love is loyal
“Love is…” Fill in the blank. There are lots of different ways we could describe love. Our culture offers an entire palette of them to choose from. “Love” seems to me to refer mainly to heavily subjective feelings and states of mind. That is, love is seen first and foremost as a feeling experienced within a person. While I don’t want to downplay or denigrate the reality of a feeling or an array of feelings which we unobjectionably call “love,” the biblical witness requires us to dig deeper. A key reality often lost in contemporary notions is this: love is loyal.
Translation troubles: Hesed
Working through the book of Ruth, we encounter an important Hebrew word at three junctures: Ruth 1.8, 2.20, and 3.10. This word is hesed. In general, I try to avoid talking about Hebrew and Greek in non-academic contexts. I find them very interesting and have devoted a great deal of time and effort to understanding them. However, the role of talking about Hebrew and Greek is primarily the role of a scholar. Scholars have done great labor in the languages, culture, and history, so that we can read the Bible and study it in English without having to learn the original languages. That is a blessing of immense proportions!
There is nothing spiritual or esoteric about using this Hebrew word hesed. It just happens to be the case that there is no consistently good way to translate the word into English. It is complex word. Regular translations include “love,” “kindness”, “loving-kindness,” “mercy,” “loyal love,” and so forth.
The fundamental difficulty with rendering hesed into English is that it traffics in a different understanding of “love” and “kindness” than we usually use. Consider these verses from Psalm 136 (the repeated refrain throughout the psalm uses this word hesed):
1 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever.
This one is easy. We can square enduring love with goodness. But as the Psalm continues, we run into problems with using “love.” Consider a few different acts of God which are also attributed as examples of “his hesed endures forever”:
10 to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt—His love endures forever.
15 [he] swept Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea—His love endures forever.
18 [he] killed mighty kings—His love endures forever.
These are a little harder to fit into our idea of love and mercy. How does God killing people fit into his “loving-kindness”?
Love is…loyal
Throughout this entire Pslam it is God’s hesed that is under view. It quickly becomes clear that hesed is concerned with something which goes beyond our normal usage of the terms “love” and “mercy.” One scholar puts it this way:
“Hesed, however, describes a mutual relationship between man and man or between man and God. Translating it as “mercy,” “compassion,” or “love” destroys the concept of mutuality.”
Harold Kamsler, “Hesed – Mercy or Loyalty?”
This scholar highlights a tendency in our cultural context of understanding love and mercy as one-way actions: I love, she shows mercy, he is full of loving-kindness. Hesed, by contrast, has a strong notion of inter-connectedness. A strong notion of loyalty. A strong notion of relational obligations.
Here is an expansive definition:
“Hesed expresses, essentially, faithfulness and loyal conduct within the context of a relationship; it is an inward commitment and disposition of goodwill together with its outward expression in dutiful and compassionate action. The precise nature of that action depends upon the context, the relationship and also upon the relative positions and abilities of parties within that relationship.”
Robin Routledge, “Hesed as Obligation: A Re-Examination”
That’s a mouthful. But helpful.
My personal favorite quick and easy way to try to represent this is “loyal love,” but even that is not entirely satisfying.
The duty of love
What does duty have to do with love?
We might put it this way: love (in this hesed sense) is bounded within certain limits. This is not a bad thing. I love my family, for instance. I don’t love anyone in Kazakhstan. Not that I am opposed to anyone in Kazakhstan. I’m sure there are many nice people there who I could learn to love. But I have no connection, no commitment to anyone there. I can love them only in a very abstract sense of general benevolence. But I go home and sit with my wife and kids and we eat together, play together, fight together, laugh together, and all those things. We have a commitment to one another and within the boundaries of the commitment, love of a deep and profound kind flows.
The difference is that there is no relational commitment in my general benevolence towards people in Kazakhstan, but there is commitment undergirding our family relationships. Within my family, hesed exists and flows out in acts of care and concern for each other. The relational context is the matrix in which loyal-love has existence. A relationship is like the boundary lines within which hesed is possible.
God’s Hesed
This notion of hesed is important in Scripture. God is a God of love, yet it is a bounded love. Not bounded in the sense of limited, as though God ever runs out of love to give but bounded in the sense of it covers a certain area, if you will. Those outside of that “area” experience God’s general benevolence—“he causes the rain to fall on the just and unjust”—but not the deep and profound love, the hesed. That love flows within the bounds of relationship: his covenant, his people, those who have come to “live in the area of God’s love,” as it were. And within the bounds of this love, God’s love is not only a good thing, but a duty, a loyal thing. God fully commits himself to those who are within this “area.”
The Bible calls this “area” of God’s love many things: the kingdom of God, salvation, eternal life, being in Christ. What unites them is the undergirding reality that God fully and freely commits himself to any and all who come into this area of his love. And he commits to being for them and not against them, to be the giver of joy, to fill up their hopes…and all these things even when they fail to be as they should.
God holds up his loyal love
That last sentence is important. God remains faithful to his hesed, his covenant love, even when we don’t. That is part of why it is so important to keep a sense of duty and loyalty in our notion of love. Even when people in my family make me angry, or I make them angry, we continue in love. Not because we necessarily are happy with each other at the moment. But because we have loyal-love, dutiful love, love which finds its strength and existence in our relationship rather than in the transient nature of our feelings at the time.
The gold standard of this kind of hesed, loyal-love, is God reaching out to humanity in various promises (covenants). In these promises, God makes a commitment to humanity. The commitment sets the boundaries in which hesed exists. Those who enter in get to receive the endless bounty of God’s loyal-love…even when we fail to be loyal. Why? Because God’s loyalty to his commitments never runs out. While anger and frustration are not foreign to God in his dealings with humanity, he does not cease to be full of loyal-love.
This calls for praise! Praise God that his love is loyal to the end.
This calls for emulation: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (Ephesian 5.1-2).
June 5, 2022 Church Service
Picnic at Brenda’s on June 26
See the PDF below for more information!
June 2022 Informer
May 29 Church Service
Part of the Sermon Series on the Book of Ruth
Ruth, gleaning, and providing for the Future
In the beginning of Ruth 2, we come across Ruth and Naomi, two intrepid widows joined by the bonds of love, yet dealing with a practical problem: they don’t have food and they don’t have money, so how are they going to survive in Bethlehem, where they recently returned? They have fallen in a gap and there is no financial plan for the future which covers them.
They are in this situation primarily because their husbands have died, they have been absent to a different country for a decade, and they don’t have clear access to what they need. The land that Naomi owns, which we will find out about only in chapter 4, has somehow fallen either into disuse or into the de facto control of someone else. If in disuse, it was not planted so they would get no food from it for an entire calendar year (they are at the beginning of harvest time now, and there would not be another harvest for a year). Or someone else from within the clan of Elimelech is using it, and they are loath to give back from the work they have put into it. Whatever the case, Naomi and Ruth don’t have food, don’t have a job, and don’t have a husband, so they fall back on the social safety net to stay alive.
Social Safety Nets
In today’s terms, the social safety net involves webs of governmental programs, non-government organizations, and charitable groups (like this church) who help through food, finances, provision of places to stay, training, etc., when someone is in a position like Naomi and Ruth. In our time, the logical place for Naomi and Ruth to begin would be to go and apply for food aid through some governmental program. But nothing like that existed in ancient Israel. What to do?
Ruth comes up with a plan falling back on a well-known and oft-practiced practice in their time and place: gleaning. Gleaning refers to going through a field which has been harvested and picking up the leftovers from the harvest. There is certainly food to be had, but it is long, hard work and the returns for the efforts are quite small compared to those returns from harvesting.
Gleaning Laws
The right for widows, orphans, and destitute to glean in ancient Israel is enshrined in the Law. Leviticus 19.9-10 is one of the many places which say the same thing:
9 “‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God. (NIV)
During harvest, the owners of the field were to leave a certain amount of the field—probably around the edges—standing. The gleaners could go through here. Also, in the harvesting process, anything that got dropped as the harvesters used their sickles or bound the stalks into bundles, was to be left for the gleaners. While a far cry from a social security check or a WIC card, these provisions accomplished the same basic outcome: those who had resources were to provide for those who didn’t.
All these commands rest on the same basic premise: God is the owner of the land. God gives land to the different tribes and families as their possessions, but he does not forfeit ownership of the land. He still reserves the right to tell them what they may and may not do with it. And one of the things that all owners of the land are required to do is to allow gleaning so that those like Ruth and Naomi who are socially destitute and don’t have land and don’t have the means to survive are still able to get food.
So that’s what Ruth is up to. She is falling back on the social safety net as a means to survive in her destitution.
Provision for the future
I want to take this as a jumping off point for a brief comment about planning for the future. Ruth and Naomi are in a pickle because the social means they had to plan for future security have failed. Their husbands died and they have no children. Thus, their only recourse is the social safety net of picking up stray heads of grain which happened to fall in a field.
There is nothing desirable about Ruth and Naomi’s position at this point. Imagine with me, for a minute, how Elimelech and Ruth’s former husband (Mahlon, as we find out in chp 4), would feel about what is going on. They certainly didn’t plan on dying, but if they could have prepared some way so that their widows did not have to suffer, I imagine they would have. Now, in an agrarian society there is not much you can do to prepare to provide for your loved ones in the event that you die. We are in a different situation today.
Financial preparation for the future
I just want to encourage you to think about those who are financially dependent on you and what ways, if any, you are planning to provide for them in the event you die or become unable to work in some other way.
Did you know, Social Security estimates that roughly one of every four people in their 20s today will experience some sort of physical disability limiting or removing their ability to work for a year or longer in the course of their lifetime? How many of us are financially prepared for losing a year of income? Are you prepared to provide for your loved ones in the event that you lose the ability to work or die? These questions are worth thinking about as we see this example of Ruth and Naomi scrambling to survive because that’s the only thing they’ve got.
Planning for future hardships
Making financial plans for the future is a sensible part of being good stewards of the money and resources God has given to us. In church, there’s often talk about what you do with 10% of your money and the importance of giving. And that’s all important and there needs to be a time to talk about that. But consider that God expects us to do wise and faithful things with 100% of the money and possessions that we have, not just 10%. And one wise principle to follow from scripture and seen from life is to plan on a loss of ability to work and possibly the loss of your life prematurely. What ways can you lessen the impact such an event will have on loved ones who are dependent upon you?
This calls for thinking about things like savings accounts, life insurance, disability insurance, and investments. Not everyone can afford such things, but if you have margin to do so, they provide a wise way to limit the likelihood that your family members will be falling into poverty and desperation in the even that you die or lose the ability to work. In fact, it is worth considering how to make margin in our lives to afford such tools.
May 22, 2022 Church Service
Do not provoke your children to anger: the meaning of Ephesians 6.4, part 2
Part 1 of this 4-part series provided the key orientation point: provoking a child to anger is a covenantal concept. It does not mean, “don’t do anything that will make your child get mad/angry/exasperated.” Wise and godly parenting will often result in children getting angry. Drawing from usage of the phrase “provoke to anger” in the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament), we see the main context of usage is a right response of anger when justly held expectations in a relationship are violated.
Putting that into terms of “provoking a child to anger,” we can say that parents provoke a child to anger when they act towards their children in ways that violate the justly held relational expectations that children have of parents.
This is a good place to start, even if it’s really broad. It points us on a clear direction of inquiry. As parents, we need to give thought to what children can justly expect to receive from us in the parent/child relationship. Some of these expectations are clear. Children justly expect their parents to protect them (especially before they are grown up), and parents who use their greater power to hurt rather than guard their children are “provoking them to anger.” Children justly expect their parents to love them and parents who do not do so are “provoking them to anger.”
When we situate “provoke to anger” within its covenantal context from the Old Testament, one result within parent/child relationships is it appears to cover a range of negative responses from children, not just anger. A child physically abused by their parents may respond in anger or may respond in sullenness and fear. A neglected child may have angry outbursts or may withdraw from the world. In either case, the response is driven by parents violating the justly held relational expectations of the child and would seem to fit under the idea of “do provoke your child to anger.” Compare to the parallel passage in Colossians 3.21.
Just to be clear, when I am talking about what children justly expect from their parents, I am not talking about things they even know how to articulate. That will be age dependent. Rather, I am talking about things understood from Scripture and nature about the needs of a human being in the journey towards adulthood. A two-year old won’t know how to express in words that their parents are not emotionally engaging with them. But they clearly understand something they need is being withheld by their parents.
Moving forward: two categories of justly held expectations
Like most of the biblical passages in Scripture, guidance for parenting aims mainly at the goals rather than the details. As a generalization, much of the biblical material answers the question who we should be rather than the question, “What should the detailed decisions of our lives involve?” We still can step back, though, and distill some guidance on what children can expect from their parents within a sort of “covenantal” context of parent-child relationships.
In the next two posts, I want to take up these concerns from two different directions: (1) psychology and human development and (2) biblical teaching.
In part 3, I want to take up some key categories borrowed in from the world of psychology and human development. Of course, one could take the time to try to argue that all these categories are supportable from somewhere in Scripture, and they probably are, but I’m not going to do that. They are sufficiently broad and deep enough concepts to engage with some of the core experiences of growing to maturity as a human being. They are rooted in how our physiology and neurobiology function. In other words, they simply address some of the basic needs people have in order to grow up into normal, functioning adults.
In part 4 of this series, I will turn to some more specific biblical themes. After all, raising healthy, successful children is wonderful, but it is a far cry short of the biblical mandate. God’s intentions for parents include other key ideas and children have an inherent right to receive them from their parents.
Answering the core questions
The end goal of these two posts is to answer some of the question, “What sorts of things should parents be providing for their children?” In answering this question, we are also at the same time giving ourselves a framework for processing our children’s anger. Are they angry because of a failure to give them something they rightly expect, or are they angry because of sin in their own heart (which calls us to help them understand how to deal with sin in their own heart)?
As one writer puts it:
“Beginning with the first day of life outside the womb, every child is asking two core questions: “Am I loved?” and “Can I get my own way?” These two questions mark us throughout life, and the answers we receive set the course for how we live.”
Dan Allender, How Children Raise Parents: The Art of Listening to Your Family, 21
In answering these questions day by day for our children, they will undoubtedly get mad at us. Our concern is to tune in to the way God created human beings to function and the directions he gives us as parents so that we can get a better idea of when the anger of our child is their own sin and when the anger of our child is provoked by our sin towards them.
Summer Reading Club 2022
(Children’s) Summer Reading Club is coming soon! Please see the image and registration form below for more information. The registration form can be downloaded here.