As tension and conflict increases in our life and society in general, God invites us to reach higher and dig deeper to tap into and receive greater dimensions of His love, wisdom and strength. The Psalms vividly show us how David consistently experienced this. He continuously encountered life-threatening trials, but pursued God to the point of being amazed at how he would emerge victoriously and experience God’s peace.
The apostle, Paul, likewise experienced great conflicts, but also God’s great love and strength. He uses a phrase to describe how real God’s love and presence was to him, and how he responded to it, “the love of Christ compels us” (2 Corinthians 5:14). As Paul understood and received the great grace and dimensions of God’s love, he became totally captivated and moved by it.
Many people are familiar with the Greek word, agape, used in the New Covenant to express God’s kind of love. However, unpacking the many dimensions of God’s love from the Hebrew context helps us really appreciate the higher and deeper dimensions of God’s love. It will also challenge us to receive and share greater measures of God’s kind of love.
So, allow the dimensions of God’s love to penetrate deep inside. As we understand and receive these dimensions of His love, we can respond with greater sensitivity to walk in them.
Ahav is the primary type of love used in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is a love of an inner disposition and condition of the heart. It moves us to care for, reach out to, pray for, serve, and give to others. It grows in us over time through exercise and by experiences. Therefore, it can also diminish if denied or suppressed. So, it is a reciprocal and relational kind of love. It is the most basic form of God’s covenant type of love.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:5)
Now when he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. (1 Samuel 18:1-2)
Racham is a compassionate love within a relational context. It speaks of a deep and strong love flowing from an enlarged (rachav), strengthened and free heart, one the Holy Spirit has filled and strengthened in capacity. It helps us see beneath surface appearances and moves us to reach out and offer help to strengthen another person, heal deep wounds, and overcome conflicts and constraints. David, the man after God’s own heart, learned of this type of love. Messiah Jesus modeled it to show us what it really looks like.
I will love You, O Lord, my strength. (Psalm 18:1)
the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion (racham) on you… 6 And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love (ahav) the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. (Deuteronomy 30:1-6)
I will run the course of Your commandments, For You shall enlarge (rachav) my heart. (Psalm 119:32)
Chashaq is a matured bonding love. It means to join, delight, desire. It goes beyond just loving someone or even experiencing a romance with someone. This is a love that creates an intimate bonding between two people, such that make a husband and wife one, in a synchronized union, and a deep bonding that makes you one in union with God.
Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name. (Psalm 91:14)
Chesed speaks of the outward expressions of God’s lovingkindness, mercy, grace, favor, goodness, affection, loyalty; His covenant and relationallove. It expresses the core ethic of God’s love. It is the fruit of ahav, the inner love that draws upon God’s resources. It should bring us to gratefulness and responsive actions of trusting faith and draw us into intimate engagement with God.
…that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, that you may cling to Him (Deuteronomy 30:20)
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne; Mercy (chesed) and truth go before Your face. (Psalm 89:14)
We can see how love from God’s perspective encompasses more than emotion. It is the multidimensional substance or power flowing in the heart that fuels a life of integrity and humility, stirring righteous and just motives and actions. Paul apprehended the fullness of God’s love and ran with it. He understood that in loving others we fulfill what God has been working in us.
So, as Paul did, you come to know deeply the dimensions of the love of God that He has intended for us to more than know, but express and live out through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. It brings us beyond systems of theology and philosophy. It brings us to redefine who we are in Christ, recalibrate our alignment with God, reset our motivations, and refresh our purpose and outlook on life.
…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17-19)
It makes sense, therefore, that the Greek word used in the Bible, agape (unconditional, consuming love), expresses the fullness of these kinds of love. Other Greek words express different dimensions of love, not necessarily reflecting such types of love. These types help us understand the world’s primary expressions of love—which are somewhat different than God’s types of love.
Eros: sensual, romantic, erotic love.
Phileo: brotherly love, affection, fondness, kindness, liking (Matthew 6:5; 10:37)
Storge: natural affection or obligatory love (Romans 1:31)
God’s kinds of love are best expressed as activated by the Holy Spirit, often through sacrifice. So, it takes blinders, blockages, callousness, legalism and dogmatism being removed from one’s heart and mind. Then the fullness of God’s love can be apprehended to walk in it. Lord, help us know, value and walk in Your higher and deeper love!
So, God challenges us to gain fresh higher approaches to understanding His heart and applying His love. It is the kind of love that finds intimate fellowship with God; and likewise, reaches out to others. This is the main point John profoundly relates throughout his gospel message.
And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)
We have been given this love, as Paul exhorts us; “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:6). So, it has been downloaded and imparted. We just have to tap into it, unzip it, and flow in it.