By Christopher Reese
On Valentine’s Day and throughout the year, our thoughts turn to romantic love, chocolates, and special meal celebrations. Romantic love is a wonderful gift from God. God created us male and female, gave us feelings of attraction for the opposite sex, and instituted marriage for the benefit of both men and women (Genesis 2:21-24). In fact, an entire book of the Bible, Song of Songs, celebrates romantic love, marriage, and marital intimacy.
Beyond Valentine’s Day, “love” is a word that’s nearly ubiquitous in our culture. Pop artists sing about it, celebrities post about it on social media, and Hollywood tells stories around it. Yet, in most cases, the kind of “love” in view boils down to feelings of warmth or excitement or satisfaction. Once the sentiments are gone, so is the love. In fact, this version of love is mostly self-serving, looking to others to meet one’s needs or desires, and often moving on when this ceases to be the case. The Christian leader Bernard of Clairvaux observed centuries ago, “Human nature is weak and therefore compelled to love itself and serve itself first.”1
In contrast to this faulty conception of love, the Bible has much to say about the higher form of love which is God’s love for us and the love we should have for one another as people created in God’s image. Let’s consider the important question of what love actually is, and then move on to see what Scripture says about God’s love for us, our love for God, and our love for one another.
What Love Is
To answer the question of what love is, we have to begin with love’s source—God himself. We’ll say more about this below, but God is the very source and foundation of love. “God is love,” Scripture tells us, meaning that love originates and flows from God’s nature (1 John 4:8).
There were a number of Greek words for love when the New Testament was written centuries ago, but the word the New Testament authors primarily used to describe the love of God was agapē. To understand the true meaning of love, then, we must first understand the love of God and what the Bible says about agapē. The following description of agapē is especially helpful:
“Agapē, as Godlike love, stands in total contrast to all pagan ideas of love in a fallen world. While they are manipulative, because largely self-centered and working for self-interest, self-gratification and self-protection, agapē is completely unselfish. It is based neither on a felt need in the loving person nor on a desire called forth by some attractive feature(s) in the one loved. . . . It rather proceeds from a heart of love and is directed to the other person to bless him or her and to seek that person’s highest good.” 2
True love, then—the love God desires us to give and receive—is a love that seeks another person’s highest good and does not depend on our feelings about that person. Instead, love is an act of the will undertaken in obedience to Jesus’ command to love as he loves (John 13:34).
God’s Love for Us
We’ve just seen God is love; this has been true of God for all eternity. In fact, God is a community of love because the three persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—have eternally had loving fellowship with one another. While Scripture doesn’t address this question directly, we can reasonably conclude that God created human beings (and the angels) so he could enter into mutually loving relationships with us.
Adam and Eve had this abundant relationship with God in the Garden of Eden before they sinned, and the entire Bible tells the story of God’s rescue plan, motivated by love, to save humanity from sin. Thus the apostle John famously tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s agapē moved the Son to leave heaven to save mankind, and the Father to sacrifice his Son’s earthly life to bring us back into relationship with him. Although it was costly, Father, Son, and Spirit sought our highest good by this sacrificial act of love. Paul writes, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
Our Love for God
When asked what the greatest commandment in the Law of Moses was, Jesus responded by quoting Deuteronomy 6:5: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment” (Matthew 22:37-38). These terms (heart, soul, mind) taken together refer to one’s entire being. Thus, we should love God with all of the faculties he has given us—with our thinking, willing, desiring, behavior, and everything else.
It’s also important to note that our love for God is a response to his love for us. The apostle John explains, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. . . . We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:10, 19). Our love for God should flow as readily as our love for our parents or for anyone who, out of love, has made a great sacrifice on our behalf. We are, of course, fallen human beings, so we fail to love God (and others) as we should. Consequently, we depend on the Holy Spirit to produce the fruit of love in our lives and to form us into people who love as we should (Galatians 5:22-23).
Our Love for Each Other
One of the last instructions Jesus gave the disciples before his death focused on love: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).
In one sense, this was not a new commandment for God’s people. In the book of Leviticus, God had instructed, “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). What was new, however, was the way in which Jesus’ followers were to love: they should no longer love others only as they loved themselves, but as Jesus had loved them—that is, with the agapē love of God. One way Jesus demonstrated this love was by washing the disciples’ feet on this same occasion (John 13:1-17). This was a task normally done by the lowest level of servant in a household, but by doing so himself, Jesus demonstrated love through humble service. Jesus’ death on the cross, of course, would be the ultimate example of sacrificial love (John 15:13).
Bible scholar Christopher Wright helpfully elaborates: the love that Jesus desires us to show to one another is “not just sentimental feelings of being nice, but real practical proof that we love and accept one another, in down-to-earth caring, providing, helping, encouraging, and supporting one another, even when it costs a lot or hurts a lot to do so. Love in action, in other words.” 3
The apostle Paul provides one of the best summaries of agapē love in the entire Bible in 1 Corinthians 13, which we would do well to meditate on daily: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (vv. 4-7).
Notes
1. Cited by Sarah Sumner in “Love,” Dictionary of Everyday Theology and Culture, ed. Bruce Demarest and Keith J. Matthews, The Navigators Reference Library (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2010), 253–254.
2. J. P. Baker, “Love,” in New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson and J. I. Packer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 399.
3. Christopher J. H. Wright, Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit: Growing in Christlikeness (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2017), 18-19.
BIO: Christopher Reese (MDiv, ThM) (@clreese) is a freelance writer and editor-in-chief of The Worldview Bulletin. He is a general editor of the Dictionary of Christianity and Science (Zondervan, 2017) and Three Views on Christianity and Science (Zondervan, 2021). His articles have appeared in Christianity Today and he writes and edits for Christian ministries and publishers.
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