This is the Gospel, or as it was defined in the seventeenth century, “the good, glad, merry news that makes a man fairly leap for joy!” It is the news about God, who He is and what He has done for us. The word hallelujah literally means to brag and rave to others about God!2 When we realize that He is hesed, we will know why He is worthy to be raved about.
It is in the revelation of Himself that God has given us that we part company with all the other religions in the world. Up to a point, we can agree with other world religions when speaking of a supreme deity. Such a diety, we all agree, must be sovereign, omnipotent, and omniscient; but no other religion has the beginning of the concept that God is love, and He loves each man and woman with a passionate and unconditional love.
The human mind could never arrive at such a conclusion. We only know that He is love because He has revealed Himself to us through the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets and finally in His Son, the Lord Jesus.
With that in mind, hesed as mercy should never be far from our understanding. We are the weaker party of this covenant, seeking the protection and blessing of the God of infinite love. We do not dictate the terms, nor do we tell Him how and when He must fulfill His promises. There are many believers today who should deeply understand that the covenant and the ensuing acts of lovingkindness are pure mercy, and they should stop their ungodly demanding of God that He act according to their dictates.
However, there are millions of believers who have lived their lives around the cry to God, “Lord, have mercy,” and they need to see the vast scope of hesed in terms of the strong love of God committed to being there for us at all times and under all conditions. If we do not see that mercy springs forth from the molten core of the infinite passion of holy love for us, we very quickly assume the posture of a beggar whining at the temple gates and shocked if told that the Lord has answered! As you invoke His covenant mercy, do so with a heart filled with praise. The mercy is in Jesus Christ, and we come not as beggars but as sons, heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus.
The Goal of Hesed
Hesed is the goal of salvation covenant history, in that Jesus is the ultimate lovingkindness and He is the keeping, doing, and showing of His covenant oath. The Virgin Mary sings of the birth of her child as the remembrance of the hesed of God: "He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy (hesed) as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed forever" (Luke 1:54,55).
Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, also saw the birth of his son as the beginning of the fulfillment of all the promises of covenant love through the centuries:
To perform the mercy (hesed) promised to our fathers And to remember His holy covenant, The oath which He swore to our father Abraham: To grant us that we, Being delivered from the hand of our enemies, Might serve Him without fear, In holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.
Through the tender mercy (hesed) of our God, With which the Dayspring from on high has visited[a] us; To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace.”
Luke 1:72-72,78,79
Jesus is the hesed of God, the steadfast, unchangeable, and strong love of God in flesh. He by His blood-shedding brings to us every promise of God and is the personal guarantor.
For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.
2 Corinthians 1:20
As we move into our study of the covenant, know that God cannot let you down. He is the God who cannot lie.
Chapter 5: The Core of the Covenant
As we pointed out in the last chapter, among humans a covenant is made in order to bring about the state of living in lovingkindness; the oath accompanied with blood-shedding is in order to give strength to such a high ideal. But God makes covenant not to make lovingkindness but to reveal that He is all that it means.
Behind the covenant that He makes is the core of His heart, which is infinite love, best understood among men as hesed. As we would not have the rays of the sun if there were no sun, so there would be no covenant if God were not the molten core of infinite and unconditional love! This is the heart of the revelation of God that comes to us in Christ and the Gospel.
Without this revelation of who He is, the thought of God produces great anxiety. And no wonder! Can we imagine life with a God who does not love us? What if God, who is almighty in power, who knows every thought and motive of our hearts, who is always present with us, who in His sovereignty rules our world, did not like us and plotted our destruction? Such a God could only be conceived as a terrifying, infinite Judge directing His wrath toward us, condemning and damning us for our many sins.
In conversations with thousands of church members, I am amazed that their thoughts about God are much like such a picture of Him. With such a concept of God, men and women live in a pagan anxiety at the thought of Him; they have an uneasy fear of Him, furtively looking over their shoulder to see if He is coming to hurt and make havoc of their lives.
The Good News of Love
The first years of my Christian life and ministry tended in this direction. My first sermons smelled of brimstone and crackled with damnation. I called people to a salvation that essentially was running from the wrath of God the Father to the semi-safety of Jesus’ protection.
My entire life changed one spring morning in Portland, Oregon, in 1965. I was the visiting speaker in a church there, and the previous night I had presented the Gospel as I understood it, portraying God as thoroughly irritated and annoyed with lazy lukewarm believers, making my message the basis for calling the congregation to rededicate their lives to Him.
The next morning, the pastor invited me to join him for breakfast. As we sat over our eggs and bacon, he began to tell me of how he had witnessed to a nonbeliever who was dying. He lingered over the details of the Gospel and how he had presented it to the dying man. As he did so, I saw the Gospel as I had never seen it before. He spoke of God’s love that initiated and carried through the plan of salvation and the love of the Lord Jesus, God the Son in His death and resurrection, and the compassion of the Holy Spirit drawing us into that love.
I had never seen or even thought of the Triune God in terms of passionate, seeking love relentlessly pursuing us. He had always been a judge that was placated by the death of Jesus, to whom we fled from His wrath. I began to weep and finally pushed aside the breakfast and laid my head on the table and sobbed. I went back to the hotel and destroyed all of my sermons.
I saw for the first time in my life why the body of truth that Christians proclaim is called Gospel, which means “Good News.”
Preaching the Gospel, we are announcing the news of the revelation of who God is and how He feels about us. We stand on the street corners of the world shouting the news that God is not the way we thought He was—He loves us! The love of God bursting into a world of lost and hopeless people is the greatest news that has ever been announced.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
1 John 4:7-10
“God is love.” The Father in His infinite and unconditional love for us sent His Son, the Lord Jesus, to announce to us who He is and to make the new covenant on our behalf. The Holy Spirit is God pursuing us in passionate love, calling us to respond to His covenant and be united to His love. This is the greatest news in the world, and it brings peace and joy to those who will respond.
Notice what this passage tells us of God and His love: “...love is of God.” This means that He is the original source of love, that He did not get love from elsewhere but is the spontaneous fount from which love flows.
“God is love”;
He does not have love, as something added to Him, something that may or may not be present, that is capable of change, increase, or decrease. He is love; it is the way He is in His essential nature.
I may tell you that I have a glass of water or a reservoir of water, but it is in an entirely different category to say that I am water! To have water means that my possession of it is subject to change whether by increase or decrease, but to be water means I am never subject to change because it is what I am! He is the definition of love; love is the way He is.
Agape or Eros
The word for love that is used in the original language is vital to our understanding of God. In the Greek of the New Testament, the word is agape.1 It was a word that meant love but was a very general word and lacked a clear definition. It was hardly used and is not to be found in the Greek literature of the first century.
The word that was used for love in the days of Jesus and during the time the New Testament was written was eros2, a word that answers almost exactly to our English word “love”. It meant the love of the lovely and the beautiful; it reached up straining to possess the highest and the best and, therefore, was incapable of loving the ugly or that which was out of harmony with itself. Eros love is repulsed by what it perceives as ugly or, in fact, anything that is lower than its standard.
The source of eros is in the beauty of the person that is loved. Eros love is awakened and called forth by the beauty of the beloved. This is a very shaky foundation; it is a built-in weakness and is liable to fade with the fading beauty of the beloved. It is also liable to become distracted by the arrival of a more beautiful object to replace the now-boring beloved.
Human love works on the principle that the person who is loved has created and earned the love of the lover by his or her beauty, and the person must continue to earn that love by maintaining that beauty.
Eros is driven to fulfill its own needs and pleasures. It is characterized by a driving and urgent need to conquer and to exclusively own the object of its desires, so reducing the beloved to a thing or object to be used.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century whenever inhabitants of the Western world think of love, we tend to think of it through the lens of eros. It is certainly the definition of love that is fed our culture daily in advertising, movies, television, and trash fiction.
Teenagers, flushed with excitement, announce that they have fallen in love. They mean that they have met the person who, at least for the moment, is the highest, best, and most beautiful person in the universe and they must possess him or her and make that person their own.
It is significant that the word eros does not appear in the New Testament. In proclaiming and defining the Gospel, the Holy Spirit obviously forbade the use of eros, the word for human love, gave us what was essentially a new word for love, agape, and used the New Testament to fill it with His own meaning and definition.
Agape is not wakened or created by the beauty of its object, but arises spontaneously from the heart of God. It is therefore a love that cannot be earned or deserved, for it springs from the heart of God upon all persons. It reaches out to the spiritually ugly and those who are out of harmony with Him; it even reaches out to the enemy that would seek to destroy Him. It is not our spiritual beauty that awakens Him to love us; it is not our acts of goodness or track record of righteousness that arouses His loving attention toward us. His love for us originates in who He is, not in our being lovable. He is the source of His love, its reason and energy. He loves us because it is His nature to love.
It is a fact that millions of believers who would heartily agree that God is love, understand His love as human love taken to a higher degree—an ultimate eros love. They believe that God loves them as a human loves a human. This results in a relationship with God that is on very shaky ground. If God loves us to the degree that we please Him, then we are forever in doubt concerning His love toward us. And the flip side is that if we believe that we have attracted His love by our behavior, we are filled with pride and congratulate ourselves that we (unlike others) have achieved the kind of life that makes us His beloved.
We look at our relationship with God as based on our behavior; it is if we do thus and so, then God will accept and bless. He loves us if we are holy (or promise to try), if we spend an hour in prayer and Bible reading, if we are enthusiastically busy for Him, and so on. If we fail in any of these areas or fall into sin, then we believe His love fades, He becomes bored with us and turns His attention to others who are worthy of His love.
The Gospel declares the incredible news that our relationship to God is not based on “if” and “then” but rather on “because” and “therefore.” The Gospel announces that because He loves us, therefore He is the source of our salvation and blessing in life, the One upon whom our faith and hope rest. This understanding governs our coming to Christ and every step of walking out our Christian life.
This is set forth in the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee:
Also He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.’ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’
Luke 18:9-13
The religious Pharisee understood God as having eros love—there must be spiritual beauty in the person He bestows His acceptance and blessing upon. There is the feeling that if certain religious duties are performed, then God will respond favorably. The Pharisee passed God’s love through the grid of human love, eros. He could not imagine a God who would want, let alone love, a person who was less than perfect. He compared himself with others, especially the irreligious, while basking in the affirmation of his fellow Pharisees, and believed that he had attained the position of being good enough for God.
The tax collector accepted the God-given revelation that he was loved in spite of his track record as a lowlife tax collector and traitor to his people. He had the key to life in believing that because God was love and mercy, therefore he could call upon Him and be heard. The word he used as he called upon God, translated here as “mercy,” is the covenant word hesed, which we have seen is also translated lovingkindness. The man called upon a covenant that was made on his behalf by the God who is love.
In an eros world, the Gospel is a scandal! It declares to all men and women that they are loved by God not because of who they are or what they have or have not done, but because of who He is!
As you read this, know that you are loved because you are alive and breathing. Stop reading, and let this sink in. Now, in this moment, you are the focus of the passionate and unconditional love of God. He loves you with His entire Being. You have all of His love as if you were the only human in existence. And He loves you because you exist without reference to your behavior. Understand and live in that reality, and behavior will change in response to such infinite love that leaves us in worshipping wonder. As John says, We love, because He first loved us (1 John 4:19 NASB).
This revelation of the heart of God is the foundation of the covenant and the truth upon which we build our entire Christian life. The love of God initiates the covenant and is the ultimate expression of His love. It is the magnetic north of truth by which we fix our position as we stumble lost in the wilderness of the world. It is from this North Star that we find all subsequent direction. To know that His love for us depends on Him and not on us is the beginning of the way out of our futile, meaningless lives and religious despair.
Everlasting Love
His love is spoken of as everlasting:
The LORD has appeared of old to me, saying: "Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovi
ngkindness I have drawn you."
Jeremiah 31:3
This means that His love for us has poured forth spontaneously from His heart without beginning, before and outside of time space history. He set His love upon us before we were born, and therefore with no reference to our behavior or works, whether they were good or evil. When speaking of such love, we cannot think in terms of deserving or earning because it originates in His heart and is not based on our actions; an everlasting love is an unconditional love.
"I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely..." (Hosea 14:4). He loves us freely even though we are wayward and rebellious. His love is unilateral, not drawn out by anything we have done. His love is not like a heat-guided missile, drawn to us by the heat of our holiness. His love springs spontaneously from who He is—He is the motivation for His love; He takes the initiative in seeking us out.
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 6
