Love: God’s Gift and Our Calling

Hey Tim. Hi John Collins. Hello. Hello. And this is our fourth and final conversation. It is. In the Advent series. Yeah. Hope. Peace. Joy and love. These are four words typically connected to an Abbot for centuries connected to the four Sundays of Advent that are the four weeks leading up to the celebration of Jesus' birth in Christmas. Yeah. Advent means arrival. Mm-hmm. Yeah. These four weeks are about anticipating the arrival of the King. You got it. And these four words became four different ways to think about that anticipation. Yeah. Really, each one of them is kind of like a Christian virtue, a character trait that's worth aiming at and, hmm, thinking about how can I structure my life, focus on these, so that I can cultivate these character traits more in my life. Yeah. And all of them are connected with anticipating, waiting for the arrival of God's Messiah. So we have done conversations on hope and on peace and on joy. And here we're at number four. There's got to be a reason why number four, in most traditions that celebrate Advent, is love. Yeah. And we're talking about the Hebrew word, a-hav, is the verb, a-hav, and then a-havah is the noun. Where's the time one Hebrew word? There's a few other words for affection, display affection, but this is the main one. All right. Ah-havah is referring to both the emotional feeling of attachment, but then also we're going to see the practical displays, actions. It's an action word. Hmm. Man, love is such a big word. Big word. How are we going to have one conversation about love? Ah, well, I've got an idea. I've got an idea of where to start. Okay. Because it would just make sense to start in Deuteronomy chapter 10. I was exactly thinking that. Deuteronomy 10. Yeah, like you do. All right. Because the language of loving God comes first and foremost in the Bible from Deuteronomy. That's where it begins. It's very common now, especially in Western worship songs, loving God. I love you God. I love you Jesus. That language is rooted in the Bible first in Deuteronomy. Let's just dive in. Okay. Love in Deuteronomy. So the book of Deuteronomy is Moses' farewell speech to the Israelites. He's been with them, you know, brought them out of Egypt, wilderness wanderings, Mount Sinai, more wilderness wanderings. Here they are. And it's kind of his, I've called it the locker room speech before going out onto the field. Okay. Right. It's the pep talk. Mm-hmm. Like you guys, I'm going to be this. I can't go with you. But here's what God's done for you. Here's what he wants to do for you. Here are the choices set before you. And he says, good versus bad. Life versus death, blessing versus curse, choose life. And one way to talk about choosing life is about love, loving God. So Deuteronomy chapter 10, Moses says, look, Israelites, to Yahweh your God belong to the heavens and the, actually, the highest heavens, it's the heavens of the heavens. The skies of the skies. Yeah. It's beautiful sunny day in Portland. I'm looking out the blue sky ceiling right there. And it's a way of saying to Yahweh belong the skies that I can see and everything that's above and beyond that. And to Yahweh belongs the earth, the land and everything that's in it. It's all from Yahweh. However, to your ancestors, Yahweh attached himself in order to love them. So you're talking about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob here. Okay. They've been in Egypt for a long time. So to them, this is great, great, great, great, great, great Abraham. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it was Yahweh made a special covenant agreement with Abraham. Mm-hmm. Yeah, out of the scattering of the tower in city of Babylon, you just chose this family. And made a covenant promise that he's going to bless them and bless all nations through them. He's going to protect them, stick with them, no matter what. And Yahweh has done that. So here, that's remembered as Yahweh attaching himself. It's the language of clinging onto. It's really interesting. He grabbed onto them and loved them in order to love them, in order to love them. Yeah. So he was there off-spring after them, namely you all, from among all the peoples as it is to this day. So notice there's this contrast of Yahweh has all of creation to work with and he has all the peoples. Yahweh is the creator. He's the universal God. But he chose your ancestors and you guys to uniquely attach himself to you in this covenant bond to love you. And Jesus was to love them. Yeah. Okay, that doesn't help us know what this word means. Ah, well, he brought us out of Egypt. He brought us through the wilderness. He fed you. He liberated you. He wants to bring you into this good land. He loves you. Yep, he loves you. For Yahweh, your God, he is the Elohim of all Elohim. He is the God of all other spiritual beings. And he is the Adon of all Adonim. He is the master of anyone who calls himself an Adonim. Anyone who calls himself the master. He is the great mighty God, awesome. He is not partial. He doesn't take bribes. He executes justice for the Orchid and the widow. He is the one who loves the immigrant, giving them food and clothing. And you all also shall love the immigrant because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt. Yahweh, your God, you shall fear Him. You shall serve Him to Him, you shall cling. There is that same word? It's synonym. Okay. This is the word used from the Garden of Eden story. A man shall leave his father and mother and attach himself to, grab onto, become one with. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yahweh loved your ancestors and attached Himself to them and therefore to you. So you should attach yourself and cling to Yahweh and you shall love Yahweh your God and keep His obligations and statutes and regulations and commandments. So that's the Yahweh love and attach Himself to you. You love Yahweh and attach Himself to Him. And then in the middle is this loving of neighbors specifically. Vulnerable neighbors. Yeah, the immigrants in your midst because you were immigrants when Yahweh brought you out of Egypt as an act of love. So this is a cool paragraph because it's a full reciprocity of divine human love and then human to human love and they are like mirrors of each other. Notice God loves the immigrant. Now by giving them food and clothing, that's what He did for you guys through the wilderness. So you should love the immigrants because you were the immigrants in the land of Egypt and that's when Yahweh loved you. Yeah. So we talked about love being an emotion. Here though the focus seems to be on your actions towards others. Yeah. Yes. 100%. Yes. You're going to keep all the like commands and statutes. That's your love for God. Yeah, you're going to honor your relationship with God by living by His wisdom. Yeah. And then in the center here is there's immigrants. Yahweh talks about the orphan in the winter. Oh, the orphan in the winter. Yes, just the vulnerable. The vulnerable. And God loves those people and you're going to love them too and it's food and it's very tangible like you take care of them. Totally. Yes. So what's cool is that this language of clinging and attaching, it's a figure of speech. I could do this to you right now. Just put my arm around you and cling to me. I could be clinging to you. But the people that you cling to in your life for a long period of time, it might just be out of pure duty and obligation. Most often there is some form of emotional attachment that's motivating it. Yeah. And that's a part of ahove. But what you're drawing attention to is really important is that the proactive, concrete action oriented expression of love is also one of the main focus points here of this vocabulary. How do you love by giving food and clothing, by keeping Yahweh's commands and wisdom? Yahweh loved you by choosing the ancestors and plied bringing you up out of Egypt. So action. Yeah. So this paragraph has it all. This is like one of the coolest paragraphs I talk about love in the Hebrew Bible. God loves you. You love God. You love each other. Yeah. That's right. Yep. Love God. Love me neighbor. Yeah. That's it. Who's your neighbor? Well, I exactly right. Yeah. It at least includes the orphan in the widow and the immigrant. Okay. Now, when Moses says you love God by keeping all of his obligations and statutes and commands, there's hundreds of them in the Torah, hundreds. Yeah. So they're developed within Israelite tradition among Hebrew Bible nerds on and to Jesus' time. Debates and conversations about how you focus in among all the hundreds of the commands, like what are the most important? Most essential. Yeah, most essential. Yeah. So that's the background of the story in Mark chapter 12. The Bible nerds, scribe, comes up to Jesus and asks, what commandment is first among all of the commandments? Okay. First. First. Most important? Yeah. Protos. Pride of place. Okay. Yeah. First importance. Jesus answered, here's the Protos. Listen, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, or he is the one Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. He's quoting from what came to be known as the Shema prayer. Do you draw me chapter six? There you go. That's the first one. Yeah. Love God. With everything. Yeah. But then he immediately follows and he just says the doodoro, the second one, is this. You're like, what? He didn't ask for the second. He just wanted one. He just wanted one. He gave them two. Then the second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. So apparently the guy asks him what's the first one. And Jesus is essentially saying, if you want to know the one thing, you actually have to know these two. Yeah. And he calls them Protos and Dutorus, first one and the second one. The way he's presenting it is to say there's nothing else greater than these, meaning that they're... They're both equally first. Flip side of each other. Yeah. And it's the same logic that we saw in Doodoro and Mi 10. Yeah. Love God and love your neighbor. God loved you. So you love God and so you love your neighbor. This is Jesus' summary of the purpose of Israel's existence, which itself is a way on reflecting on the purpose of human existence. Love God and love your neighbor. Yeah. And the subtext of it in Doodoro and Mi 10, love God because he loved you. He's shown you love. So you reciprocate by showing love to God, showing love to neighbor. This is what a human exists for. So in Hebrew Bible you had a haf and a hava, which I mentioned in the Greek New Testament, and mainly it's the word agapi. Agapi. Agapi. That's how I'm used to it. What did you say agapi? Agapi. Oh gosh. So you soften the G and the E on the end is really an E agapi. Anyway. A prolific New Testament scholar and also a friend, colleague, he lives here in the Portland area, Nietzsche Gupta has a new book, this new year 2025, on love in the theology of Paul, the apostle Paul and Paul's letters. It's called the affections of Jesus Christ, love at the heart of Paul's theology. It's excellent meditation on love and the letters of Paul. And he has the setup chapter where he just quickly notes that the New Testament's insistent use of this noun agapi is actually a surprise in the history of love vocabulary in ancient Greek. This is really interesting. So the main word for most of the history of ancient Greek to talk about love is the word filet. Plato's writings, like foundational classical Greek writer is in the 400s BC. Big body of writings. He uses the verb filet almost 1500 times. It's a lot. He uses the noun rapi zero times. But you do have a verb that's connected to rapi agapau and it appears 152 times. So not nearly as much as filet. But the verbs in play. Okay. So what's the difference between these two words, filet and agapi. As I understand it, there is not a huge difference of meaning on one level between filet and agapi. Okay. They're kind of the straight-up synonyms. Yep. But one was just not really used. One was less common. Okay. So then go forward to another Greek philosopher who's like 350 years forward in time. So this is like in the century right before Jesus, a guy named Plutarch wrote prolifically, this philosopher. And he uses the Greek verb filet over 2000 times in his writings. He uses the Greek verb agapau about 500 times. And he uses a rapi, the noun, maybe one time it's debated on whether that text belongs to his body right before it. So what's so fascinating is when the Jesus movement started to render everything mostly into Greek, which have been right in those early years in Jerusalem, the agapi was chosen as the main word to describe what Jesus said is the purpose of a human life. When you turn to the New Testament, filet is used 25 times. The verb agapau is used 143 times. And the noun agapi is used 116 times. It's just all of a sudden, boop. Yeah. This is an important word all of a sudden. Yeah. All right. So the followers of Jesus are like so impacted that they're like, we need a new way to talk about this. We need a new word. Yes. So they adopt this obscure word and they're like, this is going to be our word. Yeah. So it was given meaning now, not by the Greek language. The word was given meaning, it was redefined. Okay. It's like a word got re-made in the image of Jesus. Okay. Jesus so reshaped a whole community's view of reality that they had to rethink how they treated each other and how they talked about how they were treating each other. Yeah. Oh, interesting. The story of Jesus is life and teachings that gave the new definition of the word. Right. So there's something so radical and revolutionary about the way Jesus taught on love. Yep. What is that? Yeah. I'm so glad you've asked. This is super interesting. So here in the Gospel of Luke, it's a little dense concentration of a happy language. So Luke 6 verse 31, treat others the way you want them to treat you. There's the golden rule, but in Luke, if you love those who love you, you know, what real credit is that to you? Your mode isn't your character. Listen, even total moral failures, like sinners, know to love those who love them. You know, even the mafia boss gets his mother flowers on Mother's Day. Yeah. If you do good to those who do good to you, what extra credit do you get on the moral accounting books? Even sinners do the same. If you lend money to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners in order to receive back. So let's pause. He gives three examples right here. Love, do good, and the lend money. Yeah. He's talking here is about reciprocity. Who do I want to have, oh me a fairer? Yeah, that's right. Well, who do I want to create a bond with because I know that if I do, they'll have my back. Yeah. They'll cover me. It's like a calculus that we're doing. Yeah. So what Jesus says, he expects his followers to do is I tell you, love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return. And your reward will be great and you will be sons of the most high for he himself is kind to ungrateful and even evil humans be merciful as your father's and merciful. Hmm. But what strikes me is love, okay, big fuzzy word, but then doing good and then even more concrete lending money. It's like, yeah, you actually need some resources. Yeah, always on Jesus's mind with this love vocabulary is actually very practical, tangible acts of service and support. And then a very radical view of who you give that support to. Totally. Just upending these patterns of reciprocity. So we're watching a revolution in really the history of human thought and culture happening here in Jesus' teachings about love. Yeah. Because remember, love for God is primary for Jesus. That's an obligation. He sees that as an obligation. I see. Love God with everything you've got. And what that frees you to do then is to love your neighbor just indiscriminately, friend or foe. So Jesus came and he showed this vision of living life where that you're experiencing that love from God and then you're reciprocating that love back to God. And that frees you up to be able to then live a life of generosity to others isn't making a calculus about like, what am I going to get in return? You're living out of just this abundance. And that was so new that that's what a gop-a came to be known as. Yeah, that's right. So we're going to look at two passages in the New Testament. One by the Apostle John, he starts off, a rapitoi. Hmm. Loved ones. The loved ones. The ones who were loved. The ones of agape. Yeah. Let us love one another. Because love is from God. Everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God because God is love. You know, this suddenly feels more meaningful to me when I think about the redefinition of love. Yeah, yes. Yeah, yeah. So radically different about what you even think love is has changed. Like to be part of this means to have gone through that transformation of what love actually is. Yeah. So they're using this word to describe a fundamentally different way to love. Yes. Yeah, that's great. That's great. So he begins by saying people who are beloved. Yeah. So we already is assuming that God's done something. Yeah. Let's love one another. Love is from God. So the kind of love that we're talking about, a crappy. This is the only way to talk about is that it doesn't come from us. Yeah. Okay. This is divine love. And everybody who imitates that style of loving what that shows is that your fundamental identity, it's like you've been reborn as a human. It's a different category of human. If you don't display that kind of style of love, what it shows is you, you haven't fully attached yourself in what he says is you don't know God, but you aren't relationally clinging to God in union because if you did know that God, what you would know is God is agape. It's three words, agape, sayos, esteen, three words that just revolutionize human thought. Yeah. Just say the essence of God of all gods is agape. That's just this revolutionary stuff man. And look, here we go. This is how God manifested his agape among us. He sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might live through him. There's a short little early Christian dictionary definition of agape. So this is a story underneath that, right? So interesting because the story is of a gift. The story is of a gift. But it's not a gift that God was like, you know, if I give him this gift, then they could pay me back. Right. Yeah, totally. Yeah. They're dying. Exactly. Right. Indiscriminate generosity. Yeah. God took the thing that's so precious to him, like God's own self in the person of his son. And right, that one surrenders his life to death so that others might have life. That's what we mean when we say agape. To give a gift so others can have life. That's right. And God is that. That's what God is. Well, God is the gift. God is the life. God is the person who does those things. Yeah, the act of indiscriminate, generous gift giving. That is the essence of the very being of what a Christian means by God. Oh, verse 10. He flips it over again. He says, here's another definition of a happy. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a, hmm, he lost most in a tonement, accomplishing gift. He lost most for our sins. He lost most. So it's another little story underneath that our sins have created some really terrible scenario that is for dying. And the relationships are captured. And so he lost most it refers to a gift given that repairs a broken relationship and that's most likely what he lost most means. So that's most likely. Well, if there's one word that's like hyper debated in New Testament studies, it's all this language around a tonement. Yeah. How many times does this word use in New Testament? It only appears in 1 John here and in chapter 2 where he says, Jesus is the he lost most for our sins and not ours only. The whole world sins are addressed by what Jesus did. Yeah. So the idea is not that we loved God. What gift can we give to God? But he loved us. He sent his son as that relational repair gift for our sins and beloved ones. If that's how God loved us, here it is the flip. Then we also ought to love one another. So we ought to. There's the obligation. So God gave us a gift. So we do have an obligation though. And the obligation is to love each other the way we experience God's love. He's there. But to not do it in a way that we're used to seeing love being done by people. Yeah. Like leveraging it. Yeah. Yeah. Who's on my side? Who can I rise the ranks because of who's important that I can attach my sins? I can't be yourself too. It flips that. Just be like. Clips it completely. I don't need to worry about that. Yeah. I can just love. Yeah. We lived 2000 years in the wake of this revolution in human moral thought. The Jesus life made to the human family. Yeah. So we doing this all for the Advent season. Yeah. That's right. We're going up to the birth of Jesus. It's the birth of the gift. Yeah. The birth of the gift. To celebrate the arrival of the Messiah, the advent of the Messiah. One way to talk about that story is to say it's a story of a rabbi. Divine rabbi, divine love. And what it means is that for God to have wanted to do that, God must regard me and the human family in some way. And that's how John opens and closes a paragraph as the rabbi toy, people who are left. So you already just, by the sheer fact of being human, are bluffed because of what God has done in and through Jesus. And he tells the story two times. God sent his only begotten son into the world. That's what Advent is all about so that we might have life through him. And another way of saying that is he sent the son to be the one through whom the relational rapture between God and humans because of sin is repaired. And that gift does create an obligation. But the obligation is to love other humans with that same type of liberal, indiscriminate generosity. To love others without obligation. Without obligation. Yeah. Yep. That's it. That's the mystery that we ponder. So the birth of Jesus is not technically mentioned in 1 John 4, but I don't know what else this paragraph is about is except to say the arrival of the Messiah in the person of Jesus and his life and death and resurrection is the very incarnation of God's essence. Mm. The God has love. Love. Love. Mm. Okay. So we did four words. We did. Yep. We did it without anticipating and preparing ourselves for the arrival of the King. Yeah. And they help us live into the story. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So there was the kind of being stretched with hope. Yes. The waiting and the stretching and the tension and the energy. Yeah, that's right. Of hope. Mm-hmm. Then there was filling full of a purpose of a thing's purpose, which is peace. Yeah, peace to exist in a state of wholeness and completeness of your purpose. Shalom. Mm-hmm. And then you used a really great phrase for the joy. It was like a anticipatory joy. Yeah. That's right. Celebrating in the present because of what God has done as like the down payment of what God will fully do and joy is an attitude I choose in the moment, though I may not always feel like choosing it. Anticipatory joy. Yeah. Yeah, it's the pre-party. Not the after-party, it's the pre-party. That's joy. And then love. Yeah. Love. Yeah. God is love. And love given a precise definition, the kind of love displayed in the arrival and the life and death and resurrection of Jesus for others. A whole thing was for for others as a gift. Okay. Well, cool. Yeah, there it is. Hope. Joy. Peace. Love. These are the words of Advent. Okay, so we are going to close out this last episode of the Advent series by again having one of our own staff members and here a little meditation together on this concept. Jody, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Would you like to introduce yourself? What you do here? Yeah. I'm Jody and I lead the patron care team and our team gets to thank the people that support us. So Jody, we had four podcast episodes on the four words of Advent. Hope, peace, joy and love. Would you give us some of your thoughts on this idea that love kind of brings all of these words together? Yeah. I think every single person born on this planet, their deepest desire is to be loved or belong. And if we really truly understood love in the context that God gives us love, I think you and I would be completely different humans. The more I live my life and I try to love as Jesus love, I realize the little I do love. And the beauty of those little times where you're able to choose to love when it's difficult, it's not convenient. And I think that's where the hope, the joy, the peace flows out of that. Yeah, these words are sort of bound together in a symbiotic relationship with one another. Right. And so, God is teaching us how to love knowing we're not going to do it perfectly. Right. But we have him as our helper. And the more we really lean into Jesus for discernment, for wisdom, when I'm not really feeling loving and even seeing that with other people, how beautiful that is where I think heaven comes to earth and you see it through a love given that's not deserved or earned with no expectation of receiving anything in return. It's a great thought. And so, Jody, as we close out this series, and as you meditate on God's love for us, what is one big takeaway you'd like to share to our audience? I think for a lot of my life, I felt like you start your journey with Jesus and then there's an end. It's not a start and end. It's a circle. I mean, God is love. He loved us. We love our neighbor who shows God is love. It's a circle. And I feel like that tension of what does it really mean to walk with Jesus? And sometimes it feels very complicated. And I'm like, what if God wants us to once again say, yes, I love you. You are my Lord and Savior. I trust you. And you know what? I need forgiveness. And I've been given that freely. And the only way we can be transformed is that continually turning to who our source of truth and love is. Jody, thanks for joining us today and wrapping up the Advent series. Thank you for doing that. Yeah, super fun. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And so, as you can see, Bible Project is made up of so many people that help make the podcast happen every week. For a full list of everyone involved in the podcast, check out our show credits at the end of the episode, wherever you stream your podcast, and on our app. Bye. Bible Project is a crowdfunded nonprofit. And we exist to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. And everything we make is free because of the generous support of thousands of people just like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us. Hi, my name is Brandon. I'm from Greensboro, North Carolina. Hi, my name is Greg and I'm from Alabama. 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