Today’s Christians often focus on the New Testament concept of agape love, or unconditional love, especially as it is expressed in 1 Corinthians 13. But we often forget another important aspect of love that forms a cornerstone of the Old Testament: hesed love. The Hebrew term “hesed” does not have an exact English equivalent. It is often translated as “kindness,” “loving kindness,” “faithfulness,” “mercy,” “goodness,” “loyalty,” and “steadfast love.”
Hesed love differs from agape love in that hesed love involves the idea of a covenant or agreement. This kind of love voluntarily binds itself to another in a loving relationship. Hesed love is loyalty and faithfulness to this covenant relationship. Thus, by overlooking hesed love contemporary Christianity diminishes an important aspect of our relationships together as Christians.
In the Old Testament, God shows hesed love in many ways, as described in Psalm 136, where we are told over and over again that God’s “hesed endures forever.” But the primary way God shows hesed is by entering into a covenant relationship with His people and faithfully carrying out his obligations even when His people are unfaithful to Him.
In return, God commands his followers to show hesed love to each other. We are to “do justly, love hesed, and walk humbly” with our God (Micah 6:8).
In the New Testament, when Jesus voluntarily enters into a New Covenant with his disciples in John 13, he is practicing hesed love. And when he commands us to love each other the same way, he is commanding us to practice hesed love with each other.
So what does it mean to practice hesed love with our fellow believers? It means we understand that we are in a loving and binding relationship with each other. Faithfulness to our covenant means we lovingly carry out our obligations to each other. Hesed love, then, has dramatic and practical consequences for the church.
To illustrate the difference between hesed love and agape love, think of the difference between babysitting a child and adopting a child. Babysitting a child is a temporary relationship. One can practice agape love in this relationship, say, when the child is acting up. But one cannot practice hesed love in this relationship.? Adopting a child on the other hand, is radically different, because it involves a binding relationship. Here, agape love is possible, but so is hesed love because one can be loyal or disloyal to one’s binding commitment to an adopted child.
The result of ignoring hesed love in the modern church, then, is the loss of the concept of committed relationships between believers. This is the reason why we see the church so often falling back on the family as the primary basis for meaningful relationships. The church doesn’t understand the true nature of the relationships believers are to have outside of family relationships.
What we are attempting to do with men’s team ministry to the widowed and single parents, then, is apply hesed love–loving loyalty to our New Covenant–to those who are outside of families and who are often the neediest in our congregations. For sure, these dear believers need project ministry (agape love), but they also need relational ministry (hesed love) as well. Without the relational aspect, we are falling short in our covenant obligations.
This post originally appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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