For the Love of Israel: The Limitless Compassion of God
“I love your shoes.” “I love my job.” “I love my children.” “I love Jesus.” These are very different uses of the word “love”! Have you ever been frustrated by our limited capacity to communicate love in English? You may have read C.S. Lewis’ book “The Four Loves,” or perhaps heard of the four Greek words for love: phileo (friendship), storge (familial), eros (romantic) and agape (divine). As much of the world just celebrated Valentine’s Day, this month we decided to explore the deeper meaning of love from a Hebraic perspective.
Love in Hebrew: Ahava and Chesed
The modern Hebrew word for “love” is ahava. It occurs 40 times in the Old Testament. In the most well-known scripture for Jewish people around the world, Israel is commanded to love (ahava) the Lord:
Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And you shall love [ahava] the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deuteronomy 6:4-5
They are also told to love their neighbor (Lev 19:18) and the foreigner (Lev 19:34) as themselves. This love is not necessarily about how we feel, but rather about the loving things that we do. We love God by obeying his word. It is loving to not steal, kill, lie, oppress the poor, or take advantage of those weaker than ourselves. Ahava is about action! Jesus himself said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15).
There is another, much stronger Hebrew word that we translate as “love”: chesed. It is found over 250 times in the Old Testament. (Note: chesed is pronounced with an emphatic guttural sound at the beginning - imagine you are trying to clear your throat. The two ‘e’s are pronounced like the short vowel sound in “egg”).
This word is translated in several different ways, because there is no word in English, or any other language, I would argue, that can capture its power. Chesed has been translated as “love,” “kindness,” “loving-kindness,” “mercy,” “favor,” “compassion,” “loyalty,” “goodness,” “unfailing love,” and “steadfast love.” The story of God and Israel - the story of the Bible - is a story of chesed.
Chesed is Infinite
“His love endures forever.” This phrase is found in many places in the scripture. The love of God that is endures forever in this verse is chesed. In Hebrew it is “ki le’olam chasdo,” a refrain repeated in Psalm 136 twenty-six times!
The phrase le’olam means “forever.” Olam is the Hebrew word for world, earth, universe and even a large room. It has the connotation of being expansive or huge, both in terms of space and time. In terms of time, le’olam means “for eternity” or “to infinity.” God’s Chesed knows no space, time or distance. It brings to mind Psalm 139, where David beautifully recorded the realization that there was absolutely nowhere he could run or hide from God’s presence:
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. Psalm 139:7-10
I (Anna Beth) remember the first time I got a glimpse of what this love was like. I was on a mission trip in Peru my freshman year of college. After an exhausting hike in the thin Andean atmosphere, I sat down and pulled out my Bible. It fell open to Isaiah chapter 54, and my eyes were drawn to verse 10:
“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed,
yet my unfailing love [chesed] for you will not be shaken
nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.
At that moment I was resting on just one peak of the longest mountain range in the world. I felt the solidity of the earth underneath me and felt the weight of God’s promise through the prophet Isaiah. Those mountains weren’t going anywhere. I will treasure that memory forever.
A Personal Story: Falling in Love with Israel
Do you remember when you first fell in love? I was 19 years old when I first fell in love...with Israel! I joined a college ministry group for a ten-day tour. I had no idea that it would change my life forever. At that point I was studying Arabic and had many Muslim Palestinian friends and classmates. My view of Israel had been shaped through their worldview. I’d only heard one side. I largely absorbed their anti-Israel narrative. I had very negative feelings about a place I’d never been and people I’d never encountered.
I carried these anti-Israel sentiments with me on that first trip. While staying in the West Bank and spending time with the Palestinian community, I began to see that Israel was not the racist, colonial oppressor I was led to believe.
The media does not accurately portray what is happening on the ground. It can’t hope to express the human drama playing out in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains an issue close to my heart, and I believe it is close to God’s heart as well. He deeply loves the people on both sides. He loves the land of Israel! His eye is on Jerusalem! God says to Jerusalem,
“Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands;
Your walls are continually before Me.” Isaiah 49:16
That first trip, I didn’t yet understand God’s special love and purpose for the Jewish people, but I did begin to feel his love for the land of Israel. The Bible began to come alive! When I returned home, I would sit and pour over Exodus and Leviticus, weeping! It was as if I had been reading the Bible in black and white my whole life, and all of a sudden I was seeing it in color. It became real to me: this story really happened. In a real place, at a real time, with a real group of people….A group of people with whom God really made an everlasting covenant.
Not only that, but Jesus really came to this place, to these same precious people, and he is really coming back - not to New York, Moscow or Paris, but to Jerusalem! After spending time in Israeli culture, it was almost as if I could hear Jesus’ tone of voice. Even the personality of our Lord, fully God and fully man, was shaped by the culture in which he lived. Growing to love Israel was, for me, a process of growing deeper in love with him.
God’s Chesed For Israel
I remember the moment that it hit me, shortly after returning from that first trip to Israel, a few years after my literal mountaintop experience in Peru… That precious promise from Isaiah 54 that the Lord spoke to me was originally made to someone else. And it made zero sense if he was not still faithful to the people to whom those prophetic words were originally addressed: Israel. Logically, if God canceled his promises and changes his mind like a human, what kind of God would he be?
There are some today that believe that God is done with Israel, and his Old Testament promises now apply to the church instead. Some teachers desire to distance us as believers in Jesus from the story of Israel and the Old Testament scriptures. To do so is to rob us of this beautiful revelation of God’s character: his faithfulness expressed in chesed for his people Israel. It can also be deeply harmful to the church’s relationship with the Jewish community.
This unbroken chesed that God has for Israel is ultimately expressed through the Messiah Jesus, his Word made flesh, through whom we can have relationship with God! He promised that he would make a new covenant with Israel:
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord...“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” Jer 31:31-33
As gentile believers in Jesus, we are grafted into this new covenant; an epic love story (Romans 11). God’s special love and eternal promises to the Jewish people are not irrelevant to or in competition with the church. The testimony of God’s chesed for Israel - his tender, faithful, long-suffering and compassionate kindness towards them - is a window into his unchanging character, and a firm foundation on which we can stand.
Right as Jesus was about to go to the cross, as he invited his disciples into this new covenant, he said: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:33). Through relationship with Jesus, we are able to love people with the very same chesed love that God gives to us.
Out of a heart overflowing with gratitude and the chesed of God, we must take Jesus back to the Jewish people through whom he came. The greatest of expression of love we can give is the gospel. Thank you for standing with us as we work to reach the people that are so close to the heart of God.