Monday, August 17, 2015
Matthew 5:43f "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you ..."
LOVE!
What is the Scriptural meaning of the word "love"? Is it right that we apply Webster's definition of the word love, viz., this one: "Love is a feeling of strong personal attraction for someone or something" to the biblical term love? No, indeed not! For that would be doing Scripture and the writers of Scripture, yea, and also the Author of Scripture, a great injustice!
But why? Well, for this reason. When Webster defines this term "love," he gives a general definition which should fit, if not all phases of every type of love, then at least some phases of every type of love. Such a definition cannot and dare not be applied to Scripture's term "love." Scripture speaks of love in two different ways, by using two entirely different Greek words, namely "phileo" and "agapao."
When it speaks of feeling (phileo), it has in mind a feeling of friendliness or chumminess with someone. When it speaks of "agape" it has in mind a love of much greater significance, a love of a much finer quality, a love of much greater value. And what might the value of that love be? Well, this, that a person who possesses this type of love not only has a strong feeling of attraction for someone or something else, but is so entirely taken up by someone or something else that he is willing to sacrifice his all, yes, everything and anything, even his life in order that the other person or thing which he loves, may be forever happy.
That is the type of love which God demonstrates, the love that led God to send His only Son into the world to pay for our sins, and that is the type of love which we are to have in our hearts-- the love that God has shown to us through the sacrifice of Christ Jesus to pay for our sins.
-- Pastor Marcus Fleischer, 1943
