BibleProject - Love: God’s Gift and Our Calling

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Advent E4 — We’re ending our short Advent series with a reflection on love. In the Hebrew Bible, the word “ahavah” involves faithfulness to God and living by his wisdom, but it also means showing practical care to others—especially the vulnerable. Jesus views this love for God and neighbor as the greatest command, and he expands it to be indiscriminate, radical kindness and generosity even toward our enemies. The New Testament authors were so blown away by this kind of love that they adopted an obscure Greek word for love, “agape,” and redefined it to be a self-giving, sacrificial love that Jesus demonstrates in his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. In this episode, Jon and Tim explore the main biblical words for love, showing how the story of Advent characterizes agape as God’s own essence and our calling. FULL SHOW NOTESFor chapter-by-chapter notes including summaries, referenced Scriptures, biblical words, and reflection questions, check out the full show notes for this episode.CHAPTERSThe Hebrew Bible’s Understanding of Love (0:00–13:17)Agape and Jesus’ Redefinition of Love (13:17–21:25)God Is Love (21:25–31:10)Reflections on Love With JoDee (31:10-36:12)OFFICIAL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTView this episode’s official transcript.REFERENCED RESOURCESThe Affections of Christ Jesus: Love at the Heart of Paul’s Theology by Nijay GuptaAhavah / Love: Though not referenced directly in the episode, this 2017 video explores the same biblical word ahavah.Agape / Love: Also not referenced directly in the episode, this 2017 video explores the same biblical word, agape.Check out Tim’s extensive collection of recommended books here.SHOW MUSIC“Clouds ft. ahmo” by Lofi Sunday“Warm Hugs” by Lofi Sunday & Cassidy Godwin“Snowflakes” by AvesBibleProject theme song by TENTS SHOW CREDITSProduction of today’s episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer, and Cooper Peltz, managing producer. Tyler Bailey is our supervising engineer, who also edited today’s episode and provided the sound design and mix. JB Witty does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Our host and creative director is Jon Collins, and our lead scholar is Tim Mackie. Special thanks to our guest JoDee Atherton.Powered and distributed by Simplecast. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, Tim. Hi, John Collins. Hello. And this is our fourth and final conversation in the Advent series. Yeah. Hope, peace, joy, and love. These are four words typically connected to, and have been for centuries, connected to the four Sundays of Advent that are the four weeks leading up to. the celebration of Jesus' birth and 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 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. And 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, ahav, is the verb. Ahav. and then ahava is the noun. We're just talking one Hebrew word? There's a few other words for affection, display affection, but this is the main one. All right. Ahava is referring to both the emotional feeling of attachment,

but then also as we're going to see, the practical displays, actions. It's an action word. Man, love is such a big word. Big word. How are we going to have one conversation about love? uh well i've got an idea i've got an idea of where to start okay uh because it would just make sense to start in deuteronomy chapter 10 i i was exactly thinking that deuteronomy 10 yeah yeah

like you do all right um because the language of loving god comes first and foremost in the bible from deuteronomy that's where it begins that's very common now especially in western like 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. Love and Deuteronomy.

So the book of Deuteronomy is Moses's farewell speech to the Israelites. He's been with them, brought him 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. Like, you guys, I'm going to be, 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 the heavens and the highest heavens. It's the heavens of the heavens. The skies of the skies.

Yeah. It's a beautiful sunny day in Portland. I'm looking out at 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 he's 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 grandpa, Abraham. Exactly, yep. And it was, Yahweh made a special covenant agreement with Abraham.

Yeah, out of the scattering of the tower and city of Babylon, he 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. And he chose their offspring 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. The purpose was to love them.

Yeah, yeah. That doesn't help us know what this word means. Well, he brought us out of Egypt. He brought us through the wilderness. He's 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's the God of all other spiritual beings. And he is the Adon of all Adonim. He is the master of anyone who calls himself a master. He's the great, mighty God, awesome. He is not partial. He doesn't take bribes. He executes justice for the orphan 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. Is that the same word? It's synonym. This is the word used from the Garden of Eden story.

A man shall leave his father and mother and attach himself to, grab on to. Become one with. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Yahweh loved your ancestors and attached himself to them and therefore to you. Yeah.

So you should attach yourself and cling to Yahweh, verse four, 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. Mm-hmm. You love Yahweh and attach yourself. 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 how by giving them food and clothing oh 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 so here's how you show your love you're going to keep all the like commands and statues 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 he also talks about the orphan in the window yes just the vulnerable the vulnerable man god loves

those people and you're going to love them too and it's food it's very tangible like you're taking 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. That would be clinging to you. Okay. 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, yeah. And that's a part of Ahav. But what you're drawing attention to do 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 implied bringing you up out of Egypt. So action. Yeah. So this paragraph has it all. This is like one of the coolest paragraphs that 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 your neighbor. Yeah, that's it. Who's your neighbor? Well, exactly right. Yeah, it at least includes the orphan and 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. them in the Torah, hundreds. Yeah. So they're developed within Israelite tradition among Hebrew Bible nerds on into 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. When a Bible nerd, a scribe, comes up to Jesus and asks, What a commandment is first among all of the commandments? Okay. First. First. Most importance?

Yeah. Protos. Pride of place. Okay. Yeah, a first importance. Jesus answered, here's the protos. Listen, O 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 heart.

soul, all your mind, all your strength. He's quoting from what came to be known as the Shemah prayer. Deuteronomy chapter 6. There you go. That's the first one. Yeah. Love God. With everything. Yeah. But then he immediately follows

and he just says, the Dutro, 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 can give him two. 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 Duthoros,

first one and the second one. But the way he's presenting it is to say, there's nothing else greater than these, meaning that they're... They're both kind of equally... They're the flip side of each other. Yeah. And it's the same logic that we saw in Deuteronomy 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 Deuteronomy 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 existed for. So in Hebrew Bible, you had Ahav and Ahava, which I mentioned. In the Greek New Testament, mainly it's the word agape. Agape. That's how I'm used to it. What did you say, agapi? Arapi. Oh, gosh.

So you soften the G. And the E on the end is really an E. Arapi. a prolific New Testament scholar, and also a friend and colleague who lives here in the Portland area, Nijia Gupta, has a new book, this is new in the year 2025, on love in the theology of Paul, the Apostle Paul in 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 in the letters of Paul. And he has this setup chapter where he just quickly notes that the New Testament's insistent use of this now, Rappi, 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 phileo. Plato's writings, like foundational classical Greek writer is in the 400s BC,

big body of writings. He uses the verb, filetio, almost 1,500 times. It's a lot. It's a lot. He uses the noun, rapi, zero times. But you do have a verb that's connected to rapi, agapeau, and it appears 152 times. Okay.

So not nearly as much as filet. Yeah. 10%. But the verbs in place. Okay, so what's the difference between these two words, Filo and Nagapeo? As I understand it, there is not a huge difference of meaning on one level between filial and Irapi.

Okay. They're kind of just straight-up synonyms. Mm-hmm. Yep. But one was just not really used much. 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 Phileo over 2,000 times

in his writings. He uses the Greek verb Agaphao about 500 times. And he uses agapi, the noun, maybe one time. It's debated

on whether that text belongs to his body for writing or not. So what's so fascinating is when the Jesus movement started to render everything mostly into Greek, which had 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, Phileo is used 25 times. The verb, Arapao, is used 143 times. And the noun, Arapa'i, is used 143 times. And the noun, agape, is used 116 times. It's just all of a sudden, boop. Yeah, this is an important word all of a sudden. Yeah, yes. All right.

So the followers of Jesus, they're like so impacted that they're like, we need a new way to talk about this. Like we need a new word. Yes. So they adopt this obscure word, and they're like, this is going to be our word. Yeah. The word was given meaning now, not by the Greek language. The word was given meaning, it was redefined. It was like a word got re-made in the image of Jesus.

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. Yeah. It's the story of Jesus, his life and teachings, that gave the new definition of the word. Right.

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 ghappy language. So Luke 6, verse 31, treat others the way you want them to treat you. There's the golden rule, but in Luke.

Okay. If you love those who love you, you know, what real credit is that to you, your motives and 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, like that. 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 lend money. Yeah. And what he's talking here is about reciprocity. Who do I want to have omel?

me a favor. 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. They'll cover me. It's like a calculus that we're doing. 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 merciful. 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 G.S.'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 Agape 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 gappi toy, loved ones.

The loved ones who are 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. Something 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. 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.

So we already is assuming that God's done something. Let's love one another. Love is from God. So the kind of love that we're talking about, a ghappi, 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, just a different category of human. If you don't display that kind of style of love, what it shows is 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. Arapi, Theos Estin. Three words that just revolutionize human thought. Yeah. But to say the essence of God, of all gods, is Arapi. That's just, this is revolutionary stuff, man. And look, here we go. This is how God manifested his Arapi 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 a happy. So there's 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. They're dying. That's exactly right. It's a gift that's just like pure survival for us. 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 a happy. 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. Verse 10, he flips it over again. He says, here's another definition of a ghape. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us. and sent his son as a hylosmos, an atonement-accomplishing gift. Helosmos?

Helosmos for our sins. Helosmos. So it's another little story underneath that. Our sins have created some really terrible scenario that is we're dying. And the relationships ruptured. And so a helasmos, it refers to a gift given that repairs a broken relationship. and that's most likely what Helasmos means. 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 Atonement. Yeah. How many times is this word used in New Testament? It only appears in 1st John here and in chapter 2, where he says, Jesus is that He lost most for our sins, and not ours only, the whole world's sins are addressed by what Jesus did.

Okay. Yeah. So the idea is not that we loved God. What gift can we give to God? Yeah. 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 now. And the obligation is to love each other the way we experience God's love. Yeah, totally. But to not do it in a way that we're used to seeing love being done by people.

Yeah, like leveraging it. Which is, yeah, who's on my side, who's on my team, who can I rise the ranks because of who's important that I can attach myself to? it flips that, just be like, flips it completely. I don't need to worry about that. Yeah. I can just love. Yeah.

We live 2,000 years in the wake of this revolution and human moral thought. The Jesus' life made to the human family. Yeah. So we're doing this all for the Advent season. Yeah, that's right.

And so this is all leading 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 rapi, divine rapi, 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 the paragraph as the rapi toy. people who are loved. So you already just, by the sheer fact of being human, are beloved 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 rupture 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. And 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 that God is love. Love. Love. Okay, so we did four words. We did. Four words all about anticipating and preparing

ourselves for the arrival of the king. And they help us live into the story. Yeah. So there was the kind of being stretched with hope. Yes, the waiting and the stretching. And the tension and the energy of hope. Then there was a 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. And then you used a really great way. 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 love yeah

God is love. God is love. And love, given a precise definition, the kind of love displayed in the arrival and the life and the death and resurrection of Jesus for others. The whole thing was for others. It has a gift. Okay.

Well, cool. Yeah, there it is. Hope, joy, peace, love. These are the words of Advent. Okay, so we're going to close out this last episode of the Advent series by again having one of our own staff members and hear 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. Could 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, think you and I would be completely different humans. And the more I live my life and I try to love as Jesus loved, 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 during Advent, we're waiting for God's love to be fully realized here on earth. 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 an 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 I'm. our source of truth and love is. Judi, thanks for joining us today and wrapping up the Advent series. Thank you for doing that. Super fun. Thanks for having me.

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