Everyone has an opinion or concept of love. What’s yours? You might want to write down your thoughts on love before I develop what God has to say. I’ll wait a few moments while you pen your thinking . . . (While you are writing, pretend I’m playing the music for Final Jeopardy.)
Now you can contrast what you wrote with ahab, the love of the Bible. In Hebrew, words have root sounds rather than root meanings. Ahab is made up of two root sounds ah and, of course, ab. This newsletter beginning our sixth year is going to deal exclusively with the word study of ahab.
Love
Ahab means to have affection for (sexually or otherwise) according to Strong’s Concordance, from which all my definitions are derived. If you have this concordance, you can follow along.
What is it God loves? He loves justice and righteousness. Justice relates to God’s divine law found in the first five books of the Bible, particularly the Ten Commandments. God demands that any who disobey His Law must pay the death penalty. We have all broken the Law and deserve that penalty. But instead of assigning us all to a permanent death,
God, in His love, had His only begotten son, who never sinned, die in our place for us. Thus, his justice and love were fulfilled.
God loves righteousness, that is, doing right by faith. When we faithfully accept Jesus’s sacrifice for us and prove that faith by faithful obedience, we are made righteous. Then, when we demonstrate our love for God by keeping the Law of Justice, we are made in His image by loving the Law of Justice and acting in love by being righteous.
Psa. 11:7 For the LORD is righteous, He loves righteousness;
The upright will behold His face.
Psa. 31:23 ¶ O love the LORD, all you His godly ones!
The LORD preserves the faithful
And fully recompenses the proud doer.
Psa. 33:5 He loves righteousness and justice;
The earth is full of the lovingkindness of the LORD.
Father’s Love
One of the two root sounds of ahab is ab, father or abba, daddy. The heart of love rest on the strong shoulders of Our Father who is the epitome of righteousness. Our loving father is a wonderful provider, a powerful protector of his family, and a caring discipliner of his family. Our loving Father seeks to redeem His children from selfish stubborn waywardness to His righteousness, which is found in His commandments.