HESED

“You gave me life and showed me kindness,  and in your providence watched over my spirit.” (10:12)

The word translated here as “kindness” is the great Hebrew word hesed—a word so rich in its connotations as to be virtually untranslatable. Usually it is rendered by such double-barreled expressions as “lovingkindness” or “steadfast love.” But probably the best translation of all, preserving the greatest range of the word’s deep resonances, is simply the good old Anglo-Saxon word love. How strange it is that in this long book, containing so much suffering and so much mystery and so much strenuous grappling with the deep things of God, this little word love—surely the key word not only in the Bible but in all of human language—occurs only twice. (The other occurrence of hesed comes in 37:13, in the speech of Elihu.)

Yet here is something even stranger: people who are going through the deep waters of suffering can grow to hate this word. They can arrive at the point where they cannot even stand to hear it anymore, without feeling an actual physical revulsion in their gut. Why? Raymond Carver hinted at the reason when he titled one of his books, awkwardly but arrestingly, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. What, indeed, do we think we are doing as we bandy about this four-letter word so glibly and cavalierly? Does it ever dawn on us that just to speak it is like speaking the whole world into existence all over again? That it is like speaking the most sacred of all mysteries, that of all the names of God it is the most holy and awesome? Yet it is such an easy and gratifying little word to say, and it is particularly easy and gratifying when everything is going well for us. When life feels good and we have the world (or even just our own small corner of it) by the tail, then it is no great thing to love. It is nothing to love God under such circumstances, and nothing at all to love the whole of humanity with an expansive radiance. As long as we are getting our own way in life, love sits well in our stomachs and rolls fluently off our tongues, and that is why people who are suffering may grow to hate it so much. For it makes it sound as though the secret of life were a much commoner, cheaper thing than it is.

But love in the midst of suffering is something dreadful. To love, and to keep on loving when all human reserves for it have been exhausted, is a more fearsome thing than hate. Such love is a furnace, a fire hotter even than Hell. The one who loves in this way— long and honestly and without restraint—will love alone, and will inevitably be punished for it most severely by the world. Such love, like prayer, is something we must do in the sight of God and of God alone, or else not at all.

Some Christians treat love as though it were an evangelistic strategy, a kind of gospel-bait. Love is seen as a useful tool for attracting or luring people into the Kingdom. Naturally, once the fish has been hauled into the boat, the lure is cut from its mouth. But love is not a silver spoon or a jitterbug. Love is not bait for the gospel; love is the gospel. Love is not a means towards some other end; love is means and end together. The moment love is used as a tool, it ceases to be love. When people try to use love in this way, what they are really doing is using God. Instead of being used by God, they try to turn the tables and use Him. Religion becomes an instrument for the expansion of one’s own personal power. Love becomes a weapon of aggression. Little wonder that the person who is suffering comes to hate it. For true love is not aggression; true love is not concerned with gaining power over others. Rather, love is the humility in which self becomes subservient to relationship.

In the Kingdom of God nothing moves, nothing happens, without love. In churches many things happen because of human goals, programs, bureaucratic necessity, idealism, private fantasy, or neurosis. But it is not so with God. God has no plan, no program, no agenda except love. That is why He had no other recourse but to send us His only Son Jesus Christ, who on the one hand loved God His Father with a perfect love, and who on the other hand loved mankind no less. These were the two hands that were stretched wide on Calvary. Christ’s two great loves struggled like mighty wrestlers within His breast, until finally love itself tore Him apart on the cross. This is the dreadful, fearsome love of God, the love that will never let us go.

This is the Love who made us and remade us for no other purpose except that of His own great hesed.

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.