The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 6 – 4
If you’re a Christian, you almost certainly know that there are three different Greek words for “love”; there is eros, which is sexual or romantic love, that which we might call lust. There is philia, which is brotherly or familial love; and there is agape, which is generally called “universal love”, a selfless, altruistic attitude towards others. What you didn’t know, but should notice by now, is that eros is “love” which fulfills the lust of the flesh; philia is “love” which pertains to one’s herd; and agape is love which applies to how to treat every one, even your enemies. The pattern, obviously, is that eros is how the beast loves. Philia is how the spirit loves. And agape is how a soul loves.
Now the Bible isn’t really interested in how the beast loves; that’s actually the only command God gave that man ever kept properly (Genesis 1:28), and the only one which they don’t need any encouragement to keep. Thus the word eros doesn’t appear in the Bible except in Greek translations of the OT, where the Hebrew word ahavah is rendered as eros (the word “lovers” in Hosea 2:7, Lamentations 1:19, and “loved” in Esther 2:17, for instance). Philia and its variants are used often in the Bible, for example in Matthew 10:37, John 5:20, John 21:17, and many others. Clearly, this word represents the kindness which you would tend to show to a member of your tribe – the support a spirit gives to its herd.
Notice I didn’t say loyalty… but if you belong to any group, you owe them something for their protection and acceptance of you. A father is expected to provide for his son (Matthew 7:9), but also to bring his son for judgment and execution if he sins (Deuteronomy 22:18-21). Both are brotherly love, philadelphia, and love of one’s herd is clearly the realm of the spirit. So eros is love of those who love you; philia is love of those who are of your tribe, whether you like them or not; and agape is love of those of any tribe.
AGAPE
Considering how much Christians like to talk about love, it’s disturbing how little they understand what it actually is. By now, your average Christian is already turning to 1 Corinthians 13, to tell me that love suffers long, love vaunts not itself, and so on. But what does that even mean? People today tolerate sin from their brethren in the name of love; is that agape? Leviticus 19:17. Today people love their children too much to spank them. Is that agape? Proverbs 13:24.
How do we know God loves us? Hebrews 12:5-11. If 1 Corinthians 13 is the last word on love for you, you will not be able to make sense of these verses. Because 1 Corinthians 13 doesn’t say “love spanks its children”, “love rebukes sinners”. Yet we know that loving people do those things! Everything 1 Corinthians 13 says is true, of course, but it is not the whole truth about love.
It is part of a package, and presents us with an incomplete description of how love generally acts. Not what it is, not what it is made of, and certainly not how to acquire it! As you’ve seen, the world is ruled by their unbroken hearts and their unbroken spirits, and so the best they are generally capable of is eros and philia. And these are not bad things! Eros is responsible for the emotional and compassionate acts of mankind, because without it no one would be able to feel empathy or relate to the suffering of others.
Philia is responsible for the feelings of kinship and loyalty which cause people to do good things for their family and friends and country. So these are good things… when they are under the rule of a soul filled with agape. The problem is that the world tries to mimic agape with their heart and spirit. So the heart interprets agape in light of eros, and the spirit interprets it in the light of philia.
To the unbroken heart, agape is having an affair with another man’s wife “because he doesn’t love her like I do”. This is consistent with eros, indeed, under the “law of love”… that is, the law of eros… this is the right thing to do, because nothing is more important than love. Right? To the unbroken spirit, agape is torturing heretics to death for belonging to a different herd.
This is not inconsistent with philia, which is limited to love of brethren (Matthew 5:43). Indeed, philia requires you to hate anyone not of your tribe. But true agape loves everyone, not just those who loved you first (Matthew 5:46-47). These attempts at mimicking agape are heavily colored by the innate concept of love these fractions of the mind are meant to understand.
Thus it becomes not agape at all, but agaperos and philagape, or a disturbingly emotional mix of all three, a philagaperos which is the hyper-emotional and sickeningly sweet thing Christians call “love” today. And by being a mix of all three, it ends up being none of them. Romans 12:9-10 (DBT) Let love [Agape] be unfeigned; abhorring evil; cleaving to good: as to brotherly love [Phila-delphia], kindly affectioned towards one another… Notice how Paul’s first command was not to FAKE agape love! Not to pretend to have it when you don’t!
Because agaperos and philagape are worse than pure eros and philia, and far inferior to pure agape. Just as it’s hard to lose your accent when learning another language, it’s very hard for the heart and spirit to truly replace eros and philia with agape… and quite impossible without a soul ruling over them, pointing out their mistakes and forcing them to do better! Because alone of all three, agape makes sense to the soul. This is not to say it’s born with it, or that it will learn it without practice, but it is the language it was created to speak.
WHAT IS LOVE
True love is actually quite simple to understand; in fact, as usual, you already do. What is love? 2 John 1:6. What is the greatest commandment of all? Mark 12:30-33. These “loves” are all agape. So the greatest commandment is that you shall agape God, with all the heart, spirit, soul, and strength. The second is like it, you shall agape your fellow man with all your heart, spirit, soul, and strength.
And how, exactly, do you show this “love”? Romans 13:8-9. Keeping these five commandments, #6-10 IS showing agape to your neighbor! Keeping #5 is showing agape to your parents; and therefore keeping #1-4 is showing agape to God! Romans 13:10 (Weymouth) Love avoids doing any wrong to one’s fellow man, and is therefore complete obedience to Law.
And as always, this is obvious – if you “love” someone, you would never want to see them hurt, right? The law is designed to do exactly that! It is designed to protect people from your actions. If you love your neighbor you would never steal from him. If you love your enemy, you will not kill him. If you love God, you will have no idols in your home.
It’s that simple. Many people believe that love has replaced the law based on John 13:34; but as you’ve seen many times in these lessons, that’s like saying “we eat bread today, so we no longer need flour”. Love is literally the perfect keeping of the law, and every bit of true agape in the world can be traced to someone who is, consciously or not, keeping the law (Romans 2:14).
Is loving your fellow man a new commandment? 2 John 1:5-6, 1 John 2:3-7. So why did Jesus call it a new commandment? He didn’t! John 15:12-13. LOVE wasn’t the new commandment… loving each other AS HE LOVED US, and laying down your life for each other was the new commandment! (1 John 3:16). The OC commanded you to love your neighbor AS yourself (Leviticus 19:18); in other words, to treat others EQUAL with yourself.
In fact the whole point of the OC was to teach you that what you did to others would be done to you – so being nice to them was being nice to yourself. But the NC law – therefore, the NC love – requires you to love your neighbour MORE than yourself; to value their happiness and their lives ABOVE your own! Philippians 2:3. To do unto them like you wish they would do to you.
So why does 1 Corinthians 13 have no reference to keeping the law? Because it is a description of what love does… not what love is! When I say “love is kind”, I’m describing love. Not defining love. Romans 13 tells us what love IS; 1 Corinthians 13 tells us what love DOES. Being trustworthy is not the law. It is caused by obedience to the 8th commandment.
Being honest is not the law. It is caused by obedience to the 9th commandment. And being kind is not the law, it is caused BY the law! Corinthians says “love thinks not evil”. This is true – and if you keep the law, you will not do that. “Love is kind” – see Proverbs 31:26. Likewise 1 Corinthians 13:4 (BBE) says “love has no high opinion of itself, love has no pride”.
Both of those are sins (Proverbs 21:4), and anyone who rules their beast and breaks their spirit will not be guilty of them. Thus, everything love does in 1 Corinthians 13 can be explained easily as an automatic result of full obedience to the law of God. But agape is not merely the “do not steal” part of the law, the negative side; it is also the “do give to him that has need” part, which is the positive side of same law, kept perfectly! (Luke 6:30).
It is not merely refraining from killing someone, it is also the internal application of that same law (Matthew 5:21-22). We are trained from birth to think of love as a nebulous feeling that can’t quite be defined; after all, poets and songwriters have been trying to define it for millennia without success. But they are attempting to define eros, not agape!
Eros is indeed hard to nail down, for eros is as irrational as the beast it comes from. Eros will hurt anyone except the people they “love”, and that list changes regularly. Philia will hurt anyone who isn’t part of their herd. Only agape is capable of seeing the big picture, and extending the idea of doing no harm to everyone. Agape is a very simple thing. It is complete obedience to the all sides of the internal and external law of God. Thus if you truly keep “thou shalt not kill” in all four ways, as commanded, you will have no choice but to agape everyone… even your enemies!
BLESS THEM THAT CURSE YOU
All the Christian world pretty much interprets Jesus’ command to “bless them that curse you” to mean that, no matter what someone does to you, you should tell them “God bless you” and pray for good things to happen to them. No matter what they feel, or what they turn around and do, their mouth always has a blessing. How is that different from Psalms 62:4? But is that really what Jesus meant we should do?
Just to say “Have a blessed day” to every person we see? Read Genesis 12:2, 17:16, 22:17; these blessings were literal physical things God was going to give Abraham. When God “blessed Abraham” God specifically DID things for Abraham. In Genesis 32:11-21, 33:1-11, notice this “present” or “gift” was Jacob blessing Esau. That tells us that giving someone a present, or doing good to them, is blessing them.
In Matthew 5:1-12, these people are blessed with a specific reward; a good thing they will receive later for their suffering today. The meek inherit the Earth, the poor in spirit inherit the kingdom of heaven, and so on. I stress this because in these verses, a casual, generic, “God bless you” has never once been said! No one wished anyone to “have a blessed day!” Because a blessing is always a specific act someone does, or a specific THING someone is given.
How did Jesus bless us? Acts 3:26. Blessing someone is ALWAYS something specific. Always something like “God grant you understanding”, or “may you live a long life”, or “take my coat”. In James 2:17-26, James goes through a long series of examples to prove that faith not backed up by works is dead, being alone.
He proves that by comparing it with saying “peace be unto you, be ye warmed and filled”. Does it fill someone’s belly if you say “Bless you”? Of course not. So a blessing without works is dead, being alone. Saying “God bless you” to a cold person on the street does not warm them! Giving them a coat is a blessing. Saying “bless you” is not. You might object and say “But I’m asking God to bless them, which is even better!”
And it is true, that IS what you’re doing… but is it what God told you to do? Did He say “ask Me to love your enemies, ask God to bless them that curse you, ask others do good to them that hate you”? (Matthew 5:44). Or did He command you to bless them by yourself? Suppose you pass by someone begging money, and you feel sorry for them. If YOU bless them, it means turning loose of a few dollars or your coat or giving them a ride or something like that. It takes effort and sacrifice on your part.
It’s a lot easier to shove the job of blessing this stranger off into God’s lap. It won’t cost you a thing, you can simply fire off a quick 20-word prayer to God for this person, tell Him to bless them for you, and get on with your life. But why would God help somebody you’re not willing to help? I mean, if it’s not important enough for you to help them yourself, why should God bother with it, since it obviously doesn’t matter that much to you?
If it mattered to you, YOU’D be helping them. And if you actually cared enough to bless them yourself, He might be willing to bless them some more on top of that. But look at Matthew 5:44 again, notice that Jesus commanded you to bless them first. THEN He said you can pray for them and ask Him to bless them for you. If you haven’t done your part of the blessing, why should He do His?
TWO WRONGS MAKE TWO WRONGS
So a blessing is doing something good for someone. But how exactly do we love our enemies? When someone slaps you, your instinct is to slap them back. But God said… Luke 6:29. When someone steals from us, our instinct is to “get even”, either by stealing it back, or stealing something else from them. But God said… Matthew 5:40. When someone harms us in any way, our spirit burns for vengeance. But God said… Romans 12:19.
Are we allowed to repay ANY evil? Romans 12:17. He broke the commandments and hurt us, so we feel we should get a free pass to break the commandments and hurt him back, just to get even. Is that what God told us to do? 1 Peter 3:9. To us, it seems perfectly fair; he stole from me, I should be able to steal from him. And while this does indeed make sense, and the OC does tolerate this, the NC does not. Because if someone steals from you, and you get even by stealing from him, then you’re both sinners. Because you both stole.
If you steal from the thief, if you slap the man who slapped you, if you kill the man who was trying to kill you… you have broken the 1-2-10 law (Romans 12:14-21). When you commit sin to pay a sinner back, it makes you a sinner. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter why you did it, the only question the judge is going to ask is “did you hurt your neighbour?”
The question will not be “did he deserve it?” It will only be “did you treat him as you would want to be treated?” See, the spirit is obsessed with getting even; the heart wants him to hurt as it has hurt. But two wrongs don’t make a right. They don’t cancel each other out and make you both square in the eyes of the law.
Two wrongs… are two wrongs you still both have to pay for. Because all sin is ultimately against God. (Psalms 51:4). When someone sins against you and you sin back against them to get even, you’re even in each other’s eyes, yes… But you both still owe God, against whom you have now BOTH sinned!
You can sin against each other for eternity, and you will never get even; you will only get deeper in debt to the law – to God. So what should you do, if you want to “get even” without getting yourself in trouble? Romans 12:20- 21. If your spirit wants to see him punished and your heart wants to see him suffer, you cannot do it better than by feeding him! (Micah 5:15).
If you want payback done right, you have to leave it in God’s hands. But if you insist on doing it clumsily by yourself, God won’t bother… God won’t solve problems for you that you want to solve yourself. When you take matters into your own hands, you take them out of God’s. An ideal way of handling this sort of thing is in Genesis 26:17-22. Isaac re-dug these wells which his father had made – he had a legal right to them, but the heathens around him claimed them for themselves.
He could have stayed and fought – most of us would have – but instead he simply moved and let them win.The first well he named Esek, “contention”; then they wanted the second well too, so he again simply left and named the well Sitnah, “strife”. Remember, these were heathens, there was no likelihood that they would repent if God smote them with boils – if he asked for such a thing, it would be for his own good, not theirs. How would that be loving them, exactly?
But then he dug a third well, and this time they left him alone, so he knew that’s where God wanted him to be. He called that well Rehoboth, “wide places”, because he said “For now the LORD hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.” When there was strife and contention he couldn’t peacefully resolve within the law, he simply moved on looking for a place where God had “made room” for him.
Remember, you can work and struggle all you want, but… “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain” (Psalms 127:1). If God isn’t with your well, your house, or your job… you’re wasting your time anyway. And if He is… you don’t need to defend it yourself.
LOVING YOUR ENEMIES
The standard Protestant images of love – feeding the hungry, forgiving your enemies, caring for the sick, these are all nice things. But limiting love to these things – the only thing philagaperos can grasp, being inherently external – means missing the bigger picture, as always. Loving your enemies is not really complicated. As you well know, the greatest law is “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” Loving your enemies is simply a reminder to “do unto others… regardless of how they HAVE treated you.”
Jesus left us example in 1 Peter 2:21-23. We are to bless them; which literally means giving them what they need even when they don’t (according to our spirit) deserve it. The heart and spirit want to punish their enemies. To seek their destruction; but a soul should overrule them and insist on doing only good to your enemies, seeking only their good whatever that might be.
If that means to return their lost dog (Exodus 23:4-5) or turn the other cheek, if you would do it for your best friend you must do it for your worst enemy (Psalms 35:13-14). And if you let your hurt feelings get in the way of doing the right thing, you’re not worthy of Jesus. Loving your enemies means doing what, in your judgment, is best for them. Not always what is nicest for them. By that I mean that yes, sometimes loving your enemies is allowing yourself to be defrauded (1 Corinthians 6:7).
But sometimes, it means cursing him with blindness (Acts 13:10-11), or shunning him by putting him out of the church (1 Timothy 1:20), provided those things are good for everyone involved, in particular the sinner. Sometimes, yes, the most good you can do is to be an example of bearing their insults and affliction silently (Matthew 27:12-14). But sometimes the most good you can do for someone is to call the police on them. Because left unchecked, they’ll only commit more crimes and harm themselves and others even more.
Sometimes it is to pray for their health… but sometimes it is to ask God to break their teeth (Psalms 58:6)… but only if it is in the realistic hope they might repent, not just because your heart wants to see them in the same pain they caused you.The situation is always different; what matters is that you do whatever your soul judges will help your enemy the most.
Loving your enemies and blessing them that curse you means doing whatever is best for HIM, regardless of what he is doing to you, or how you feel about him! Cast all that aside, and ask yourself what is BEST for him, and then do it – whether he is lying to you, or throwing you to the lions. Why do you have to do that? Matthew 5:45. Never forget you are being groomed to be a child of God.
This life is a training period where you learn how to get beyond your own emotions and seek the good of others above your own. Not merely to love your enemy as yourself, but to love him more than yourself. What does it mean to be great in God’s Kingdom? Mark 10:42-45. In God’s system the greatest, most powerful people are the servants of all.
Even Jesus came to serve, not to be served. To the world, this means ladling out soup and helping cats out of trees. But the true service a leader does, which is vastly more difficult, is learning to set his emotions aside and seek the good of others before their own; even when they annoy you or even harm you. Because a righteous leader does not have the luxury of indulging in his own emotions.
He has to set them aside and seek the good, try to find out how the law judges this person or situation and then dispassionately do it – whether it is to the rich or poor, your friend or your enemy. Loving your enemies today is training to “be the children of your Father” (Luke 6:35). Whether that means shunning a person and having no company with him, cursing him with boils, giving him a drink, rebuking him for his sins, or helping his donkey down the road. Loving your enemy is no more or less than doing the right thing for him even though he is doing the wrong thing to you.
THE CHAIN OF LOVE
Why did Jesus say there would be very little true love in the end time? Matthew 24:12. Love is made of obedience to God’s law. Without that, agape disappears. Philia doesn’t necessarily grow cold; team spirit is as strong today as ever, and people are more likely to say “the most important thing is family” than ever before. But that’s not true love.
The world’s love looks at 1 Corinthians 13, and tries to force their heart to feel that way. They have the best intentions, but since they don’t really know what love is, they have no choice but to try and fake it, hoping they make it. But no one can learn agape in a day. Agape is the end result of years of learning the law, and applying all of its facets to your heart, spirit, and soul until no part of you would ever consider harming someone else.
The things in 1 Corinthians 13 must develop as the automatic outgrowth of obeying the words of Christ, or it will be worse than no love at all! Trying to become those things as your heart and spirit understand them, is to build your house upon the sand – the opinions of your fellow man! (Matthew 7:24-27). The process of acquiring agape is outlined 2 Peter 1:5-7.
Notice that this is not a buffet of virtues, but a chain of them. You cannot just go grab a helping of patience if you don’t already have faith!Because patience requires you to wait for God to save you… something which the unfaithful will not do! You might be able to show something like patience, that the world will call patience. But true patience will arrive after you have a stable foundation of faith, virtue, knowledge, and temperance. These virtues, like stones in a wall, must be built upon other virtues.
But notice the very last two, at the end of the list, are philadelphia and agape! Because these two are the last to arrive, after mastering faith, knowledge, and temperance! So if you see someone who is “loving”, but doesn’t have the knowledge of God, that love is a lie. If you see a loving person who lacks faith, that is not agape… it is philagaperos. Because love requires you to forgive your enemies… which requires faith that God will judge them.
Love requires you to turn the other cheek, which requires faith that God will protect you! So you cannot have agape unless you first have fairly strong faith! Because if you lack faith, you are by definition fearful… and therefore, by definition, incapable of showing perfect love (1 John 4:18).
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The goal of our heart is to be humbled and faithful. The goal of our spirit is to be meek and truthful. The goal of our soul is to judge wisely and be loving. 1 Corinthians 13:13 (Weymouth) And so there remain Faith, Hope, Love—these three; and of these the greatest is Love. It is the heart which must learn faith – faith that the soul is able to protect it. It is the spirit which much learn meekness – which in this context you might call the hope that the soul is capable of saving it (Galatians 5:5).
But it is the soul which must learn love, which is by far the greatest of the three, for it makes the others possible. True agape love is to treat all men as you would want to be treated, no matter who they are or what they have done to you. That requires a soul that makes judgments about right and wrong in spite of the beast’s pain or the spirit’s anger. In spite of the beast’s eros or the spirit’s philia.
This is something a soul must learn; it must be changed by the law from an inexperienced toddler into a wise and just judge (Psalms 19:7). It must correctly judge right and wrong in every situation, no matter what, so that it can always be relied upon to choose the choice which is good for others. We are to be just judges of our actions. We must hear the beast’s pain, and we must hear the spirit’s desire for vengeance, but we must leave their final judgment, and vengeance, to God. For you cannot make a sinner obey the law.
You can and should observe that they are doing wrong, and opposing themselves, and try to help them see that (2 Timothy 2:25). The world will call this judging (“how dare you judge me!”), but that’s not really what’s happening. You are just determining, based on your own understanding of the law, that they are behaving badly; that they should stop.
But having done that, you cannot control what they do. You can only control your response to what they do. You cannot make them do the right thing – you can only make sure that you do. That is your soul’s sole responsibility (yes, pun intended). I always tell you a single verse that sums up the lesson you’ve just read; but considering how important this one is to God, there are many you could have read and arrived at this conclusion; but I think it’s best summed up in…
1 Peter 1:22 (Philips) Now that you have, by obeying the truth, made your souls clean enough for a genuine love [Philadelphia] of your fellows, see that you do love [agape] each other, fervently and from the heart. Do you see that? Those people had, BY OBEYING THE TRUTH, made their souls CLEAN ENOUGH for a genuine love of their fellows! Because their soul was not able to feel that GENUINE love until it was thoroughly cleansed!
This is why Paul told the Romans that their agape must be unfeigned, not a pretense. Because anyone who seems to show perfect agape days after learning the truth is lying to you, and to themselves. Agape is not possible until you have a clean soul, which is in charge of your members. Agape cannot be shown when a beast is in charge.
It cannot be shown when a spirit is in charge. They can both do nice things, even good things; but agape is, by definition, doing good things for everyone and anyone, and no heart or spirit will do that without their soul’s firm guidance. We established long ago the law of God is a perfect expression of the nature of God. God is completely obedient to His own law, in all senses. And that is why God IS Agape! 1 John 4:8. Because His soul always makes the choice that is good for everyone, not just for Himself.
And that leads us back to what agape actually is, and why it belongs with the soul. Agape IS always making just judgments. The judgments of a heart are always justifying “me”. The judgments of the spirit will always prefer “us” over “them”. Only a wise and just soul is capable of judging every act, every choice, every thought, in light of what is best for everyone, not just “us” or “me”.
When your soul does that, when you have brought every thought into captivity unto the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5), when you can make objective, fair, and merciful judgments about those who are, even then, nailing you to a stake… …then you will finally have fully become agape, and you will be love, as God is love. Because like Him, every decision you make will be made with the good of your fellow man in mind, thus you will make the exact same decisions as love itself would make.