Who was God Before He was Agape? Part One

I'd like to start this afternoon with what I'm sure will appear as a strange question. But here it goes. Who was God before he was agape? I told you it was a strange question, wasn't it? Now, as your mind reels off, where is he going and why did he ask the question and what's this all about, I'm sure there are some of you, as you heard the question, who was God before he was agape? Your mind would have flitted over to any one of the group of Scriptures that say, wait a minute, God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He's always the same. I'm sure that for some of you, your minds would have probably gone over to God's dialogue with the priests back in the end of Malachi, where he simply told them, he said, I don't change. Or as it says in the New King James, I change not. I'm not variable. Or because of the word I just used, James 1.17, where James says about God in whom there is no variableness. Simply a different way of saying the same thing. And it reminds me, even though the word is the verses about Jesus Christ in Hebrews chapter 13 verse 9, what you say about God the Father you can also say about Christ. It reminds me of one of the apostles who said, show us the Father in Christ's response to the Lord. And I think the response was, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. Not speaking of physical appearance as he was of character, position, attitude, thinking. And as Hebrews 13.8 says about Jesus Christ, he's the same yesterday, today, and forever. So what are we talking about? Who was God before he was Agape? Agape is a Greek word that wasn't originally used in the way that it is understood, believed, taught, and preached today. In fact, it has quite a history, and we'll walk through that particular history. This is going to be a two-part sermon, and in this part we will look at Agape, its history, how it came to be what it is, and then the next sermon we will deal with who God was before he was Agape.

The God before Agape became a term to describe him from the Gospels all the way through to Revelation, with something else in the view and in the mind and in the language of those people who were taught about God. God described himself by a particular term. He described David and other notable Old Testament patriarchs by the same term. The same term described the attributes that he was looking for in those who were his followers. The same term was also encased in the covenant as the pivot point that determined whether or not Israel would survive or whether it would fail. And interestingly enough, as you move through the Old Testament, you eventually get to the prophets, and in the prophets they were inspired to write that that same term would describe God in the Millennial Kingdom. And in the Bible, it's an interesting study that we will get to next week after we walk through Agape. The key takeaway of both sermons is very simple. In looking at who God describes himself, we are taught how to lead our own lives. The Apostle Paul said, imitate me as I imitate Christ. In light manner, as we imitate Christ, we are taught that God is the Father. And so the question is, how do we look like him? Let's look at Agape's journey.

The classical Greek language was spoken in Greece before the time of Alexander the Great. At that particular time, Agape was simply not even on the radar. It was a term that wasn't, for all intents and purposes, a part of classical Greek. As it journeyed along to its journey to become one day the highest form of love in the New Testament, it passed through multiple stages.

William Barkley, in his New Testament words, under the chapter on Agape and Agapan, states, quote, Agape is not a classical word at all. It is doubtful if there is any classical instance of it, unquote. So prior to Alexander the Great, when classical Greek was the Greek of the Greek world, Agape simply, as Barkley said, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist in the language. The verb form did, rarely, but the noun form just simply wasn't there. When Alexander conquered the world of Greece, the Middle East, and the Middle East, the Greek was not there. Alexander conquered the world of Greece, the Middle East, all the way to the shores of India.

He united that particular world with a common Greek language, a language referred to as Koine Greek, and it became the common language of all of the conquered peoples. As Vine states in the beginning, introduction to his Vine's dictionary of Old and New Testament words, Greece effectively wiped out the cultures and the civilizations of Babylon, Persia, and Egypt and replaced them with Hellenism. The only society he didn't totally transform was that of the Jews. But in doing so, a common language was necessary, and that common language was Koine Greek.

The New Testament writers, as they quoted scripture, quoted from a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint. And somewhere in the 200s B.C., a Jewish community of scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, began translating the Old Testament into Greek so that the Greek world could understand the Hebrew Scriptures. And as the world as a whole was moving toward Greek as its common language, it was a practical move to turn the Old Testament into a Greek volume. The translation took well over 100 years. It was a long, tedious process, beginning, as most believe, in the middle of the 200s and going all the way into the middle of the 100s B.C.

before the completion of that particular task. In translating the Old Testament into Greek, the translators of the Old Testament simply took the common Old Testament word for love and translated it into agape. And so as they walked through the Old Testament, fundamentally, when they came to the word love, ahab or aheb, in Hebrew, they simply translated it as agape. Now, I think all of us understand that agape today is, as we walk through the Bible and we read the 200 and some occurrences of the noun and the verb form of that word, the expression of the highest form of love of God, the encouraged, highest level of love practiced by humans.

And so we're looking at the epitome. We're looking at the very top. When the Greek scholars translated the Old Testament into Greek, agape didn't mean anything different to them than love means to us today. You and I, when we walk about in our society, if we're being familial, we'll say, I love my wife and I love my children. If we're being patriotic, we'll say, I love my country or I love my state. On Saturdays and Sundays, we say, I love my college or professional football team. When we buy a new car, we say, I love my new pickup or I love my new SUV.

If we've got a dog or a cat, we love our pet. And so love gets spread over all of the realm of things that, when you come right down to it, you say, well, what do they have in common? My wife, my children, my city, my state, my country, my football team, my pet, my car. The only thing they share in common is they all elicit an emotional response.

And that's what the word in Hebrew basically revolved around. What things make you breathe a little faster and makes your pulse rise a little higher than normal, that equaled love. Love, as the Jewish writers of the Septuagint translated it, cover an entire range of things that are honorable and decent to things that are abominable and illicit. It wasn't but a couple of weeks ago that one of the messages that was given involved the surroundings around the violation of the sons of Israel's sister, Dinah, by Shechem.

If you went back to Genesis 34, verse 3, it said in the Septuagint of Shechem that he was attached to the soul of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and he spoke kindly to the damsel. Now this is a young woman that he had violated, but that was labeled as love. We go from that realm all the way to the opposite end, a principle, a very lofty principle of human conduct embedded in the Old Testament and repeated in Matthew by Jesus Christ.

Leviticus 19, 18 says, And thy hand shall not avenge thee, and thou shalt not be angry with the children of thy people, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord. Just as Shechem agape'd Dinah, so God said we are to agape our neighbor. The great command, You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength, from Deuteronomy 6 for 5, agape.

And so we see agape used in the same high, honorable way that it is used by New Testament writers. But in contradistinction, we see it used of some of the worst acts. One of the worst of all is in 2 Samuel 13, verse 1, which reads, and this is regarding the violation of one of David's daughters by one of his sons.

And it happened after this that Absalom, the son of David, had a very beautiful sister, and her name was Tamar. And Ammon, the son of David, loved her. And he said to her, What ails thee, that thou art weak, O son of the king, morning by morning you will not tell me.

And Ammon said, I love Tamar, the sister of my brother Absalom. As you go along, after he had had his way with Tamar, it then proceeds to the place where it says, Of this same man who said, I love Tamar, it only takes a couple of verses before it says, He hated Tamar. Nothing but pure, raw passion. And yet it was agape. When we come to the prophets, we see a very different picture. We see the abstract in Psalms and in Proverbs, where they speak of loving the law, of loving wisdom, of loving instruction.

All of these again, agape. Ecclesiastes 5 verse 10 talks about, He that loves silver shall not be satisfied with silver, and He who loves gain in the abundance thereof. He said, this is all vanity. The prophets talked about loving their idols, agape, about loving the worship of the idols.

Agape. And so in the days of the translation of the Old Testament into the Greek language, agape, for all intents and purposes, as you can see by the illustrations I've given, meant nothing different than the way we commonly use the word love in the English language today. Any and everything you like, any and everything that you enjoy, every and anything that you want, I love.

During the Gospel period, as we move another hundred years forward, during the Gospel period, it still had not evolved to the place where it is once we arrive at the writings of Paul and the writings of John, primarily. Peter and James also mention it, but ever so briefly in comparison to the dozens of occurrences in the writings of Paul and the massive condensed use of the term agape by the Apostle John in 1 John. But when we're in the Gospels prior to the beginning of the New Testament church, love is still used at that point in time in the same way that it was used a hundred years earlier when the translators of the Septuagint were in the last stages of translating the Old Testament into Greek. Turn with me and watch the last vestiges in this particular case. Turn with me and look at the last vestiges of using agape in its Koine form. Luke 11. Among those condemnations that Jesus Christ heaped upon the Pharisees and the Sadducees is one that's recorded in Luke 11. This is one of those sections that if your Bible has labels, it probably labels it as woe to the Pharisees or woe on the Pharisees. And so beginning in verse 37 of Luke 11, Christ begins a series of woes upon the Pharisees. And we arrive at verse 43 where it says, And so here Jesus Christ is recorded, and the writer of Luke used the word agape for that prideful, arrogant attitude of, I want the most prestigious, most visible seat, the most honorable seat, the one that people walk by and they bow to because they realize that I am sitting in the important place. And I love to strut in public where everybody says, well, who is that? Oh, that's so-and-so. Well, he's important, and they act accordingly. Agape. In the book of John, John 12, again in some of Christ's teachings as recorded by John, in John 12 beginning in verse 41, so it's referencing back to a quotation from Isaiah in the previous verse. It was about Christ.

So now it transitions to the fact that among the Jewish leaders of Christ's day, there were people like Nicodemus, and there were people like Joseph of Arimathea, and there were people who were less honorable than either one of these but also had a leaning of preference toward Christ. But because of the Pharisees, they did not confess him lest they should be put out of the synagogue, for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God. So again, love is connected to something that is not honorable, deferring to men's opinion rather than obeying God first. The last example I'd like to give you is in John chapter 3, because John chapter 3 provides us a most interesting illustration. What we're going to find as we move along is that the word agape, like many other things in the Greek language, is an abstract term. The Hebrews by nature were a people whose language was built around the concrete. The Greeks by nature had a language that was built around the abstract. And when you deal in abstract terms, if I say love, if I simply walked out and talked to a group of a dozen people across the street at the college, and I said, I'm going to speak a word and you tell me what comes to mind. I know that I'm going to get a range of responses, and they're the kind of responses that I've just illustrated to you. They're not focused, because the word love is abstract, and it is what does it evoke? Oh, I really love a good pizza. I would love to have a milkshake. Whatever happens to be on your mind at the time that is desirable, you can attach the word love to. And so in the New Testament, as the New Testament writers moved into literally redefining the term, because of its abstraction, you need to add, for instances, words like, like. Words like as. We're a little wordier, we will say for instance, but they're all doing the same thing. John 3 16 for the last century was the most quoted scripture in all the Bible, and it centers on Agape. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Here was an opportunity for us to say, now we take the skeleton, Agape, and we put some meat on the bones. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, and now we're defining what love is. Every one of us who loves a son or a daughter or a wife or a husband can immediately, emotionally attach ourself to what it would feel like to have to give up that person that we treasure with all our heart. For the sake of somebody else.

Now it's no longer an abstract thought. Now it's a powerful, emotional, connected thought. And from that, ministers and preachers and writers for who knows how long have preached about sacrificial love as an element of the definition of Agape. Because here it is. Here is a sacrificing of something that is more valuable to me than anything in the world that I am giving up because I care about you.

We can all connect to that. We can all grasp that. But you know what's interesting? As I said, the Gospels were a transitional period. It had not arrived yet. I just read to you John 3 16, for God so, and you'll pardon the anglicizing of the term, for God so, quote, agape'd the world that He gave His only begotten Son. But we go down to verse 19, and this is the condemnation that the light has come to the world and men agape'd darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. Same word. Same word. In John 3 16, used at the highest level that it's going to be used in the whole New Testament.

Three verses later, used in a very corrupt, negative manner of men who love to do the things that are wrong. They delight in doing what is wrong. They agape doing what is wrong. As I said, it is primarily Paul and John that turn agape into the highest form, not of love in this regard, the highest form of church speak. What may not be obvious as we walk through our New Testament, and we simply delight in the culture that is there, is that agape, as we use it, is truly, genuinely one of the highest forms of church speak.

Much the same as if you and I use the word feast, we use it in a way that society outside of this building wouldn't even grasp. In fact, I'm not even sure if we were talking to a Jewish body that we'd be on the same page. Because even though we recognize everything from the first holy day of Unleavened Bread until the last great day as feasts, when we use the feasts commonly, we say, well, where are you going to the feast this year?

We're not talking about Passover. We're not talking about the days of Old Bread. We're not talking about Pentecost. We, in church speak, will use the term feast for the Feast of Tabernacles. We recognize all the rest of them are feasts, but our church speak says, where are you going to the feast this year? Where were you for the feast? I wonder when they're going to put out the announcement about the feast sites.

And all of those terms are—that's church speak. We have talked about all the years that I've been in the church about, quote-unquote, the work. The term the work is church speak. Outside of us, if you walk up to somebody and you say, let's talk about the work, and he'd probably ask you, well, what are you? An electrician? A plumber? A programmer? No, no, no. We didn't want to talk about the work.

Not what you do for work. We want to talk about the work. And you'd get this quizzical look like, what's this person talking about? What I say agape is pure, unadulterated New Testament church speak. That's not a diminishing of it. It is a refining of it to fit those times and to teach and lead and guide a people in a way that the culture around them simply could not. As they opened their Septuagint Bible, which is, if they had an Old Testament, and by this particular point in time, by the time of Christ, most Jewish people could not speak Hebrew.

They couldn't read Hebrew, they couldn't write Hebrew, and most of them couldn't speak Hebrew. They'd been speaking Aramaic ever since the Persians controlled them. And so they were in that position of time where their common language at home was probably Aramaic. The language of commerce would have been Greek. There's a degree of challenge in giving agape its new exclusive New Testament meaning, and it was cultural in nature. And we get a peek at that culture in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. I've already given you a tip in that regard, but let's turn back to 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and take it further.

As Paul is talking to a sophisticated congregation in a cosmopolitan city in Greece, he says to this Corinthian congregation as a part of his greater discussion. He simply makes a comment, and I don't know about you, but this particular comment has rolled around in my mind with a certain fascination and wonder for decades. I can't even tell you the first time that I looked at this particular verse and said, I would really like to know how far you can plumb below the surface of this verse before you get to the bottom.

It's 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 22 where he says simply to his audience, the Jews require a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom. Two very, very different cultural mindsets. To highly simplify it, one, very comfortable and happy with abstraction. The other, asking, tell me how it works. Tell me what it does. Tell me what to do. And viewing life through those lenses. As the apostles, especially the apostle Paul, who upon his commission was given in a commission which ended up being primarily to the Gentiles, but if you go back to Paul's conversion, he was sent to both Jew and Gentile.

He stated eventually that, I got the boot from so many synagogues that I went to where I had an ear, and he ended up being by label the apostle of the Gentiles. But his commission was wider than just that. It wasn't, Paul, you have this world and this world only, and don't step into the other one.

But in trying to teach a Gentile world, you're teaching a world that lives in a world of abstraction, and their teachers were born, raised, and bred in a world where things were more concrete. So what do you do? The only way to solve the problem is by doing what we described for a moment in John 3.16. You simply have to take a term that the mind of the listener can take in a dozen different directions, and you have to harness that mind and bring it in, and channel it into a very, very narrow channel and keep it there.

And as Paul wrote his epistles, as John wrote his letters, even as John wrote the Gospel, because as we all know, John marched to a different drumbeat than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. If any of you have a harmony of the Gospels, you will see Matthew, Mark, and Luke being side by side by side, page after page after page after page, and then every so often up comes a chapter of John.

And sometimes all four of them are together, but there are a lot of times where the only thing being quoted is John. Every year when we have the Passover and we arrive at John 13 and 14, we can't go anywhere else because nobody else recorded what John did in John 14. And so John, as he was writing his Gospel and as Paul was writing the epistles, we're in a position of using agape in a very narrow sense.

It is John alone in the Gospel writers who records Christ's words and the powerful statement about agape that we see in John chapter 14. Turn back to the chapter we read every year at the Passover. In John chapter 14, we'll read a verse that removes all abstract qualities from the word agape. Jesus Christ said to his disciples in John 14 and verse 15, if you agape me, keep my commandments.

You know what that does? Simultaneously, it removes all abstraction, and it also removes the emotion. Because every single solitary one of us in keeping all of God's commandments have had times where our emotions and our passions want to go one way. And the only thing that keeps us from going that way is our devotion to God and the calling that he has given us and the conversion that he has provided us. And if it weren't for those things, direction would take us a totally different way. So when Jesus Christ said to his disciples that Passover evening, if you love me, equals keep my commandments.

You walk through the second half of the Ten Commandments, murder, adultery, false witness, and covet. The normal carnal human mind does not keep those things because they passionately desire to go those ways when challenged.

They obey those commandments when challenged emotionally because of their calling, their conversion, and their devotion to God. 1 John 5 Written quite a bit later, if the people who assign dates to different portions of the New Testament are anywhere close, they say that John wrote the Gospel of John about the same time as Paul was writing some of his epistles. But when we get to the letters of John, we're at a later time. In 1 John 5, John has this ability to be just as blunt as a 2x4 between the eyes. There are times where John can be very abstract, but there are times where John is so blunt that there's no way to miss what he's saying. And verse 3 of 1 John 5 is one of those cases, for this is the love of God. So John says, I'm defining for you what agape is, that we keep his commandments. So he does a very simple mathematical equation. Love of God equals keeping the commandments. We all understand, and I think if somebody is put in a false position, it's unfair to them, that anyone who loves God in the way that God wants him to love him is not passionless, is not emotionless. But if all you have is emotion, then you don't have love. So those who truly love God love him because they do what he says equals love, and they are happy to, they're joyful to, and they rejoice in doing it. So it isn't a matter. You put one on one side and one on the other side. They are coupled. But the driver, the driver is not emotion. The driver is not passion. We saw what the driver was in the Septuagint. I violated a young woman, and I call that love. I worship idols, and I call that love. I do this and I do that, and I do something else, and I call them all love. The New Testament writers were picking a term and said, we are going to turn a term into the property of the New Testament by definition. We're going to remove all the other definitions. We're not going to talk about Eros. We're not going to talk about Philia. We're not going to talk about sexual passion or about buddies. We're going to talk in a much narrower framework.

As I said, commandment-keeping isn't always positive. It isn't always emotionally passionate. At times, it's a very hard choice that makes you stop and say, which way am I going to go? It's not a whole lot different than when Christ came to Peter in John 6, and he'd offended everybody by saying, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. He said, Peter, they're all heading for the exit.

What are you going to do? Peter said, I don't have anywhere else to go because you have the words of truth. This came down to what you're saying is true, and I don't have a choice. If I'm going to honor and respect what is true, I don't have a choice but to stay here. As we walk through Paul's writings, we watch Paul further reduce the level of abstraction. I'm covering territory that has been covered in the last month or two, so these are not new areas. They've been plowed recently, but the context that we're seeing them in today, of course, is a different context.

So we saw what John did in John 3.16, where at this particular point in time in John 3.16, during the Gospel period, while it was still possible to use agape for pride, arrogance, status-seeking, it was also used in the highest form of God's love for mankind and the willingness to give His Son as a sacrifice for them. We saw the concreteness at the Passover, where Christ said, you know, you go through John 14, and love is a fairly prominent aspect of John 14. Love one another. The Father loves me. I love the Father.

And as we're talking about love in all of these contexts, as my disciples, you need to understand that if you really do love me, then you'll keep my commandments. That will demonstrate to me that you actually do have agape. And if you don't, then you can use the word all you want, but it'll have no meaning, and you won't be using it in the sense that the New Testament uses it.

When we go back to 1 Corinthians 13, 1 Corinthians 13 is an absolutely phenomenal example of reducing abstraction. We refer to it as the love chapter. And yet, without the Apostle Paul saying, here's what it looks like. I don't know... I'll go sideways very, very briefly. I don't know how many of you have a volume similar to Vines' expository dictionary of Old and New Testament words. But I find it always a bit amusing when I walk through Vines, and I'm searching for something. At a subconscious level, Vines is telling us the truth of 1 Corinthians 1.22. Because you go to the Greek side, and if you're not already aware of it, all of us think like Greeks.

Greece set the stage for all of the cultures that proceeded from it going westward. The Romans picked up the culture. Europe picked up the culture. We are simply the most current generation of people who think like Greeks. So when I go to the Greek side of Vines, except for the fact it's dealing with Greek, it's like reading Webster's dictionary.

A to Z in alphabetical order with the pronunciation of the word and the multiple definitions and where those definitions are found. And I'm right at home. I'm as comfortable as I can be if I'd reached down in a drawer and picked up my old Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. But I go to the Hebrew side, and for somebody that thinks the way we do, it's a frustrating side to go to because an awful lot of words are not there.

And probably more words than not start with the preposition to. So if you're looking up love, you're not going to find love. You're going to find up to love. If you look up obey, it's to obey. If you look up this, it's to that. The reason is very simple. The Jew is asking, what is the action? What is the roll up my sleeves and do it?

And so you go to the Jewish side, and time and time again as you go through the pages, to this, to this, to this, to this, to this. Because it's saying, let me tell you how to do it. Let me tell you how to apply it. The Greek simply says, here's the word. Here's what the word means. And now you fill in the blanks as to how it applies.

Paul did such a fabulous job in 1 Corinthians 13. I'm going to go first of all straight to where he defines love. And notice it's virtually all do. Love suffers long. Verse 4, 1 Corinthians 13, verse 4. He starts out with love suffers long. It's kind. And then he works, and then from there he moves into do's. Love does not envy. Love does not parade itself.

It's not puffed. Does not behave rudely. Does not seek its own. Is not provoked. Thinks no evil. Does not rejoice in iniquity. But rejoices in the truth. And then we go on from there to bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Notice the preponderance of do. How do I know whether you love? Paul is saying, because I can see what you do. So I walk through here. I just do's and don'ts. Verse 6, I don't rejoice in iniquity. I don't celebrate when somebody does something bad. I don't rejoice in wicked conduct. I don't rejoice in arrogance and hotiness. That's what I don't do.

Now, don't doing that demonstrates that I grasp what love is from God's perspective. So all of the don'ts are simply the backside of the coin. If I don't do that, it tells me what I do understand. Does not behave rudely. Nobody likes to be treated rudely.

I remember, and by and large, from my experience, this is no critical study. It's just a personal observation. By and large, in my study, an era has passed. But at the height of feminism, there have been times where I've walked up to a department store door, and there was a lady coming up, and I took the door and I opened it.

And I got a scowl that said, Don't you dare ever try that again. And I thought, you know, that scowl is your problem. My not opening the door for you is my problem. So I will open the door whether you like it or not. Now, if I knew in advance that was what the person's attitude was, I would respect them, and I wouldn't open the door.

But I mean, when I walk up to a door, and there's a lady, I open the door. And if I get a scowl, I think to myself, if we could play that all over again, and I still didn't know your attitude, I'd still walk up to that door and open it. Because to me, not opening that door was being rude. I haven't had that kind of response over a decade.

It's nice to walk up to a door, open it, and have a lady smile at you and say genuinely and sincerely, thank you. But Paul says, you don't act rude. You don't treat people rudely. And so Paul was telling a sophisticated Greek city, let me define for you love in the church. I'm not going to define for you love in the Septuagint, and I'm not going to define for you love in Greece following the reign of Alexander the Great.

I'm going to define for you love. And of course, you're aware of the fact that every time I'm using the English word love, I mean agape. I don't need to say agape every time to the place where it makes you numb. But he was telling the Greeks, I'm going to define for you what it is to God.

I'm going to define what it is for you as a Christian. I'm going to define it in concrete terms of how you walk day in, day out. You know, the greatest challenge in transforming a life from a way that you don't want to walk to a way that you do want to walk is that all of us live in the instant.

We live in the moment. We don't get a chance to see a movie of what's going to be ahead of us so that we can adapt our conduct according to what we'd like it to be. And usually it's only after our conduct has not been what we want it to be, and we're not happy about it that we stop and reflect upon the fact that this is not who I want to be.

This isn't how God tells me I should be, and I want to change it. But we don't get to see life coming at us in advance, in slow motion, so that we can think. We act the way spontaneously we act. And sometimes it demonstrates the love of God, and sometimes, like Paul said, the things I want to do I don't do. And I'm not happy about that. So Paul is giving them concrete ways that love can actually be identified when you look at a human being and say, Does that human being love? And you say, okay, let me see. Verse 4, love suffers long. Do you put up with things that your mind says, I shouldn't have to put up with this?

Do you have those times where you put up with something not because you want to put up with it, and not because you even think it's fair to put up with it, but because you believe that God says you should put up with it? I know those are three options. Is kind. Most people are kind. Unless something's gone wrong in their life, something's gone haywire. Most people you run across in life, if you say hello, you get a pleasant response.

You don't get a scowl, a sour response from most people. So kind is easier. Does not envy? That one's not as easy. We have a society built around commercials that are all designed to convince you that you need something, that you deserve something, and that you should have something. Envy is built into the highest and most sophisticated level of commercial life. It does not parade itself. It's not arrogant or puffed up, as the new King James says.

And so we walk through all of these. Before that, he talked about areas that people can confuse with love and may have absolutely nothing to do with it at all. There are people, especially during particular times in history, that have showcased giving all of your wealth away. And Paul says, you can do all of that and it means nothing. If you go back to a distant mirror as a good example of a historical period where people of great wealth gave all of their wealth away just before they knew they were going to die in order to buy their way into heaven.

There was no love involved in that. This was all me, me, me, me, me. I'm not going to be around much longer to enjoy it, so let me get a quick pass and a VIP seat in heaven. During the protest periods that Mr.

Sexton alluded to very briefly, one of the most powerful messages, visual messages, in the world of photojournalism was a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire, sitting in the middle of the street. He was in his yellow orange robe. Is that love? So Paul walked through things that you can do these.

They don't necessarily mean you love. They may have a phenomenal impact, but they don't necessarily mean that you love. You know, Paul then took it, and again, all of these have been touched on in messages over the last couple of months. If you go back to Ephesians 5, and I'm not going to take you there because you all know it, we went through it, where it talks about the love of a husband for a wife. Now Paul doesn't, in Ephesians 5, where he talks about husbands love your wives, the word arrows, passion, doesn't occur because you don't have to work on that one.

That's automatic. You were attracted to somebody. That attraction was an automatic. But love, agape, well, that's something different. Something totally different. And Paul simply put it in a way that a man can understand. That love your wife as you love yourself. Now, you don't have to stop and think about that. He said, everybody knows how they love themselves. That everybody loves himself. So stop and think about how you love yourself, and then love your mate the same way. And so you want to do something, and your mate doesn't want to do it.

Is it a world of give and take? Or is it always my way or no way? I want to go here, but I want to go here. Okay. If you love each other, there are times where you say, okay, let's go your way one way, and let's go my way the next way, or let's sit down and talk and find a way we both want to go.

But Paul talked about agape, and it had nothing to do with romance. It had to do with day in and day out life. Women take care of men's laundry and their ironing and their food preparation, and men take care of an endless honeydew list, and both of them do those things because they love each other, because they respect each other, and because they care about each other.

Nothing passionate about fixing this or fixing that. Nothing really passionate about washing dirty clothes and ironing. They're all simply a function of, I care about you and you care about me, and we demonstrate it by what we do. In this brethren, the New Testament writers transformed a Greek word, agape, that, Barkley said, was nearly invisible in classical Greek, which was later used by the Jewish scholars who wrote the Septuagint in the same broad, indiscriminate way that we use the word love today, meaning anything that I have ever seen.

I have feelings about, I can attach the word love and brought it all down once they began dealing with the church as a body to a word that became the property of the New Testament church. I said this was a two-part sermon, and so next time I speak, in contrast to all of this, for well over a thousand years in times past, the Hebrew-speaking world was taught all the same principles that you'll find in the New Testament. There's really not a principle that you find in the New Testament that you don't find already embedded in the Old Testament, but they were taught all of those same principles but under a different word.

It was a word, as I said earlier, that described who God respected. It was a word that described what God valued. It described what He wanted to be sunset—what He wanted to see done in the covenant relationship. And it was a word that He even used to define Himself.

What was the term? Well, it's interesting because we don't speak Hebrew or think in the Hebrew manner that it flies completely under the radar. I sat down just out of curiosity to see how many of our hymns contain—if those hymns were in Hebrew. So all I had to do was go to Strong's and look at the words, and it would apply only to the Old Testament hymns in our hymnal. Forty-two of those hymns contain that term. We sing about it regularly. We sing hymns that we've been singing as long as the Church of God in this era has existed. And we repeat those words over and over. Now, we're singing them in English, so we don't sing agape when we sing a hymn. We sing love, but we know the word behind it. Next sermon, we'll talk about the word behind it. It sits in some of the most well-known places in the New Testament that we normally read for another reason, and don't even realize that as we're reading it for one reason, that embedded in what we're reading is this quality that God says is make or break. Same is true with the millennium. It appears over 480 times in the Old Testament, and so it is sprinkled from Genesis to Malachi. Next sermon, we'll explore the term. The Hebrew term that we will look at next sermon is the term tzedek.