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It Is Written

Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2025: God's Love and Justice

Eric Flickinger

John Peckham

01 God Loves Freely

02 Covenantal Love

03 To Be Pleasing to God

04 God is Passionate and Compassionate

05 The Wrath of Divine Love

06 God’s Love of Justice

07 The Problem of Evil

08 Free Will, Love, and Divine Providence

09 The Cosmic Conflict

10 Rules of Engagement

11 What More Could I Have Done?

12 Love and Justice: The Two Greatest Commandments

13 Love is the Fulfillment of the Law

Welcome to Sabbath School brought to you by It Is Written.

We are taking a journey through a fascinating subject.

We are looking at God's love and justice.

What does God's love really look like and how does that interact with His justice?

This is lesson number 2 out of 13 and today we are looking at covenantal love.

We're going to find out in just a moment.

Father, we want to thank you for bringing us together again and as we study this week's lesson, we ask that you will bless us with a deeper understanding of not just the subject, but of you.

But we're grateful to have with us again this week, the author of this quarter's Sabbath school lesson, John Peckham.

He is an associate editor of the Adventist Review and also a research professor at the Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University.

So we're looking at covenantal love and I wanna kind of begin our dive into this with 2 words, words that I think many Christians are at least somewhat familiar with, they've at least heard before.

They may or may not have a correct understanding of these words for love.

1 of them is agape and the other 1 is phileo.

Help us to understand what these 2 words mean, and maybe some common misconceptions surrounding these words.

Yeah, yeah, most people have probably been taught something like this.

You've probably been taught that agape is a special kind of love that only God has, and all other kinds of love are deficient in some way, or merely human loves.

So often there's a dichotomy put forth between agape, that's God's love for us, which only gives and never receives, according to some conceptions.

And phileo is like a friendship love, it's a back-and-forth love, relational love that humans can engage in.

But actually, the Bible tells a somewhat different story, and I want us to look at the Bible itself so we can see this for ourselves.

So I want to invite you to read from John 14, and in that verse you'll see God's love mentioned in that verse, and the verb that's used throughout there is the verb form of agape in John 14.

All right, so we're going to look at John 14 verses 21 and 23.

Verse 21 says, He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.

Jesus answered and said to him, if anyone loves me he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him." So I want us to notice a few things in those verses, right?

So first of all if somebody would think that agape is only a divine love and never a human love, you're already running into problems in this passage, right?

Because we're talking about a love that is reciprocal love relationship, right?

He who keeps my commandments, it is he who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father." And so you have not only humans engaging in this love, which again is that verb form of agape, but also God responding, that this is a back-and-forth, that God actually somehow evaluatively loves in response, already in John 14 verses 21 and 23.

And so you have this condition in verse 23, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him.

So this is a back-and-forth love relationship using agape all throughout.

So already there we see a misconception that would be cleared up.

Then if we go to John 16 verse 27, we'll see another issue here.

Because as I mentioned before, it's common for people to say that the Greek verb phileo refers to a lesser kind of love.

Sometimes spoken of as brotherly love, but actually that's from a compound term Philadelphia.

That means brotherly love, but it's the the latter part of that compound term that is the brotherly part.

But some say, oh this is a lesser kind of love, it's deficient.

In John 16, verse 27, the verb that's used here of love is phileo, and just notice what it says, for the father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came forth from God.

Now that sounds almost identical in teaching to what we read in John 14, right?

But here we have the phileo verb that is used.

And so immediately from this verse you should know that whatever else phileo means, it is not necessarily a deficient kind of love.

Because God himself loves us with that kind of love according to this text and God's love is never deficient.

And actually what we find throughout the Bible is that there is no unique term for God's love.

God's love is the greatest and most generous and perfect love, not because of the word that's used, but because God, who is the 1 who gives it.

In fact, the root of agape can refer to anything from the most generous, noble, wonderful kind of love, to something that we wouldn't even describe as love itself.

To give an example of this, kind of a sad example, in the Old Testament translation into the Greek known as the Septuagint, you have the common word for love used in the story of Amnon and Tamar.

And if anyone's not familiar with that story, you have this horrible story of 1 of David's sons, Amnon, who claims to be in love with his half-sister, Tamar.

And he says over and over again, I love her.

But actually in the story, it's really nothing more than a rapacious lust.

And then in the story, he actually takes her by force in a horrible, horrible example.

Obviously, this is nothing close to love.

But the Greek word that's used there throughout that story to translate the term for love is agape.

And the Hebrew term in the original Hebrew is the main term for love in the Old Testament.

And it just shows you there's a broad range of these terms.

And it's not the term itself that is describing a special kind of love.

The special kind of love is actually because the agent, who is God himself, and it's his kind of love.

But there again, there's all kinds of misconceptions that come from a number of theologians in past ages who had a particular view of God who can't enter into back-and-forth relationship.

And so they thought of God's love as just unilateral.

When they thought of agape love, they thought of love that only gives and never receives because God isn't supposed to receive anything.

But in the Bible there's actually a back and forth.

It's always asymmetrical because God is always the great lover, the source of love.

We don't deserve love, we can never merit it, but we can respond to it.

We can enter into real relationship with God and that's what God calls us into and draws us into throughout the biblical story.

You know that's actually where I want to go with my next question.

This idea of God being a relational God and not just a unilaterally loving God.

What does that help us to understand, or how does that help us to understand our responsibility to reflect God's love back to Him?

So whenever we talk about the back-and-forth relationship, and even when we talk about that there's even some conditionality in relationship, which we'll talk about more, more extensively later.

We need to first emphasize the fact that all love starts with God, right?

So Jeremiah 31.3, God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love.

Therefore, with loving kindness, I have drawn you." Right?

And so it's God who is drawing us into love relationship before we ever love Him in the first place.

And 1 John 4, 19 just says, we love because He first loved us.

We cannot just originate it in ourselves.

And so this is a universal love that is given to everyone.

But I refer to it as a universally relational love because it's love that calls everyone into relationship because God will never force his love on anyone.

In fact, love itself by nature requires it to be freely given and freely received.

Like even if I could control someone else's mind, I wouldn't be able to make them love me.

I might be able to make them think they love me.

I might be able to make them respond in all the ways, external ways, that love typically responds.

No, because love must be freely given and freely received.

And so God pours out this love prior to any conditions, unmerited, on all people to draw us all into relationship with Him.

But we have a choice whether to respond to that, whether to enter into that relationship with Him.

He's looking for that back and forth between Him and us, for it to be genuine, for it to be authentic.

I'm going to read a passage here in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 7, verses 6 through 9, and help us to understand this relational aspect, this covenantal love from this passage.

It says, for you are a holy people to the Lord your God.

Series

Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2025: God's Love and Justice

02 Covenantal Love

Transcript

Parent Series

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Recorded

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