Surprised Again
And he said, “I love you, O LORD, my strength.” Psalm 18:2 (Hebrew text)
I Love You – English is a troubled language when it comes to personal relationships. It has plenty of words for the nuances of relationships with things, but it is significantly lacking in words which convey the nuances of deep relationships with people. For example, there are dozens of words describing ownership, property rights, leases, etc. But when it comes to “love,” the same word must suffice for baseball and ice cream and for personal devotion and romance. Not so in Greek or in Hebrew. Greek has four different words to capture the distinctions of love. Hebrew has three. But (surprise, surprise) none of those three words is used in this verse. What David says is not like any of the usual words that capture the meanings of love in Hebrew. That makes David’s statement all the more important – and it leaves us with an even greater vulnerability for misunderstanding.
The usual Hebrew word for love of God is ahav. It carries the idea of the noblest of love’s actions found in relationships of deep devotion and total commitment. Of course, Hebrew also has a word for friendship love (ra’yah) and sexual love (dodh). All three together are only found in the Song of Songs. None are in this psalm.
David says, “er.kham.kha.” The root word is racham – not what we expected. What makes it so unusual is that this is a word that describes compassion and mercy toward someone who is under affliction or is helpless. Now that seems utterly impossible here. David does not have compassion and mercy for God. Just the opposite is true. God has compassion and mercy for David. So, in this verse, racham is better translated as finding compassion and mercy. That makes sense. David experiences God’s mercy when he is rescued from the hand of his enemies, so he cries out to God, “I have found compassion in You.” But how in the world does this get translated, “I love you?”
The answer is the deep connection between our essential helplessness and God’s essential care. Racham is also the word for the womb, an overwhelming physical picture of the love relationship between mother and child. Nothing is more helpless than an unborn child. No human relationship is more deeply connected and more necessary for life than the relationship between a mother and an unborn child. Our contemporary disregard for life, shamefully displayed in abortion “rights”, only underlines how fragile this love really is. God uses the metaphor of pregnancy to express the intensity of His concern for us. When David experiences that degree of compassion, he overflows with emotion. His experience is one of deepest devotion and fidelity toward the One Who cares for him. And that’s what this psalm calls “love.”
Does this cause us to re-evaluate our headlong rush toward love as personal gratification? Does this make us take a step back from our preoccupation with “falling” in love? Is love our abbreviated term for someone else’s obligation to fulfill us, or is it an overflowing gratitude for compassion toward us?
Topical Index: Love
