A Knot in the Stomach

A conversation with a friend this week turned on one word. He uses agape often, and he means it. He spoke of a break with his sister he could not leave alone, of a knot in his stomach that stayed until he went and talked it out with her. Talking is not the hard part for him; he is built that way. The pull to go was. He gave the Spirit the credit for that pull, and he called what he felt agape love.

He has a heart toward God, and that should be said first. Something moved him, and he refused to take the credit for it. The only question worth raising sits under the word itself.

Agape is simply the Greek word for love. It is not the top rung of a ladder. That ladder — storge, philia, eros, agape — was built by Anders Nygren in 1930 and made famous by C. S. Lewis in 1960. Two of its four rungs, eros and storge, never appear in Scripture at all.

The word is also not holy by itself. The same Greek word is used when Amnon wanted Tamar (2 Samuel 13:15 in the Greek), when men “loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19), and when Demas “loved this present world” (2 Timothy 4:10). A word that can carry lust and greed cannot be a grade of holy love.

So what does it mean? A love that is chosen. A love aimed at something. Behind it sits the Hebrew word ahav, and in Hebrew, love and loyalty are one idea. A servant says, “I love my master … I will not go out free” (Exodus 21:5). Yahuah keeps covenant “with them that love him and keep his commandments” (Deuteronomy 7:9).

That is the heart of the word. Agape is allegiance. It ties a man to something and then makes him act like it. It works the same way when the thing is wrong, which is why Demas is described with it: his allegiance was to this present world, and he walked off and served it.

The confusion around the word did not come from nowhere. It came from something true. Across more than two hundred and fifty uses, the apostles lay this word on the highest things — Yahuah’s love toward men, and the love that sends a man out to do His work. Nobody reading straight through misses that. The mistake is in what gets pulled out of it.

What the pattern shows is not a higher love with no strings attached. It shows the opposite. Every time the word lands on something holy, obedience is standing right next to it. “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me” (John 14:21). “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3). The apostles were not describing a love with no conditions. They were describing a love that produces obedience to the One it is aimed at.

Which is why the knot matters. It did not push toward a feeling. It pushed toward an action already written down:

“Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart … thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am Yahuah.” (Leviticus 19:17-18)

He kept that command without looking it up. That is exactly what Yahuah said He would do: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). Put plainly, Yahuah sets His standard inside a man, so the man feels the wrong before he can name the verse it breaks. The knot was that standard at work.

So he was right that such a love comes down from above rather than being worked up from below. What is owed a second look is the word he used, because it did exactly what agape always does. It bound him to Someone, then marched him straight into a commandment out of Leviticus that most who use the word are taught is gone.

The love was real. The word is smaller than he thinks, and the Law standing behind it is larger.