What is love?

What the Bible says

The Bible does not begin its definition of love with human experience. It begins with God. John writes:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

1 John 4:7-8

"God is love" does not mean that God loves now and then. It means love belongs to who God is. So the source of love is not us but God. "We love because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

What does that love look like? The Bible points to an event.

But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Rom 5:8

John says the same: "By this we know what love is: Jesus laid down His life for us" (1 John 3:16). Jesus himself said, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). So love in the Bible is not first a response to another's worth. It is a love that reaches out while the other is still a sinner, and pays the cost.

Paul describes how this love looks in everyday life.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Cor 13:4-7

Notice that this passage has hardly any words of feeling and almost all words of conduct. Paul ends the chapter, "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor 13:13).

Jesus summed up the whole law in love.

Jesus declared, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Matt 22:37-40

Both commands come from the Old Testament, one from Deuteronomy 6:5 and the other from Leviticus 19:18. Jesus pointed to the center of the law. And this love does not stop with those close to us.

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Matt 5:44-45

The reason given for loving enemies is God himself. He did it first.

The church's witness

Augustine opens his Confessions with a prayer: our heart is restless until it rests in God Augustine, Confessions 1.1.

Augustine spoke of ‘ordered love.’ The fault is not in loving good things but in loving them in the wrong order. Explaining the first commandment, he says:

if aught else present itself for the soul’s love, it should be absorbed into that channel in which the whole current of love runs.

Augustine

Loving God most does not mean loving everything else less. So Augustine can say of loving a neighbor: "Whoso then rightly loves his neighbour, ought to endeavour with him that he also with his whole heart love God" Augustine. He also offers a way to love an enemy: hate the evil in him, but love the good in him that is his as a person Augustine.

Matthew Henry, on 1 Corinthians 13, calls love the opposite of selfishness: "Charity is an utter enemy to selfishness" Matthew Henry. Yet he adds that love does not mean ignoring oneself. It means not seeking one's own good to the hurt of others. On 1 John 4 he warns that anyone who professes love for God yet indulges anger or revenge "gives his profession the lie" Matthew Henry.

In the original languages

The New Testament has several words for love. The most important is agape (ἀγάπη) and its verb agapao (ἀγαπάω). The love in "God is love" in 1 John is agape. It is often presented as a uniquely noble word, but the word itself is ordinary: John uses the verb when people "loved the darkness rather than the Light" (John 3:19). What sets agape apart is what the New Testament writers filled it with: the cross.

Another is phileo (φιλέω), the affection of friends, closeness and warmth. In John 21 Jesus asks Peter three times. The first two times he asks "do you love Me?" with agapao, and Peter answers with phileo: "You know I love You" (John 21:15-17). The third time Jesus also uses phileo. Some see meaning in the change; others think John simply varied his wording. Either way, Jesus accepts Peter's imperfect love and gives him a task: "Feed My sheep."

In the Old Testament the basic verb for love is ahav (אָהַב), the word used in both Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Another word is essential: hesed (חֶסֶד), covenant faithfulness, a love that holds on to the end. God held to Israel with hesed even when Israel wavered. God's love is love faithful to its promises.

Common objections

"Love is just a feeling." There is truth here. Love has joy, tenderness and pain, and a love with no feeling at all seems cold. The Bible does not deny this, and the word phileo shows it. But if love were only a feeling, it would end the moment the feeling faded. Yet the Bible commands love. A feeling cannot be produced on command, but the choice to act for another's good can. In Scripture, action usually comes first and feeling often follows. Loving one's enemy does not mean feeling warm toward him. It means praying for him and doing him good.

"Love is just brain chemistry." Experiments confirm that substances such as oxytocin and dopamine are active when people fall in love or hold a child, and evolutionary accounts explain much about why self-sacrifice for kin and group arose. But saying that something has a bodily side is not the same as saying it is only that. When we solve a math problem or grieve, our brains are chemically active, yet that does not decide whether the thought is true or false. The Bible sees a human being as body and soul together, so it is not surprised that love involves the body. Christians judge, however, that a love like the cross, or praying for an enemy, where neither gain nor pleasure follows, is hard to explain by chemistry alone. This is a judgment, not a proof, about which account better holds the whole of love.

"If it is love, shouldn't everything be accepted?" Today love is often taken to mean approving and allowing anything. But Paul says that love "takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth" (1 Cor 13:6). A parent who lets a child wander toward danger is not a loving parent. Biblical love wants the other to truly flourish, so it sometimes corrects and speaks painful words, aiming at restoration, not condemnation. Nor does "bears all things" mean staying under abuse; stopping evil and protecting oneself and others is also love's work.

Going further

The love the Bible shows starts less with "how much do I love?" than with "how much am I loved?" We can love because God loved first. For someone crushed by the burden of having to love well, this is rest. Love is first received, and then the love received flows on.

You might ask yourself some questions. Can I believe that God loves me? Does the love in my life now depend only on feeling? Who is hard for me to love, and what small thing could I do for that person today?

To read further, see Who is God? and What is grace?.