What is Love?

(I originally wrote and posted this to my previous blog 03/08/2007.)

Reading: Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) 7 & 8

Son 8:6 Set me as a seal upon your heart, As a seal upon your arm; For love is as strong as death, Jealousy as cruel as the grave; Its flames are flames of fire, a flame of Yah!
Son 8:7 Many waters are unable to extinguish love, And floods do not wash it away. If one would give all the wealth of his house for love, It would be utterly scorned.

Love is a difficult thing to understand. We all want it, and all too often we take it for granted. The world defines love in ways that may or may not be in harmony with what YHWH teaches us in His Word.

And what about the sad line, "I love you, but I'm not 'in love' with you"? What is 'in love' other than infatuation, and could infatuation be true love? From what I've observed, infatuation doesn't last. Our culture builds a lot on this idea of infatuation as love. It is a gigantic industry with a wide scope from entertainment and fashion to literature and all points in between. But this thing that is called 'love' in reality is a very selfish conditional kind of thing.

When all my dreams of love were shattered, I went back to YHWH and asked Him what love is, and He showed me:

1Co 13:4 Love is patient, is kind, love does not envy, love does not boast, is not puffed up,
1Co 13:5 does not behave indecently, does not seek its own, is not provoked, reckons not the evil,
1Co 13:6 does not rejoice over the unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth,
1Co 13:7 it covers all, believes all, expects all, endures all.
1Co 13:8a Love never fails.

Most believers are familiar with this passage that teaches us what love is. Today I noted the similarity between this passage and the passage in Shir HaShirim above:

• Many waters are unable to extinguish love
• Love never fails

But so many of us have seen 'love' extinguished; we've witnessed the failure of 'love'. So, what is the truth--What YHWH says or what we have witnessed? If we believe that YHWH speaks Truth, then the only conclusion is that what we've seen extinguished or failed was not love.

The King James version translates the word 'love' in 1 Corinthians 13 as 'charity', and I believe that this gives us our biggest clue to what love truly is--

It is something we give to another with no expectation of anything in return.