What is love? It seems to mean just about anything we want it to mean. It’s a decoration for a valentine, a religious symbol, the theme for bump er-stickers, a middle-class value, and the word to use for any passing whim (I’d love to go there!). To different people it will mean different things. Love can be a four letter synonym for LUST or, at best, SELF ; it can also speak of personal sacrifice. The Bible helps us understand love. Not because there is something special wrapped up in the Greek words that are used, but because love is defined and described in both the gospels and epistles. The two basic Greek verbs translated love in the New Testament are phileo and agapao. They both probably meant about the same thing to the man in the street of that day as our word love means to us today. In classical Greek, both could and did mean everything from mere contentment to deep affection. Agapao was not superior in any special way to phileo, save this — it was relatively free from the physical concept of love; it was, above all, quite distinct from the well-known classical Greek word eros (from which we get erotic). But the New Testament writers could not use their Greek words for love without much the same problem we have today. If love can mean affection, delight, satisfaction, or fondness, what does it mean when the Bible speaks of love? First, the Bible defines and describes love. The Greek word is not the key to the meaning nearly as much as the dynamic definitions that are Page 4
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