A Tale of Two Loves
July 17, 2025 | by: Dale Thiele | 0 Comments
Posted in: Pastoral Encouragement
We read our first love story in the Bible in Genesis 24. It is not that love has been absent in the first 23 chapters of the Bible; God’s covenantal love is the undercurrent of all that he does. In chapter 24, however, we read of the first mention of one human explicitly loving another. In 24:67, it says that Isaac loved Rebekah. We never heard such love expressed between Adam and Eve, Noah and his wife, and not even between Abraham and Sarah. I am not saying these other couples didn’t love each other. The Bible just doesn’t record such detail. But it does in Genesis 24 for Isaac and Rebekah. Why?
Explicit in the love story of Genesis 24 is the undercurrent of God’s love for his people. Isaac’s love for Rebekah is supported by and enlivened by God’s covenantal love. In Genesis 24 we learn of the link between God’s love and human love. This story is a vivid illustration of 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” This love story is a tale of two loves: God’s love and human love.
Genesis 24 opens with Abraham sending one of his servants on an errand: find a wife for Isaac from among his kindred back east. When the servant arrives in the land, he prays, “Please grant me success today and show steadfast love to my master Abraham” (v.12). The servant appeals to the “steadfast love” of God for success in finding a wife for Isaac. This term for love is the Hebrew word chesed, used almost exclusively for God in the Old Testament. Bible translations have struggled to translate this word into English, as we don’t have a great equivalent. In the various English translations it is rendered as love, mercy, kindness, lovingkindness, steadfast love, and unfailing love. The Jesus Storybook Bible describes this important Hebrew word with the phrase “God’s never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love.” All these are trying to capture the idea of an active love that pursues one’s good, as opposed to merely an emotional feeling, and a love that is committed through all circumstances. Chesed is God’s covenant commitment to his people actively expressed through kindness.
Already at this early point in the biblical story, God’s people understood that they were utterly dependent on God’s chesed. God’s covenantal love is their only hope of favor with God. Man could not earn God’s favor. So, as Abraham and his servant are looking to the future fulfillment of God’s promises, dependent on the family line continuing, they appealed to God’s chesed. When God answers the servant’s prayer and Rebekah is presented as a favorable wife for Isaac, the servant exclaims, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master” (v. 27). God, in his covenantal love, has provided a wife for Isaac.
The love story concludes with the servant bringing Rebekah, who goes willingly, to Isaac. We read, “And the servant told Isaac all the things that he had done. Then Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her” (v. 66-67). It has all the makings of an arranged marriage. There is no romantic pursuit or dating period or engagement. Isaac meets Rebekah, hears all that the servant did, and takes her to be his wife. “And he loved her.” Isaac has grown up in the same environment that this servant has dwelled in. It has been an environment where God’s promises have shaped all of the family’s hopes and God’s faithfulness has provided for everything. It is an environment where God’s chesed was cherished and trusted. Isaac received Rebekah as an expression of God’s chesed, therefore he loved her as a gift from God.
This is where we begin to see the link between human love and God’s love. We are empowered to love the people in our lives, whether it be a spouse, a family member, a coworker, or a random person with whom we cross paths, when we understand how dependent we are on God’s chesed working all things, including each person, for good in our lives. Our ultimate good is not dependent on the people in our lives; it is dependent on God’s chesed. People are neither the ultimate source for goodness in our lives, nor are they the ultimate threat against our goodness. As we begin to see God’s chesed working in the relationships in our lives, we become free to love the people God places before us. We love because God first loved us.
