Love That Will Not Let Go

חֶסֶד

chesed (ḥesed)

steadfast love; covenant loyalty; lovingkindness; mercy. The love that has bound itself by a promise and will not take it back.

LAMENTATIONS 3:22 · EXODUS 34:6 · PSALM 136

A man is sitting in the ashes of everything he loved. Jerusalem is rubble. The temple is burned. He has watched mothers go hungry, and the city he wept over has been reduced to a ruin smoking against the sky. He is, by a fair margin, the saddest man in the Old Testament, and the little book he is writing is called Lamentations, and you would not expect to find one bright word in it. Then, in the exact middle of the wreckage, he says this:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. – Lamentations 3:22–23

He did not stumble into those lines by accident. Lamentations is built as a careful acrostic, poem stacked on poem, and this one confession of hope sits dead in the center of the middle poem, the structural heart of the whole grief. Even the architecture is preaching.

He is standing in the worst week of his life, and he reaches for one word to hold onto. The English calls it steadfast love. The Hebrew is chesed, and there is no good single word for it in our language. That is the first thing worth knowing about it.

The Word

Steadfast love. Lovingkindness. Loyal love. Covenant faithfulness. Mercy. The translators come at it with a fistful of words and still walk away short, and that is not a failure of their skill. It is the size of the thing. When Miles Coverdale sat down in 1535 to put the Psalms into English, he met this word and found that the language had no vessel big enough to carry it. So he took two ordinary words that had never been joined and welded them into a new one: loving-kindness. He had to invent a word. That should tell you something about chesed.

And here is where we owe the word the same care we owed the mercy seat. You do not measure chesed by cracking it open for its parts. You measure it by watching the company it keeps. Even in Lamentations, it arrives with a companion at its elbow: the “mercies” that never come to an end, right beside it, are a different Hebrew word again, rachamim, the tenderness a mother feels in the womb. Chesed keeps that kind of company. But the company it keeps most faithfully of all is covenant. Chesed is not a warm feeling that comes and goes with the weather. It is love that has bound itself by a promise. Love that has signed its name. Affection and obligation fused into one unbreakable thing: I have given you my word, and I will not take it back. Strip the covenant out of it, and you are left with sentiment. Leave the covenant in, and you have the love that held Jeremiah up in the ashes.

The Name He Gave Himself

Where did the word come from? It came out of the mouth of God, describing God. On Sinai, after Israel had already betrayed Him with a golden calf while the ink on the covenant was barely dry, Moses asked to see His glory. And God answered, not with thunder, but with a sentence about His own character:

The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin… – Exodus 34:6–7

Abounding in chesed. When the Almighty is asked to define His own glory, this is the word He chooses. Not power, though He holds all of it. Not bare holiness, though He is holy, holy, holy. He names Himself by His steadfast love. And He says He keeps it “for thousands,” to a thousand generations, which is the Bible’s way of saying it has no expiration on it anywhere. The Psalms never get over it. Psalm 136 says one thing twenty-six times in a row, like a man who has found the only sentence worth repeating: for his steadfast love endures forever. A chesed that outlasts the singer, outlasts the kingdom, outlasts even the exile. Forever.

And because the love is His, He asks it of us. The word does not stay up in heaven. It runs through the whole story as the loyalty covenant partners owe one another: Ruth swearing she will not leave Naomi, Jonathan keeping faith with David at the cost of his own throne, a hundred quiet kindnesses that hold when nothing forces them to. When Micah boils the entire law down to three things, one of the three is this very word: to do justice, and to love chesed, and to walk humbly with your God. We are meant to leak it. Having been loved with a love that would not let go, we are slowly made into people who will not let go of one another.

Love That Should Have Run Out

Now we have to guard the word, because a soft and popular counterfeit of it is everywhere. The counterfeit says God’s steadfast love is a general, weatherless fondness for everyone and everything, a divine warmth that asks nothing and costs nothing, love with the covenant quietly filed off. Love wins, and that is the end of the sentence.

But put the covenant back, and a harder, better question stands up. A covenant has terms. It carries blessing for the keeping and curse for the breaking, and Israel broke it, over and over, with both hands. By every right of the contract the chesed should have run out. The marvel of the Old Testament is that it never does. Read the prophets and watch a people earn abandonment a hundred times and not receive it. God even tells Hosea to go and marry a woman who will betray him, and to keep loving her through the betrayal, so that the prophet will feel in his own chest what it costs to keep chesed toward someone who keeps breaking it.

So the question stands, and it is the very question the mercy seat asked. How can a just God keep covenant love toward covenant-breakers and still be just? How does the love that will not let go avoid collapsing into a love that merely winks at sin? The Old Testament aches for an answer it cannot quite give, and paints it in advance. Psalm 85 sees the day coming from a long way off:

Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. – Psalm 85:10

Steadfast love and faithfulness meet. Righteousness and peace kiss. Where on earth could that happen? On a hill outside Jerusalem, where the chesed of God and the justice of God, which had seemed forever at odds over the head of a guilty sinner, finally embraced over the body of His Son. There the love that would not let go took hold of the curse we had earned. There God kept covenant with us by keeping it Himself, in our place, in the only One who never once broke it. And John, reaching all the way back across the centuries to that sentence on Sinai, tells you who that One is:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth… For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. – John 1:14, 17

Grace and truth. Those are Moses’ own two words from the mountain, carried over into Greek. Chesed and emet, steadfast love and faithfulness, now wearing a face and walking out of Nazareth. Everything God said about Himself in that one defining sentence on Sinai is standing in front of you in Jesus Christ. Bavinck would call this the covenant of grace come at last to its fullness. Calvin, going verse by verse through the Psalms, kept finding a God whose steadfast love is the believer’s one unfailing refuge. They were both only reading this word.

On the Knees

And so the word comes down, as every true word must, onto a guilty man on his knees. David has done the worst thing he will ever do. Adultery, and a man murdered to bury it. He has no record left to plead, no merit to bring, nothing at all in his hands. Listen to what he reaches for:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. – Psalm 51:1

According to your chesed. Not according to my goodness, for I have none left this morning. Not according to my promises, for I have broken every one. According to Yours. David throws the entire weight of his ruined life onto the single thing in the universe strong enough to hold it: the steadfast love of God, which does not run out, which is new every morning, which held Jeremiah in the ashes and met justice at the cross and will not, cannot, let go of the soul that throws itself there.

That is a prayer you can pray tonight, with no Hebrew at all. You only need to have come to the end of yourself.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your steadfast love. New every morning. Great is Your faithfulness.

Amen.

❦

FOR FURTHER READING

John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms.

Charles Spurgeon, The Treasury of David.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vols. 2–3.

Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity.