The Mystery of Hesed
Creation by Bridgette Whittingham
Meditation by Michael Card, from Inexpressible
“When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”
The most profound mysteries are not hidden away in remote, secret places; they are mostly an unrecognized part of everyday life. We fret over mowing the lawn and miss the deep mystery of how the grass grows. We seek to shush a weeping baby but rarely ask where tears come from and what they could possibly mean.
Most mysterious of all are the sounds we make with our teeth and tongue, the symbols we scratch across a legal pad and peck out on a keyboard. They seem the most ordinary part of our world—words—but they are a mystery. At this moment I am writing them and you are reading them; the thoughts that my words elicit in your brain are composed of words. In fact, we couldn’t even think without them. This book is founded on this inexpressible mystery in general and on perhaps the most mysterious and inexpressible word of all, the Hebrew word hesed.
We can theorize about words and how they work. We can task the greatest minds with listing and outlining and defining them. We can analyze the structures we use to put them into language, but in the end the way words work is an inexpressible mystery. Almost without our awareness they do their thing, lighting up the neural pathways in our brains. We use words to define other words because words are all we have. But ultimately they are only clumsy bricks. Words are, in one sense, beyond words; even the simple ones are often indefinable.
Indefinable words—words that require paragraphs and parables to provide even a hint of all they might possibly mean. Love and hope are two of the most obvious examples. Of course the Oxford English Dictionary lists definitions for them, but they fail miserably because love and hope are bigger than words. Their meanings cannot be contained by syllables, cannot be fully expressed by the sounds we make with our voices. Groups of letters hint at the inexpressible; they are sounds we put to mysteries. They fascinate and amaze me.
The Bible puts words to what is beyond words. Because it is God’s Word, it perfectly achieves this impossible goal. It invites you and me to a new perspective made possible only by the Spirit and the Word, if only we will lovingly listen (in Hebrew, shema).
One Bible encyclopedia calls the word hesed one of the most important theological words in the Old Testament; another lexicon describes it as the most sacramental word in the Bible. A good case can be made for the claim that it has the largest range of meaning of any word in the Hebrew language, and perhaps in any language.
Hesed occurs nearly 250 times in the Hebrew Bible throughout all of the three major divisions—the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The majority of occurrences (127) are in the Psalms.
To borrow a concept from the world of physics, we might say that hesed is a word with an enormous mass. The greater the size of the object, the greater the gravitational pull it exerts. Earth revolves around the Sun because its great mass pulls us toward it. The centripetal force, which pulls our planet away from the Sun, is perfectly balanced to keep us in a steady orbit. One of the fascinating features of hesed is its tendency to draw other words to itself by means of its “linguistic gravity.” It’s as if in struggling to express the inexpressible, the original writer was forced to enlist other words beside hesed to help convey its meaning. Sometimes the additional word is joined with the letter vav, usually translated “and”; hence, for example, “goodness and hesed” in Psalm 23:6.
The Bible reveals the God of hesed, who has opened the door of his life to humankind. Though we are responsible for the death of his only Son, he covered us with his body, his blood, and saved us long before we might have accepted him. We have no right to expect anything from him, the Holy One. Yet he has extended himself to us, has invited us to enter his world, has made our story a part of his story, and has opened his life to the inevitable possibility of being hurt, disappointed, and wounded by you and me.
Though we had no right to expect anything from him, he freely gave us everything. At the heart of this relentless and extravagant act of God himself, central to the indescribable mystery of the opening of the door of his life, is the Hebrew word hesed. When God definitively reveals himself to Moses, the word is twice upon his lips. When he reaches out to David, it is the word on which their relationship and David’s throne rest. The psalmists sing about it. The prophets lament its fragileness in us. And God himself hopes that our response to his hesed will be an infinitely smaller, yet still indescribable, expression of our own hesed. Jesus will expand on it in his parables and incarnate it in his own life.
This small three-letter Hebrew word, חסד, seems to always be there when the door is open from one life to another, when the unexpected and undeserved gift of one’s life is offered with no strings attached, when inexpressible acts of adoption, forgiveness, and courage occur that leave us speechless.
Meditation by Rachel Collins
My first encounter with the term hesed came as I was working my way through Precept Ministries popular “Covenant” study. It was one of the first words I ever attempted to do an original language study on, and I quickly became absolutely fascinated with this word. As I saw its connection with the concept of God’s covenant love, it became a doorway to me to see references to covenant throughout scripture. And what’s more, because God’s hesed is the basis for His covenants, hesed became for me the foundation of my understanding of God’s faithfulness, His love, His forgiveness, His mercy. Because of the hesed of God, I know I have eternal life, I know my sins are forgiven, I know I am loved and welcomed, even though I have no merit of my own to claim any of this. It is all the hesed of my God – and yours.
Understanding hesed will change your perspective of God. No longer will it make any sense to try to earn His love and favor – His hesed has covered all of that. By His own admission, he abounds in hesed– in faithful, steadfast, love and mercy to those who don’t deserve anything. Like Mephibosheth, who was blessed by hesed that David desired to show to Mephibosheth’s father Jonathan, in Christ we are blessed by the hesed that our heavenly Father delights to show to His beloved Son. As we understand this more and more, our hearts will sing like Ethan the Ezrahite who declares “I will sing of the hesed of the Lord forever!”, and our desires will be transformed as we seek to show others the hesed that we have been shown.
Meditation by Adriel Sanch
Have you ever been at a loss for words because of something so beautiful? The first time my family drove through Zion National Park in Utah, I was completely overwhelmed by what I saw. Growing up by the beach, the towering rock faces seemed like something from a distant planet. We took hundreds of pictures, but not one of them captured the grandeur of what we were seeing with our eyes. As I attempted to describe the scene to friends after our trip, I couldn’t articulate the wonder we felt. You just have to see it for yourself!
Some things are too marvelous for words, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give a description our best shot. A biblical word that has proved characteristically inexpressible is the Hebrew word hesed. In fact, musician and theologian Michael Card’s book, Inexpressible, spends twenty chapters exploring the depth of hesed. By itself, the word has been translated as love, lovingkindness, merciful love, steadfast love, unfailing love, covenant love, everlasting kindness, persistent faithfulness, immense favor, unswerving love—and that’s just a small fraction of English Bible translations. What an amazing thing to experience! Who wouldn’t want someone to love them with unswerving mercy? God says, “That’s the kind of love I have for my children”—a love that’s inexpressible.
If you long for this love, there’s good news. God didn’t just show the Old Testament believers his hesed, he revealed it to all humanity in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. When the apostle John described the incarnation of the Son of God, he said, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). John was a Jew, writing in Greek. When he says that the Incarnate One, Jesus, is full of grace and truth, he’s echoing the words of Exodus 34:6. This Jesus is abounding in hesed: He’s “full of steadfast love [grace] and faithfulness [truth].” Not only is John identifying Jesus as God, he’s also giving us the best definition and clearest sight of God’s inexpressible love. Everything else is just a polaroid, but in Jesus we see with our eyes the towering face of glory. We witness this steadfast love in his unflinching mission, from the cradle to the cross, for his people. That’s hesed!
The Story of Jonah Reveals God’s Hesed
Jonah 3:10-4:11 . . . When God saw what they (the Ninevites) did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.
But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love (hesed), a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” But the Lord replied, “Have you any right to be angry?”
Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” “I do,” he said. “I am angry enough to die.” But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”