Every language has a word or words for love. The biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek are no exception. The two main words are hesed and agapé. [1] In both words, love reaches its apex as “love for the sake of the other.”

This kind of love includes altruism, philanthropy, etc. But it is not defined by these ideas. They reflect a commendable desire to live unselfishly, and that would be a major step forward for some people. But hesed and agapé do not merely describe an other-orientation, they describe a sense of oneness with others.

Our being created in the image of God is a good place to focus our look at God’s amazing love. It is love based in actual likeness. However, it is not a love based on our merit, but rather on our essence. If that were not so, God’s love would be spasmodic and conditional. Instead, hesed and agapé are continuous and gracious. We refer to this as steadfast love.

God’s love says, “You are mine’” and in addition to the idea of our being a cherished possession of God, it means we are beloved children of God. In a very holy sense, God sees God’s nature in us, and it is a real seeing because we are made in the image of God. This means that God’s love is amazing, not because it is transactional or obligatory, but because it is a genuine Heart-to-heart relationship—a Lover/beloved relationship.

Part of the amazing nature of this love is that Jesus said we could love others the way we are loved by God. It’s the second great commandment: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Matthew 22:39). Of course it means loving others the way we like to be loved (as per the Golden Rule), and it includes the psychological truth that our capacity to love others usually reflects the extent to which we love ourselves in a healthy way. But again, there is more goung on in Jesus’ words than that.

Loving your neighbor “as yourself” is recognizing the oneness between yourself and another person in the same way God recognizes the oneness between ourselves and God. We love others “as ourselves” because in a genuine (though indescribable) way, they are us! Buddhists have a word for it: interbeing — an essential oneness that everyone shares with everyone else. Bringing the word alongside Jesus’ words that say the same thing, we find that love is amazing because it exists and expresses itself because of a radical oneness in the whole of creation. How we love anyone is how we love everyone. And how we love anyone is how we love God (1John 4:20-21).

That’s amazing love.

[1] This post is not a word study on love. For that, I recommend William Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words (Zondervan, 2006), 424-429.