Thinking On Steadfast Love

“We have thought on your steadfast love, O God,

in the midst of your temple.”

- Psalm 48:9

The translational variance for Hebrew chesed—“steadfast love” (ESV, RSV), “unfailing love” (NIV), “lovingkindness” (KJV, NASB), “love-in-action” (MSG)—gives us an idea that it is a word for which no English counterpart really exists. Chesed is used only in cases where there is some recognized tie between the parties concerned; it is not a haphazard love or kindness. N. H. Snaith writes, “the theological importance of the word chesed is that it stands more than any other word for the attitude which both parties to a covenant ought to maintain to each other.” It is thus perhaps thought of as a combination between love and loyalty. But the root of the word means “eager or ardent desire.” This is not a resigned, obligatory or passive kind of loyal-love.

If a word doesn’t exist in a language, does a familiar notion of that word also not exist within the culture that language represents? If the chesed of God was worth the thoughts of the Psalmist, how much more us English-speakers. At the very least, we can think on this in the manner of our post-enlightenmenet, postmodern, Western minds: give it our individual, speculative, narrative mental attention. As the Psalmist does, we step into past evidence.

But we also think in other ways. The Hebrew damah used here for “thought” is translated various ways based on context: it can mean to purpose, meditate; but also to imagine. To be silent. To wait. To compare or be like. God’s chesed is so out of my ordinary experience at times, that I need to give it my silent attention. I need to give it my time. My imagination. Tim Keller said once that he reads The Lord of the Rings once a year to “baptize the imagination” and that phrase has stuck with me. I think about how naturally imagination comes to my children—sometimes more naturally than reality—but I need to be more intentional about feeding and freeing that part of myself.

Thinking on chesed is also not done alone or in a vacuum. The plural “we” is used, and the location is the temple, a congregational place, built by and for all the people of God. We think in the presence of God. We think through history or liturgy. In the consciousness of God’s holiness, as all the objects and materials and colors and smells in the temple pointed to. We think through the person of Jesus, who spoke of himself as a temple.

When was the last time you thought about God’s loyal-ardor, his sustained, covenantal desire and kindness towards you? Towards us, the church, his people?