Covenant Love - NCCG.ORG Ning Network Archive 2008-10

"Covenant love is not a sentimental feeling. It is a deep, personal commitment to another individual. As such it is not something that our modern therapeutic attitude understands or values. By its very nature it involves putting the interests of another before our own - so it has much more in common with the traditional ideas of love associated with self-sacrifice. Significantly of course, such covenant love was the very thing that was breaking down in this period when the judges ruled. Hosea, a few centuries later, would still be complaining about it. 'There is no faithfulness, no covenant love in the land.' He says, 'And because of this the land mourns and all who live in it waste away' (see Hosea 4:1-2). Israel was sinking in a sea of moral anarchy, and at the root of that collapse was the abandonment of the ideal of covenant love in personal relationships. People didn't care about one another any more. People didn't trust one another any more. People weren't loyal to one another any more. God had promised covenant love to them, but Israel, in her rebelliousness, saw nothing to be gained by demonstrating such love towards one another. And she was reaping the judgment of God upon her callous selfishness as a result. The land mourned. There was no bread ... even in the house of bread.
"Whenever covenant love fails in human society, misery increases. God has built that moral law into his world as inescapably as the law of gravity. And yet here, in a private exchange between two apparently quite insignificant women, a different pattern of human relationships is emerging. Ruth, the pagan convert, is showing a true-born Jewess precisely the kind of covenant love commitment that God requires of his people when it comes to relationships. Orpah her sister-in-law was not a specially bad person for failing to demonstrate the same devotion to Naomi. She just wasn't a believer. She wasn't able to take the step of faith Ruth had taken. It was too sacrificial for her because she didn't believe in the God who rewarded covenant love. But Ruth did. And that's why Ruth chose the way she did." (Roy Clements, Covenant Love
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