What is chesed, the steadfast love of God?

Question 2096

The phrase steadfast love is how the ESV most often renders the Hebrew word chesed (transliterated hesed), one of the richest and warmest words in the whole Old Testament. It speaks of a love that is loyal, covenant-keeping and utterly dependable, a love that holds on when every reason to let go has already been given. When we trace this love through Scripture we are following the very heartbeat of God’s dealings with His people.

English struggles to capture chesed in a single word. Older translations reached for mercy, kindness, lovingkindness and goodness, and each of them catches part of it. The translators of the ESV settled on steadfast love because the phrase manages to carry both warmth and firmness together at once. It is affection that has committed itself, kindness that has bound itself by promise, and it will not waver or grow cold.

Chesed and the meaning of steadfast love

The Hebrew chesed appears around two hundred and fifty times in the Old Testament, and the great majority of those describe God rather than people. It is never a vague, drifting benevolence. Chesed is the love that belongs inside a relationship, the loyalty owed and freely given within a settled bond between two parties. When the ESV writes steadfast love it is trying to hold two truths in one phrase, the tenderness of genuine affection and the strength of an unbreakable commitment.

What makes chesed so striking is that God keeps pouring it out on people who have given Him every reason in the world to withdraw it. Israel breaks the covenant again and again, chasing other gods and forgetting the One who carried her out of Egypt, and still the prophets announce that His loyal love endures. This is not softness or weakness on God’s part. It is the firmness of a God who has set His heart on a people and simply will not be moved off them.

Chesed therefore reaches well beyond mere feeling into solid action. The steadfast love of God is something He does, and not only something He privately feels. It rescues the helpless, forgives the guilty, provides for the needy and keeps on coming back to the wanderer. To understand it we have to watch closely what God actually does for an undeserving people across the long unfolding story of redemption.

Steadfast love in covenant

Chesed and covenant belong together so closely that you can hardly speak of one without the other. When God revealed His name and character to Moses on the mountain, He proclaimed Himself the Lord, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping it for thousands of generations. That self-disclosure became the very heart of how Israel came to know her God, and it is quoted back to Him again and again through the rest of the Old Testament.

This covenant frame protects us from turning chesed into mere sentiment. God’s loyal love is not a passing mood that comes and goes with His feelings about our performance on a given day. It is anchored to His promise, and a promise made by a faithful God does not quietly expire when we fail Him. We see the same covenant loyalty running through the compound names by which He revealed Himself, which Ian has unfolded in our study of the compound names of God.

Because this love is covenantal, it is also remarkably patient with us. The steadfast love of God bears with repeated failure, disciplines a son without ever disowning him, and waits with watchful eyes for the wanderer to come home again. The father in the parable, scanning the road for a boy who had spent everything on a far country, is chesed painted in a single unforgettable scene by the Lord Jesus Himself.

The steadfast love of God in the Psalms

Nowhere does chesed sing more loudly than in the book of Psalms. Again and again the worshippers of Israel return to it as the one sure ground of their confidence before God. They appeal to His loyal love when they have sinned and have nothing else to plead, they shelter in it when enemies press hard against them, and they wake to find the steadfast love of God new and waiting with every morning.

Psalm 136 makes the point in a way no one forgets. Through twenty six verses the congregation rehearses the works of God in creation and in redemption, and after every single line comes the same answering refrain, for his steadfast love endures for ever. Creation, exodus, provision and final rescue all hang from the same golden thread. His covenant love is the reason behind everything He does for His people, and the well of it never once runs dry.

When Jeremiah sat among the smoking ruins of Jerusalem, with the city burned to the ground and the people dragged into exile, he reached for exactly this truth and held on to it. He confessed that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases and His mercies never come to an end, that they are new every morning, and that great is His faithfulness. That is chesed spoken from the very bottom of grief, and even there it bore his weight and did not break.

Steadfast love and the cross

The deepest expression of chesed is found not in the Old Testament at all but at Calvary. Every act of loyal love in Israel’s long history was quietly pointing forward to the moment when God would keep His covenant at the unimaginable cost of His own Son. Paul tells us that God shows His love for us in this, that while we were still sinners and still His enemies, Jesus died for us. There is the steadfast love of God in its very deepest colour, loyal to a people who had broken faith, paying in full a debt they could never have paid themselves.

This is penal substitution warmed all the way through by chesed. The Lord Jesus took upon Himself the judgment that our sin deserved, so that God’s loyal love could reach us without ever compromising His perfect holiness. Love and faithfulness met and embraced at the cross, exactly as they had been proclaimed together to Moses on the mountain centuries before. The God who is light, in whom there is no darkness at all, has opened a way for His steadfast love to welcome home those who come to Him through His Son, a theme we touch in our answer on what it means that God is light.

Here too we learn why chesed is never soft or careless about sin. Covenant love did not sweep human evil quietly under the carpet and pretend it had not happened. It carried the full cost in its own body on the tree. The cross is where we discover that the steadfast love of God is at once the warmest and the most costly love anywhere in the universe.

Steadfast love and the faithfulness of God

Chesed and the faithfulness of God stand as near neighbours all through Scripture, and they explain one another beautifully. His love tells us what is in His heart toward His people. His faithfulness tells us that what is in His heart today will still be there, unchanged, tomorrow and for ever. Put the two together and you have a love that simply cannot be talked or argued out of itself.

For the believer this becomes the solid ground of all assurance. Our security with God does not finally rest on the steadiness of our love for Him, which honestly rises and falls from one week to the next. It rests on the steadiness of His love for us, which never does. Eternal security is at heart a matter of the steadfast love of God holding His own children fast, a comfort that runs far deeper than our changing moods and our stumbling, uneven obedience.

It also speaks tenderly to the heart that quietly fears it has finally used up God’s patience. Chesed is not a reservoir that drains a little lower every time we draw on it in our need. It is new every morning, and the supply always rises to meet the depth of the need. No prodigal has ever once out-sinned the loyal love of his Father, and no morning has ever yet dawned that found the steadfast love of God spent and gone.

So, now what?

If chesed is real, and it is, then your whole standing with God does not hang by the thin and fraying thread of your own consistency. On the very days you feel furthest from Him, His loyal love has not shifted an inch. The steadfast love of God is, by its own meaning, precisely the love that stays when feelings and circumstances do not.

Let this draw you back home whenever you have wandered off. The same covenant love that ran down the road to meet the prodigal is fixed upon you in Jesus right now. You do not have to clean yourself up first before you dare to come. You come in the first place because the steadfast love of God has already opened the way through the cross and is waiting for you there.

And let it slowly reshape how you love the people around you. We who have been carried so far on the steadfast love of God are now called to a loyal, patient and covenant-keeping love toward others. The love we have so freely received was never meant to stop with us. It is meant to flow on, steady and unearned, into a watching and weary world.

“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