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Proverbs 3:3-4  Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.  Then you will win favour and a good name in the sight of God and man.

The combination of the words ‘love and faithfulness’ occurs many, many times in the OT, mostly in the Psalms.  The two nouns are key covenant words.

The word translated here as ‘love’ is ‘ches-ed’ and, sadly, there is no single English word that captures the full richness and depth of its meaning.  It is often translated ‘mercy’ (probably the best known example is the KJV translation of Psalm 23:6 – “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life …”).  It is also translated ‘loving-kindness’, ‘steadfast love’, ‘covenant loyalty’, ’tender mercy’, etc, but none of these does full justice to its meaning.  It seems it’s a combination of all of them!

The Hebrew word behind ‘faithfulness’ here is ‘emet’, and in other places is ‘emunah’, both of which come from the idea of ‘truth’ (cf. our ‘amen’).  So ‘love and faithfulness’ is a good description of the character of our covenant-making and covenant-keeping God, the God whose love/grace/mercy sent his own Son into our world to shed his blood on a cross of shame to seal his eternal covenant with us, and whose truth/faithfulness is expressed by his Holy Spirit indwelling us comforting, encouraging, challenging and correcting us as he goes about his work to ‘sanctify’ us – to re-shape us day-by-day into the likeness of Christ, to make us holy.

It is not surprising that Solomon wanted to instil ‘love and faithfulness’ very firmly into the essential being of his son, to “bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.”  It is interesting that the Evangelist Luke, a physician who carefully studied all the relevant facts in matters concerning Jesus, reports that he, Jesus, “grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” (Luke 2:52)  Yes, Jesus was despised, rejected, mocked, misunderstood, opposed, slandered, unjustly tried and finally crucified as a criminal, which was part of the price for displaying ‘love and faithfulness’ in a God-denying, evil, broken world.

But he also calls us to follow him and ‘let love and faithfulness never leave [us]; bind them around [our] neck[s], [and] write them on the tablet[s] of [our] heart[s]’ anyway, knowing personally that ‘win[ning] favour and a good name in the sight of God and man’ like him can be quite costly!  But it’s worth it!  Are we up for it?  The more we live a life that is different from our surrounding culture, a life that has ‘steadfast other-people-centred love and faithfulness’ as its very foundation, the more we might be misunderstood and marginalised as Jesus was, but we might also start to have a significant impact on our culture, just as Jesus had on his.

– Bruce Christian