Cherishing Fidelity

Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you;
bind them around your neck;
write them on the tablet of your heart. (Proverbs 3:3 ESV)

When you mention Proverbs Chapter 3 to many Christians the fifth verse “Trust in the Lord with all your heart” immediately comes to mind. But just a few verses before it there is a short three phrase instruction that has captivated me in the past few days. I have pondered it, studied it, meditated on it, and marveled at its truth.

In the original Hebrew the verse is just eight words. The first word is hesed, which many English translations render as “mercy” or “kindness.” It is a very rich wonderful word in Hebrew that encompasses love, zeal, kindness, mercy, & favor. There is no one English word that does it justice, but the ESV rendering “steadfast love” comes close. God often uses hesed to describe His faithful covenant love for His people.

The second word in the verse is emeth, which is often translated “truth” in English but in Hebrew literally means stability, reliability, firmness, & faithfulness (which is, after all, what truth is supposed to be).

Reading a commentary on this verse I learned that these two Hebrew words, hesed emeth, are often used together when describing the character of God, and they form a “nominal hendiadys.” No, I didn’t know what that meant either until I researched it. A “nominal hendiadys” is two nouns linked together, with the second noun behaving like an adjective for the first noun to make it sound more powerful. For instance, “sound and fury” has more punch to it than “furious sound.” So in this verse, these two character qualities, steadfast love and faithfulness, are linked, with faithfulness emphasizing an essential quality of true love.

Solomon pleads for us not to azab (forsake) this steadfast faithful love. The Hebrew word azabcan mean to forcefully leave or forsake, but a primary meaning of the word is to loose the rope of an animal and let it wander off. Both of these meanings are apt warnings for us. There are times when in our self-centeredness or pain or pride we deliberately reject faithful love, but often we are guilty of allowing it to “wander off” when its bond to us has been allowed to loosen.

Because of this danger of wandering, we are next enjoined to qashar (bind) faithful love to us. The Hebrew word qashar“bind” would have instantly brought Solomon’s readers to think of God’s commandment from Deuteronomy 6:8, “You shall bind them (God’s laws) as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.”

We are to bind faithful love to our gargĕrowth, our neck. This Hebrew word is only found in the Bible in Proverbs, always referring to binding a character quality. To bind faithful love to our neck is to put it on public display, to let anyone who sees us to immediately recognize that we are marked by faithful love.

But having it on public display is not enough. We must also write it on the tablet of our heart. The Hebrew word for tablet luwach would also draw Solomon’s readers back to Moses, for it is the same Hebrew word for the stone tablet that the finger of God inscribed the Ten Commandments. In the same way that God inscribed the stones, we are to permanently inscribe our hearts with faithful love.

So, in eight words Solomon tells us to be marked by hesed emeth, faithul love, both in outward visible actions and inward heart motives. These are two powerful images of cherishing this faithful love, putting it in such high esteem that we bind it to our bodies and write it in our hearts.

Where are we to cherish and live out this faithful love? The Bible makes clear that first we are to faithfully love God, as He faithfully loves us. But the second most important area is in our marriages. Read this verse with your marriage in mind, to hold fidelity in such high esteem that you bind it to you for all to see, and inscribe it permanently within your heart.

Fidelity is not regarded with such esteem in our culture, and with the divorce rate of Christians in America no different than the divorce rate of non-Christians, it is not regarded with sufficent esteem in the modern church either.

How do we bind this fidelity, this faithful love, to our marriages? We often use romance, because we start out marriage thinking the cords of romance are surely unbreakable. But even in the happiest of marriages, bonds of fidelity based only on romance can weaken and fail with time. We sometimes then resort to bonds of duty, and yet when the pressures build and temptations come the restraint of duty is often thrown off.

No, the only bond strong enough to bind fidelity to us for life is the bond of cherishing fidelity itself, as something precious to God, something that reflects the nature of God, and something that God desires to be inscribed in our hearts and lived in our lives. Cherishing fidelity in these ways will forge a bond that we can be confident that no storm or trial will loosen. We can then rejoice that we are people of hesed emeth, people of faithful love, to our God, to our spouses, and to the world.

You might also enjoy these articles:

1. Framework for Fidelity
2. Every Word Proves True
3. Eternal Difference, Eternal Reward
4. New Mercies
5. Two Approaches to Wisdom