Love, Knowing, Faith, and Belief

Four words carry most of what people mean by being right with God: to love Him, to know Him, to have faith, to believe. The dictionary has quietly emptied all four. Knowledge becomes information; love becomes a feeling; faith and belief become assent — things held in the head and the heart, invisible, asking nothing of the hands. By those definitions a man may know, love, believe, and have faith, and keep not one commandment.

Scripture will not allow it. All four meet in one covenant response — the commandments kept — but they are not interchangeable synonyms. Each holds a distinct office:

This chapter proves each office in turn.

Begin where the confusion is thickest. Love, we are told, is chiefly what you feel. Scripture insists that love take a body:

Jesus says it plainly: “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). And John’s second epistle runs the whole chain in three verses, and swears none of it is new:

Walking in truth and walking after His commandments are one walk — for “thy law is the truth” (Psalm 119:142) — and the commandment that defines love is expressly not new: it is “from the beginning” — archē, the very word that opens Genesis in the Greek Bible, and John’s gospel after it. The commandment to love is as old as creation. Nor was it new when Moses wrote it: loving Him is “to keep the commandments of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:5; 10:12-13).

These verses do not reduce love to a naked outward motion. Paul says a man may give all his goods and even his body, yet lack love (1 Corinthians 13:3); John says “God is love,” manifested when He sent His Son (1 John 4:8-10). God is not obeying a superior. The common center is self-giving covenant allegiance; for the creature under God’s authority, that allegiance has a commanded body — obedience. Warmth may accompany love, but it cannot substitute for it. A deed severed from allegiance can be empty sacrifice; an allegiance that persistently refuses His commands is a false profession.

Jesus was asked which commandment is greatest, and His answer hangs the whole canon on love:

Two loves, two tables of the same stone: the first four commandments are how one loves God; the last six are how one loves a neighbor. The Law does not compete with love; it hangs from it — and love without the commandments is a hook with nothing on it.

Paul’s hymn to love is quoted at weddings as if it were a mood; read it with the symbols, and it is a legal argument.

Tongues, prophecy, mysteries, knowledge, mountain-moving faith — every prized gift in the assembly, weighed and found to be noise without love. This chapter has already located love’s commanded body: “this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3). Read it so, and the audit is exact: spectacular gifts and even self-chosen sacrifice, detached from obedient allegiance, are a cymbal — sound with nothing inside.

Jesus ran the same audit on the same inventory, and passed the same sentence: “have we not prophesied in Your name?… and done many wonders in Your name?” — “depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” (Matthew 7:22-23, NKJV). They plead powers; the sentence answers works. Paul names the missing allegiance; Jesus names its lawless fruit. The terms are not synonyms, but the audit reaches the same defect: a life full of religious gifts while refusing the command.

Samuel passed the sentence first: Saul spared the best of the flock to sacrifice it — an offering in place of the command — and heard, “to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22). Sacrifice, powers, gifts — the offering never outranks the command.

The catalog that follows is the law in motion. “Love does not envy” — the tenth commandment kept; “does not seek its own… thinks no evil” — no ill worked to a neighbor; “does not rejoice in lawlessness, but rejoices in the truth” — and “thy law is the truth” (Psalm 119:142). Paul is not decorating; he is itemizing: “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10) — and “the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart” (1 Timothy 1:5, NKJV). The commandment’s own goal is love; love’s own shape is the commandments.

The hymn then turns prophetic:

James supplies the mirror: the hearer who is not a doer is “a man observing his natural face in a mirror” — and the doer looks “into the perfect law of liberty” (James 1:23-25). The mirror we see dimly in is the law; what it shows a man is his own face. Now the reflection is dim and partial; the day the perfect comes, the mediated image gives way to “face to face” — the phrase of Moses, with whom God spoke “face to face, even plainly, and not in riddles” (Numbers 12:8). The hymn lands on “I shall know just as I also am known” — Paul’s love chapter ends in the covenant word this chapter defines next. The gifts are scaffolding and come down; love — covenant allegiance embodied in the commandments — “never ends,” because the law it fulfills does not pass away.

Love has an opposite, and Scripture defines hate with the same precision — not a hotter feeling, but the other pole of the same axis. Jacob served for two sisters, and the record grades the marriage in consecutive verses: “he loved also Rachel more than Leah” (Genesis 29:30) — then, one verse later, “when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb” (Genesis 29:31). Leah is a wife in the house, bearing son after son; the hated one is the loved-less, the not-chosen-first — Scripture’s own equation, stated where the word first touches a family. The Gospel translates its own idiom the same way: Luke’s “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother… he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26) stands in Matthew as “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). To hate is to un-choose — a prior claim renounced. Wisdom states it as a plain parallel: they “hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the LORD” (Proverbs 1:29).

When God Himself hates, the grammar is divorce:

Hated, driven out of the house, loved no more — the covenant repudiated step by step, in its own legal order. The KJV itself knows the word is a standing and not a temperature: six times it renders the Hebrew’s one who hates as “enemies,” “enemy,” or “foes” — “the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (Proverbs 27:6) is, in the Hebrew, the kisses of the hater. Even where the KJV keeps “hate,” the English has drifted underneath it: the translators' word could mean no more than strongly dislike, reject, and four centuries have hardened it into hot hostility and little else. The heat a modern reader feels in these verses is an import the translators never wrote — the word must be read with the Bible’s own sense, not our century’s.

Where did the feelings go? Scripture keeps them in other words. Esau’s murderous grudge is plain: “Esau hated [bore a grudge against] Jacob… then will I slay my brother” (Genesis 27:41, KJV).^[1] God’s covenant judgment uses the same English word differently: “Esau have I hated [un-chosen]” (Malachi 1:3, KJV).^[2] The KJV’s single “hated” hides the two words. Leviticus splits them in consecutive verses: “thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour” (Leviticus 19:17) — the alternative the verse offers to heart-hate is not a warmer feeling but the spoken rebuke, for the brother left unrebuked in his sin is the brother quietly un-chosen — and the grudge follows in the next verse under its own word: “thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge” (Leviticus 19:18, natar).

So the axis stands whole: love keeps the covenant; hate is the covenant refused — “them that hate me” set against “them that love me, and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:5-6) — one axis, both enacted, neither an emotional temperature.

To know God, we assume, is to know about Him — facts, doctrine, a sound creed. But Jesus turns away people whose facts are exactly right:

He does not say you never knew me; He says I never knew you — and the disqualifier is lawlessness. The Greek is anomia — without nomos, without law — the word the KJV renders “iniquity,” and the word John uses when he defines sin: “sin is the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4). Read “iniquity” in the New Testament and this is usually the word underneath — law-breaking, wearing a vaguer name. To be unknown by God is to be what Scripture calls the one not known — a stranger; so the whole sentence reads “I never knew you: depart from me” — put out of the household like a man who was never of it.

John gives the test plainly:

To know God is a covenant bond proven by obedience — the same sense in which God says of Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2). Knowing is not information held; it is a relationship kept.

Paul says it with a knife: “They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him” (Titus 1:16). Hosea mourns the same equation from the ruins: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge… seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God” (Hosea 4:6) — the knowledge lost was not information; it was the law. God defines the knowing by a king’s life: he “judged the cause of the poor and needy… was not this to know me? saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 22:16).

The relationship it names runs deeper than acquaintance. The first time Scripture uses the word of two persons it means the union of marriage — “Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived” (Genesis 4:1) — the union that bears fruit. To know, at root, is the intimate joining of husband and wife; which is why God calls His covenant a marriage and His people a bride.

To know God is to be joined to Him as a wife to her husband — and that union keeps an order: “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:23), the bride subject to her Head “in every thing” (Ephesians 5:24). So the intimacy and the obedience are not two things: to know Him is to be His, and to be His is to obey the Head. The ones He never knew were never joined to Him — they said “Lord” but were no bride of His.

Put the symbols together and the Shepherd says it whole. “My sheep hear my voice… and they follow me” (John 10:27): the sheep are His people, the voice is His words, and to know that voice is to follow it. And they follow no other — “a stranger will they not follow… for they know not the voice of strangers” (John 10:5): the stranger is the one outside the covenant, so His sheep will not heed the voice, the teaching, of those outside it. “He calleth his own sheep by name” (John 10:3) — and the name is a symbol with its own chapter just ahead. To the one who overcomes He gives “a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Revelation 2:17) — known only by the one who receives and keeps it. Sheep, voice, name, stranger, knowing: each word in its place, and not one of them a thing held only in the head.

Belief and faith are not two disconnected substances. The Greek keeps them in one word-family: pisteuō is to believe; pistis is faith. Ephesians gives the order: “after that ye heard the word of truth… after that ye believed” (Ephesians 1:13), and Paul concludes, “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). The word is heard; belief receives it as governing truth; hope lays hold of its unseen promise; faith holds that belief steady through delay and testing; works enact it in the life. Belief can stop at factual assent, as the demons and fearful rulers show. Living faith cannot exist without belief, and faith without works is dead.

Faith, we are taught, is the one thing that needs no works. James answers head-on:

He presses it: “the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19) — perfect assent, and it saves none of them. The faith Scripture honors always moves: “By faith Abraham… obeyed” (Hebrews 11:8).

The Hebrew behind faith is emunah, faithfulness — steadiness, reliability — so “the just shall live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4) is to live by one’s faithfulness. The word’s first appearance in Scripture is a picture: Moses’ hands, held up over the battle, “were steady” — emunah — “until the going down of the sun” (Exodus 17:12): faithfulness is hands that do not drop. Faith is not a conviction lodged in the mind; it is trusting faithfulness — reliance on God’s promise held steady through obedience. The trust and the works are distinguishable, but living faith will not leave them separated. James says Abraham’s faith “wrought with his works” and “by works was faith made perfect” (James 2:22): the works do not rename faith; they enact it and bring it to its goal.

Hebrews states the office in one verse:

Evidence is a thing produced and examined — the unseen promise is proved in the life by the faithfulness it produces. Scripture keeps the pattern consistently: hope’s object is unseen by definition — “hope that is seen is not hope… but if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Romans 8:24-25) — and the patience is faithfulness holding while the thing stays out of sight. The unseen things are the eternal ones (2 Corinthians 4:18), and “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7): conduct stands in where sight is denied.

Hebrews 11 itself is a catalog of visible acts — Noah, “warned of God of things not seen as yet… prepared an ark” (Hebrews 11:7): unseen warning, visible obedience. What is hoped for, Scripture also names: the resurrection (Acts 24:15), eternal life “promised before the world began” (Titus 1:2), the city and better country Abraham looked for (Hebrews 11:10, 16), His appearing (Titus 2:13). Faith is the trusting fidelity that holds obedience while the promise is still out of sight — a life that can be seen (Matthew 5:16), held steady for things that cannot.

This is not works offered as the purchase price of the promise. Paul defines that error before he excludes it: “to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt” — then sets over against the wage-claim the man who “believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly” (Romans 4:4-5). Romans is not setting faith against obedience; it is setting faith against labor offered for a wage. Jesus makes the distinction exact: “when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do” (Luke 17:10). Even complete obedience leaves the Master owing no wages. Ephesians keeps the same order: salvation is “by grace… through faith… not of works,” and those so saved are immediately “created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Ephesians 2:8-10). The works neither buy the gift nor put God in debt; they are the life the received gift creates. Faith receives the promise, then remains faithful to the One who promised.

What, then, are the works, without which faith is dead? Scripture defines the word where the law is first taught: Jethro counsels Moses to “teach them ordinances and laws, and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do” (Exodus 18:20). Ordinances taught, a way walked, the work done — a work is a deed, not a synonym for obedience. A work becomes obedience when it executes a legitimate command; it becomes disobedience when the command or deed conflicts with God’s command. Romans 4 speaks of a laborer’s work presented for wages; James 2 speaks of Abraham’s work as the visible enactment of faith. The word names the deed; the context names its master and whether any wage is claimed. Paul’s distinct uses of law, works, obedience, wages, and duty are traced occurrence by occurrence in The End of the Law. The psalmist holds God’s works and God’s commandments as the two halves of one line: “the works of his hands are verity and judgment; all his commandments are sure” (Psalm 111:7). Jesus holds His works with the commandment-keeping verb: “he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end” (Revelation 2:26) — works can be kept because works are commandment-shaped. So the sentence James wrote completes itself: faith without works is dead because works are the commandment-shaped enactment of trust — the keeping this chapter has been proving — and a faith that never acts does not become faithfulness.

Which leaves believe, the word on which whole systems are built — and here the ground is already broken: the Gospel chapter caught Paul trading “obeyed” for “believed” in a single breath (Romans 10:16), and pointed at the Greek of John 3:36. Now read that famous verse whole:

In the covenant question John is asking, the opposite of believing is disobeying. Receiving the Son’s word as governing truth means submitting to the Son who spoke it; persistent refusal to obey exposes the claim of belief as empty.

That does not mean Scripture never uses believe for accepting a fact. James says “the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19), and the Gospels say those same spirits know who Christ is and obey when His authority commands them: “he commandeth even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him” (Mark 1:27). Their belief is real enough to produce trembling and compelled compliance; it is not love, covenant allegiance, or saving trust. John records the human counterpart: many rulers “believed on him,” but would not confess Him because “they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God” (John 12:42-43). A man may believe a fact and still act against it because another love, fear, or appetite governs him.

Saving belief is therefore not bare assent and not obedience renamed. It is receiving God’s testimony as governing truth in a response that submits to it. Where that submission is persistently refused, Scripture judges the claimed belief by its fruit and calls the condition unbelief.

Scripture keeps the pair together: Israel could not enter the land for “unbelief” — they “believed not” — and the refusal that exposed their distrust was disobedience (Hebrews 3:18-19). Abraham, who “believed in the LORD” (Genesis 15:6), is later shown to have been “justified by works, when he had offered Isaac” (James 2:21): the obedience did not replace his belief; it brought the belief to its declared end, “and by works was faith made perfect” (James 2:22).

The four words converge, then, in one covenant response — and keep four distinct offices. Love is self-giving covenant allegiance embodied, for us, in the keeping: “this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” (1 John 5:3). Faith keeps them in hope of the promise — “faith is the substance of things hoped for” (Heb 11:1); Abraham “obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went… for he looked for a city” (Heb 11:8-10). Belief receives the word as governing truth and submits to it: Thomas believed “because thou hast seen” — and the Lord blessed “they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29), grading the two grounds in a single sentence.

Knowing keeps them as a bride keeps covenant — “I will betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the LORD” (Hos 2:20); “He judged the cause of the poor and needy… was not this to know me?” (Jer 22:16). One covenant response, four distinguishable offices — and faithful is Scripture’s word for that allegiance kept consistent: Moses' hands “steady until the going down of the sun” (Ex 17:12), the servant found “so doing” when his lord comes (Matt 24:46), “faithful unto death” (Rev 2:10). Flatten them into synonyms and each goes invisible — which is what the dictionary did, so a man could claim all four and live as he pleased. Scripture binds them back together and sets them where they can be seen — in a life that does what God said.

See, then, what the symbols do to the simplest promise of all.

It is heard as a sentence you say — profess the name, and salvation is done. Then remember the many this chapter has already met — who prophesied and did wonders in that name, and were not known. They said the name; whatever it is to call upon it, they did not do it. So what is the name, that calling upon it saves and merely saying it does not? The question has a chapter of its own just ahead — The Name — and everything this chapter proved about knowing, loving, and obeying rides on its answer.

This is what knowing the symbolic language does, and why it changes everything: the verse you thought you had mastered turns out to ask for your whole life.