A lovely Thursday to you in the name of Jesus. It’s a lovely day and we are still talking to you about love. All through this month of February, we’ve been talking about love and we’ve been talking about the different aspects of love, the meaning of love, and the person of love.
Yesterday, we spoke about the 7 kinds of love that we see in the Greek language and that is also captured in the Bible and today we begin to talk about these different kinds of love again in details.
So today we will talk about two of them. We will talk about the “Eros” and “Phileo.”
“Eros” is the general love people talk about. It is the romantic love; it is the love that is full of passion, intense sexual desire for someone else. It’s that passionate feeling that sometimes, if you don’t know how to control it can get you into trouble. This is what Eros is all about.
So a lot of times when we hear most of the songs about love, power of love and the show of passion and ecstasy, they are usually talking about Eros but in the English, like we said yesterday, they are all communicated as love. Eros can be a dangerous thing when not kept under control and within the confines of marriage.
There is a painful story in the Bible that show how terrible Eros can be when not practice as God intended.
2 Samuel 13: 12 - 15 (NLT)
12 “No, my brother!” she cried. “Don’t be foolish! Don’t do this to me! Such wicked things aren’t done in Israel. 13 Where could I go in my shame? And you would be called one of the greatest fools in Israel. Please, just speak to the king about it, and he will let you marry me.”14 But Amnon wouldn’t listen to her, and since he was stronger than she was, he raped her. 15 Then suddenly Amnon’s love turned to hate, and he hated her even more than he had loved her. “Get out of here!” he snarled at her.
Amnon had spoken to his friend on how much love he had for his sister, Tamar and how he was so much in love and love sick. He devised a plan with his friend pretending he was sick and he asked that his half-sister Tamar would bring food for him. In that process, he raped her and the so called love he had for her was immediately turned to hatred. Why? It wasn’t real love; it was just the passion of Eros and Eros like we said is just that sexual desire and once the passion was gone, the love was and it turned to hatred.
The other love we want to talk about is “Phileo” and this one is the friendship love; the fondness we feel for people. It’s that affection which is devoid of the sexual desire or passion of Eros. It is just that love, that admiration, that desire you have for somebody to do well in life.
This was the kind of love we saw between Jonathan and David. Some people that didn’t understand the different shades of love have insinuated the possibility of sexual passion but that is absolutely untrue. They just loved themselves and wanted to see each other do well. It was the Phileo kind of love, this was the same kind of love Jesus had for Lazarus.
In John 11: 36 (NLT) it say this;
36 The people who were standing nearby said, “See how much he loved him!”
Jesus went at the grave of Lazarus and when people saw Him weeping, they said; “see how much he loved him.” The love they were talking about there is “Phileo.”
So there is the Phileo and Eros and they are both shades of love. We need to begin to ask ourselves what kind of “love” we are talking about when we talk about love.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
