ARAMAIC WORD STUDY – FRIEND – RACHAM – רחם Resh Cheth Mem
James 2:23: “And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God.”
So Abraham was just a friend of God, that is all just a friend? In modern Western 21st Century to be a called a friend doesn’t carry that much weight. I mean politicians have friends because they contribute to their campaign. Entertainers have friends because they help their career. Kids and teenagers have friends who may not be friends this week but not next semester in school. Of course, if you have a presence on Facebook and Twitter you have friends coming out of your ears. People you don’t even know or ever met become your friends. We’ve worn out the word friend in our culture and it can mean different things to different people.
We hear that Abraham was friends with God. Big deal. Yet, the Bible really seems to suggest it is something very special to be friends with God. The word in Greek for friend is philo which is a word for love but not the greatest love. I would think something better of Abraham.
Ok, if you have read my blog for the past year, you know what’s coming. The Aramaic uses the word racham. Remember that word? Do I have to go through the background of this word? Briefly, it is a word for love but a love that is beyond love. The love a mother has for a child in the womb and when it first leaves the womb, before the child has had a chance to challenge the mother, rebel, break her heart. The mother still loves that child with chav a love that is unconditional, but falls short of racham.
So Abraham was more than just a friend, he was someone that God loved with a pure love, a love that is perfect as if it has never been offended. How did he arrive at this status? He simply believed God. That is all you have to do is to believe God and you have that perfect love from God, a love that is as if you have never sinned.
God is ready to love you with that perfect love, but you cannot receive that perfect love until you believe He loves you that deeply with racham, that perfect love. Racham is that love that can only exist when it is accepted, you know like accepting Jesus as your personal Savior. When you accept Jesus as your personal Savior you are really saying: “Yes, I am going to believe that you loved me with that perfect racham love such that you died in my place for my sins. Until you acknowledge that love and believe that it is real, like Abraham did, God’s love for you can only remain in the chav state, unconditional, but still blocked by sin that can only be removed by believing.
Years ago, I was at a very low point in my life. I had left teaching, I was financially broke, lost my home the whole 9 yards. My brother and sister in law told me they had many friends who would love to take a Hebrew class. So, we set it up, over fifty people showed up for that first class. There were all these friends of my brother and sister in law, all these friends who had friends and I felt so alone and friendless.
I remember after the class sitting in my car after everyone went home. It was very quiet, a stillness and quiet you feel after a party when everyone has left. I sat alone in my car and I wept before God. “Why, Lord, why do all these people have friends and I don’t? What have I done wrong, why can’t I have friends.” A side note here, I have Asperger’s Syndrome and I could not just walk up to people and make friends. I hated that old advice that I am sick of hearing: “Well, you have to be friendly to have friends.” “You have to up and make friends to have friends.” God did not wire my brain that way, I could not do that. People have to make the first move toward me and for whatever reason, the don’t so I don’t make friends.
I just sat there in my misery complaining to God, I had no friends, no one ever sought me out to be my friend, when all of a sudden I heard an actual, audible voice. It scared me. I was so embarrassed that someone found me crying, yet there was no one around or nearby. It was a soft, tender gentle voice, almost like a dove cooing. I knew it was God. I heard that voice only one other time in my life and I knew it was God. What God said was: “Do you want to be friends?” He was reaching out to me when no one else would. Yet, He was the one I was being the unfriendliest with. I almost shouted ‘Yes,” and suddenly I felt and understood racham, what Abraham must have felt, what the disciple whom Jesus racham felt. I can’t explain it. I am writing a book on racham but I fear even the book will fall short of explaining racham. Well, we shall see.
Like that old hymn In The Garden, “The joy we shared as we tarried there, none other has ever known.” That is what it feels like, it feels like something that no one else in this world could feel or experience.
Do you want to be friends with God, to feel His racham? You just have to believe in it. For you see it takes two to create racham.
I often tell people that when I meet Yeshua in person, I don’t want to hear him say,” Well done good and faith servant!” But I want to hear him say,”Well done good and faithful friend!” In John 15:14&15 Yeshua said,” You are my friends if you do what I command you.15 No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. That tells me that a servant to Yah is lower than a friend of Yah’s.
This is perhaps the most viscerally understood post I’ve ever read of yours.
My situation was the opposite – I could make friends with a rock. I’m always out talking with people, and God have me the ability to instantly connect with any person that I meet. I wasn’t always popular, and I was made fun of when I was in middle school, until one day, I had enough, and I just changed everything. The people who bullied me actually became my best friends, and I became one of the most popular kids. That trend continued throughout college to an extreme degree – at one point managing nearly 400 friends.
Something else that grew though was how utterly alone that I felt. It didn’t matter how many people I knew or spoke to, I didn’t find anyone that cared about me the way that I cared about them.
Relationships went the same way, I was too “perfect” and the women would often say that it was too much pressure – but I wasn’t perfect at all, I was just trying to show people how I needed to be treated as I attempted to keep myself together waiting, praying the scaffolding of my inner being could hold a bit longer.
I had been a Christian for all of my life and I cried to God so many times as to why I had no friends, no best friend. I prayed for a best friend – and it was like when the Israelites asked for a King.
God granted my request, you know I’ve never thought of this, but it was much like the “blessing” of the meat that the Israelites grumbled for. Friends were coming out of my nostrils there were so many – yet I was not satisfied.
It wasn’t until later in life that I realized all along that Christ was that friend that was always right there – that God had planned this specific road for me to see, by experience that there is no love like His, and the Holy Spirit truly taught me through the hardest lesson that I have ever had to learn – which is the exact message that you put forth – you have to accept that unconditional love for it to be a thing beyond human understanding.
I had to unlearn all of my needs, and but the care for people was still there. I had to learn to still give people a sincere love without asking for anything back and whenever that twinge, the howling of my inner beaming, wounded with unfairness, and if a one sided care – that I am relieved. Relieved that the struggle of finding that Racham has already been accomplished.
My whole world became infinitely smaller and infinitely larger – it’s obviously still a process, but God teaches me everyday about the kind of love that He requires from us and the kind of love that he has commanded us to give to everyone else – regardless of what they do. Because we have found that treasure in the field and have sold everything for it.
You know you were such an important part of the revelatory process of me letting go of the world and seeing the mind boggling (there isn’t a word for it) way that God has set all this up. So I would absolutely consider you a dear friend who has helped me through many hard times and shown me a better way forward to the greatest (understatement) love possible.
I would cry sometimes because it always astonished me that God called Abraham a friend. Is there a better honor? And it’s funny the tactics used to try and justify why I wasn’t worthy of that, and God continually invited me in telling me, the door is right here should you ever decided to forsake all of this and find true rest – the refreshing, as it were.
What a joyous thing.
Thank you friend!
Hi Chaim, so interesting that you published this article. I had been moved to research how this verse was recorded in Genesis to Abraham. I could not find words in Genesis that matched the record in James. Somehow maybe it ties into Abraham being the father of the faithful or that “he believed God and it was accounted unto him for righteousness”? There must be a connection between Abraham’s faith/action that creates the emotion of friendship that James recognized?
Thank you so much. I really needed this. I have trouble making friends also because of a disability and because I have recently repented from years of sinful living at a late age, 56 it seems even harder.
I sometimes feel completely alone because I feel I fit in nowhere.
But yes!!! I do believe God and I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose from the dead!!! Please pray for me as I do you and all my brothers and sisters in Christ, especially the lonely ones. God bless.