Hebrew Word Study – Abundant, Great Love – Rab Racham     רב רחם  Resh Beth  Resh Cheth Mem

Psalms 51:1: “To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

So David is pleading with God to have mercy and restore his relationship with God.  He asked for it according to the lovingkindness of God.  The word used in Hebrew is racham which is rendered here as lovingkindness. I have done a number of studies on racham and have even written a book entitled racham, yet I have yet to do justice to that word.  Lovingkindness is good, sometimes this word is rendered as tender mercies, but as beautiful as these English words are it still does not come up to the standards of racham.  It seems like almost every day I come to a new understanding of racham.

Racham is a love that a mother feels for her baby while it is still in the womb and when it is placed in the mother’s arms right after birth. It has not yet had the chance to wound her heart with rebellion and defiance.  It is a childlike love.  It is a pure love that has not yet been offended. It is the starry-eyed romance where Prince Charming and his bride live happily ever after with no problems, just living in each other’s embrace, always in love, never seeking anything for oneself but only for the sake of the other. Racham is as perfect a love as you can find.

Yet, note what David is appealing to, not just the perfect love of God but he uses the Hebrew word rab which means the great or abundance in this perfect love. We cannot comprehend this great love that God has for us.  I have spent the last fifteen years in search of the heart of God and I have not even come close to understanding the love that fills His heart. But I have come to know this one thing, the closer I get to the heart of God the more I realize that no matter what sin I commit He will forgive it if I seek chesed, that is His mercy to restore our relationship. 

I no longer fear the consequences of my sin, I do not fear hell, or that God will do something bad to me if I sin.  Oh, He will do something bad to me just like He did with David.  He will do the worst possible thing, worse than a serious health problem, worse than a financial disaster, worse than hunger or want.  As I draw closer to the heart of God the worst thing that can happen to me is what David feared most, being cast away from the presence of God.  What makes hell so bad, eternal fire?  Give me a break.  There is something worse than that in my mind. It is to spend an eternity separated from the rab racham, His abundant, great love.  To spend eternity separated from that is beyond imaginable suffering. 

When I was teaching at Bible College we had a student come over from Russia under Perestroika.  After a few weeks in the United States and at the Bible College he came to me and said; “I don’t understand American Christians.  All they do is pray for themselves, ask God for good things, and give me.  In Russia we belonged to the state, what they say we do, if they wanted us to be a doctor or a garbage collector we did it. When we become Christians we belong to God, we just naturally ask God what He wants, not what we want.” 

Say a friend purchases an expensive birthday gift for you.  You feel obligated to purchase a gift for that friend of equal value on that friend’s birthday.  Suppose on that friend’s birthday you do not purchase a gift, but instead say: “I did not buy you a gift, my only gift is to assure you of my friendship.”   That doesn’t work in our society, does it?  Yet, that is what it is for God, He gave us the most expensive gift he could, His Son.  We certainly cannot repay that gift, but all God ask of us is to simply say: “I will be your friend for eternity.”  The whole thing is not about who can give the best gift as our culture dictates, but the depth of our relationship. 

It is interesting that Samson Hirsch the nineteenth-century linguist and Hebrew master associates the word racham with raham which means to increase. Our love relationship with God is not static, it just doesn’t reach a certain point and end right there. It is always increasing and increasing.  I have heard people say: “Oh, that we had the love for God like a new Christian.”   I don’t want the love for God like a new Christian.  That is shallow, it is infatuation.  

I drive an old boy in by disability bus who is in a wheelchair, paralyzed, and on dialysis.  He is 84 years old.  He once said to me: “You know, I would just rather God come and take me home but my wife, she doesn’t want me to go. I love her, I love her more now than I did 62 years ago when I married her and if she wants to me stay around I will for her sake.  She is the only reason I am living right now.”  He loves her more than he loved her when he married her 62 years ago.  That is a love that is continually growing it is like a racham that is raham.  

I do not fear getting older for I know next year at this time I will be more in love with God than I am now and if I am granted another twenty years, I shall be in love with God in a way that I cannot even imagine.  Every day I Live, I grow more in love with Him.  I cannot wait until next week for I shall be closer to the heart of God and a week more in love with Him.  This fall season I shall be more in love with Him than I was last fall. But think of this, when we are with God in eternity our racham will still be raham, and our love for God will still be increasing and keep increasing for eternity.  

When you are in love you just shine or light up like the sun.  Is that what John Newton meant in his song Amazing Grace when he says: “When we been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun.”  In eternity we will just shine and keep shining brighter and brighter until we are shining like the sun and we will get more brilliant than ever in our love for God.

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