More Than Skin Deep
Have you ever heard the expression: “Beauty is only skin deep”? In fact, most people’s understanding of beauty is limited to the skin. Billions of dollars are spent each year to enhance the skins beauty, giving it that extra glow and youthfulness. The skin protects us from harmful toxins, bacteria, ultraviolet radiation, trauma and temperature extremes. It covers our whole body, thus being our largest organ. Our thinnest skin is over the eyelids, measuring just 0,3mm and the thickest area of skin is on our back, which is just 3,0mm. Men generally have thicker skin than women and children have very thin skin. Skin holds in our body fluids and stretches as our body grows. Can you image what we would look like without our skin?
Skin, also stimulates our emotions. Different ways of touching the skin can communicate love, care, understanding, irritation, anger and disgust. We can show acceptance or rejection, through gestures, such as: Stroking the skin to show compassion and affection or brushing something off our skin so as to communicate brushing someone off our lives. Metaphorically speaking, skin is compared to: shallowness and superficiality (skin deep), hardness and indifference (hard skinned), wounded (burned skin), too sensitive emotionally (thin skinned), etc. Unfortunately, many relationships are only skin deep, meaning they are superficial and shallow. Emphasis is on one’s appearance and the maintaining of a certain image one desires to portray.
There are primarily two different words to describe love in the New Testament. The first is Phileõ, which refers to brotherly love. The second is Agape, which describes the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. There are other words used to describe different aspects of love, but these two are the more frequently used in the Scriptures. Brotherly or emotional love is common to all mankind. Each of us has felt this love from time to time. Though attractive and sought after by all, it is only skin deep. It changes with the moods and fluctuations of our emotions. We may feel “in love” one day and not the next. People feel so connected with their friends one day, but just the littlest of disagreements can change the climate of brotherly love into disinterest and/or even hatred.
God has revealed to us another kind of love. This love, agape, is more than skin deep. It is the kind of love that forgives all wrongdoing. It is the love that covers a multitude of sins. It is the love that remains faithful and increases as time goes on. Agape love is of the heart, not the skin. If you have skin deep love for God, it is just an emotional response to Him, without obedience to His Word. If your experience of love remains “on the skin”, it is shallow and subject to fluctuating between cold and hot, interest and indifference. God’s love for us is penetrating and deep. It is Agape. It passes through the emotional surface and reaches the heart. It is with this Agape love that we are to love one another. So as Peter says in II Peter 1.7: “…add to your brotherly affection, (phileõ), love, (agape).
Scriptures to meditate on:
John 14.20-24; I John 4.4, 20; 3.23; I Thess. 4.9; I Cor. 13; Rom. 5.8; 13.9; Mat. 24.10-12