Therein you taste and see, not only that God loved us, but that His love is sovereign and free, self-existent and independent. . . . Love is a bond. It is the union between persons . Strictly speaking, love does not exist between inanimate creatures, nor between brute creatures. One abuses that noble word love when he speaks of loving his dog, or when she exclaims that she loves your new hat.
Love is a bond between person and person.
It exists only between rational, moral beings. Moreover, it is a spiritual bond. There is, indeed, a kind of love that operates on a lower level, and that is an image of the higher love of which our text speaks, a bond that is based on and rooted in the natural affinity of our race. Even the robin loves and cares for its young. Yet, all this does not compare with, cannot reach up to the love in that highest sense which Scripture defines as the bond of perfectness.