The second form of Christian friendship is between two people invested in seeking God together by clinging to each other in love while also helping each other cling to God in love. This is the Christian form of what Aristotle called “good friendship” in that its principle aim is to love one another in preparation for life with God. At their best, these friendships will be transformative and life-changing. The best of Christian marriages will function this way.

The final form of Christian friendship is the true end of the Christian life, namely, friendship with God. This is the natural relationship of creatures to their God, but due to the fall we scorn God until he moves in us by his Holy Spirit to produce a love and desire for Himself. This love and desire grows as the Christian matures over time, yet always competes with created goods until Christ’s return at which time believers will be ushered into God’s presence and the friendship will be perfected in that we will finally love God as God and he will be our all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

A Biblical Account of Friendship

While in many ways unique to him, Augustine derives his theology of love from the teachings of Jesus.¹⁹Jesus provides the paradigm of friendship with God and with others in giving his summary of the Law and the Prophets in the form of the Two Greatest Commandments (Matt. 22:37–40). As with Augustine after him, Jesus communicates an ordered relationship between love of God and others, with love of God taking priority in that as we love God, we also love the things God has made because God has made them. While we are created to love and worship our Creator God, genuine love for God cannot be separated from love for what he has created (cf. 1 Jn. 3:17), just as faith cannot truly flourish without works (Jas. 2:14–26). The two are in Jesus’ teaching united together and, while distinct, must always remain together.

While love is the vocation of every Christian disciple, the only perfect love consists in the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Jesus speaks to the unity of his relationship, in being and will, with the Father (Jn. 10:30), an eternal communion that also extends to the Holy Spirit. In the NT, however, Jesus draws an explicit comparison between his relationship to the Father and the relationship of Christians to each other. In the Upper Room discourse of the John’s Gospel (Jn. 13–17), Jesus prays and exhorts his disciples to share unity, that is to be one with each other as he and the Father are one (Jn. 17:11, 20–23). So there is no perfect horizontal friendship in Scripture other than the relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet this friendship is of a different order, for while Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love each other perfectly, they are divine persons loving in transcendent triunity Beyond saying we want to know and to love each other in perfect unity as do the three Persons of the godhead, they way they love does not provide an example that applies directly to our human situation.

We can, however, learn from examples of love and friendship shown throughout the biblical narrative, which culminate with Jesus’ friendship to his disciples, a foreshadow of the church in which Christian friends are to love one another and God. Before exploring these examples, it will be helpful at this stage to provide working definitions of love and friendship as we are using the terms. What we have learned from the ancients and the early Christians alike is that true friendship will require the shared object of love to be worth loving and the only qualified object worth loving is God. Thus, while love is the desire of the whole person either for God or for some created good that is in keeping with loving God, friendship arises as a dynamic relationship between two people whose love for each other has been caught up in a shared love for God or for some created good that is in keeping with loving God.

The Bible provides many examples of people loving others and seeking friendship for the sake of eternal communion with God. Each one points a way forward for Christians today by offering important lessons from friends and friendships in the biblical witness. In each example noted below, the relationship is defined by a shared love for God. Yet each instance displays a diversified set of benefits that can emerge from good Christian friendships. Not all circumstances and the relationships that develop out of them are the same. The way one friend helps to sustain your love for God will look different than the way another friend does. One may help you better understand God through biblical teaching. Another friend may help you to love God more in helping you deepen your prayer life. The following is a sampling of biblical friendships that exhibit the conditions and consequences of godly and Godward friendship.

1. David and Jonathan: Putting God First

The relationship between David and Jonathan, the son of King Saul, is an instructive friendship in the Bible. Loyalty, love, and faithfulness characterize their friendship. As we read in 1 Sam. 18:3: “Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself.” John Woodhouse makes the same point: “Saul’s son, Jonathan, was the best friend David had in the world.”²⁰

Saul is the King of Israel and progressively becomes more paranoid as his jealousy for God’s blessing grows over time. At a dramatic moment in their story, Saul chases after David, God’s newly anointed, with the explicit intention of killing him to avoid being replaced. Jonathan finally sees proof of his father’s intention to kill David in 1 Sam. 20:32–33 when Saul attempts to kill David by the spear. At a time of great conflict and at great risk to his own position, Jonathan chooses to give his love and support to David, rather than to his father, King Saul. When he evaluates his predicament, he sees that all the evidence points to David, and not his father, as the one following the will of God.

So Jonathan puts his friend before his wayward father and king (1 Sam. 20). Francesca Murphy captures the nature of Jonathan’s act of what she calls “friendship love”: “‘Friendship love’ is about seeing or caring about ‘the same truth’ above and outside both parties…The Lord is the same truth that David and Jonathan share…What holds David and Jonathan together, the true covenant binding them, is their God: ‘Behold, the LORD is between you and me forever’ (20:23 ESV).”²¹ Friendship is a two-way street. On the one hand, Jonathan helps David in a display of loving friendship, but on the other, David is helping Jonathan to escape the grasp of his wayward father.²² Inasmuch as this is the case, Jonathan’s courageous love for David is an example of what friends can accomplish when their love for one another is caught up in their love for God. The “same truth” that binds two people together in friendship, which Murphy identifies as “above and outside,” is God.