Zip it!

In the history of my denim wardrobe, I have owned only one pair of jeans that had a button-up front fly.  Of all the others, every single one had a zipper.  That solo pair was back in my hippy days when the “bell bottom” was king. Not counting the copper rivets on the pockets, I can’t think of any material used on my jeans except brass.

That odd thought entered my recall when I was studying one of the Greek words translated “Beloved” in Ephesians 1:5-6.

He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, ⁶ to the praise of his glorious grace that he lavished on us in the Beloved One.  (CSB)

The root of that Greek word translated “Beloved One” is “agape.”  We most commonly translate it as “love.”  Back in the heyday of the button-up fly, that word was used frequently in theological discourse.  Thus, the connection.

Christianity.com states, “To the Greeks, proper agape meant a general empathy or lovingkindness for all people.”  It’s different from the two other Greek words translated as love:  philos, brotherly love, and eros, romantic or erotic love. 

God’s love displayed toward humanity, even with all its blemishes, is agape love.  God loves because He wants to love.  He is a “self-start” lover of His creation.  All that I had learned before I went to seminary was not much more than doing my not-so-daily Bible reading and sermons. I did have a clear picture of the descriptions in 1 John, “God is love.”

In 2021, I was in a men’s Bible study group that was challenged to memorize all three chapters of the Sermon on the Mount over the course of the year.  It took the whole year, but I got close to reciting it with a little prompting from my friends.

In that year, the frustration shifted from the difficulty of memorization to not really knowing what I was memorizing.  In 2022, I returned to my usual preparation for our weekly Bible studies, but the “Sermon” kept slipping back into my thinking.  It occurred to me that if those three chapters of Matthew were a summation of all the teaching of Jesus, I needed to do more than just recite the words.  As a result, in 2023, I decided to read the “Sermon” every day for the whole year.

In that reading, I became fascinated by the “Lord’s Prayer.”  That became 2024’s daily reading. 2025 was an expansion year of reading every week the whole of Matthew’s Gospel.  As 2026 approached, I grew a desire to broaden my understanding of Paul’s application of Jesus’ teaching by reading the Book of Ephesians.  May has just started, and I am still in the first chapter.

One of the things I have been doing in this dense chapter is starting a vocabulary list of words that seem to call me deeper.  I then dive deeper into the meaning of that word as it was used on the day Paul wrote it down.  The resource I use the most is a site called “Abarim Publications” (www.abarim-publications.com/Interlinear-New-Testament/index.html).

Now I am back to the zipper.  Here is the sentiment that prompted this post.  “Our verb doesn’t emphasize the meeting of two parties but rather their gradual integration, like a zipper that closes or DNA that duplicates.”

You probably aren’t aware, but 2026 marks the 135th anniversary of the zipper’s invention.  In 1991, a Japanese company produced well over a million miles of zippers.  I am thankful for zippers; they make life a little easier and more secure.  While having the ability to hold their grip under greater stress, the brass ones are also comfortably flexible.

That picture of the zipper is wonderfully helpful in helping me understand God’s love for me.  And in that sixth verse, Paul shows us how tenaciously God held on to His Son.  God’s “agape” is stronger than the world’s hostility toward God.  For those of us who are allowing God to “zip” us to Himself, we rest secure in His determined Self-generated and Self-activated love for us.   His outrageous love is His process of “blessing” us, rather than the single event that happened when I “accepted Jesus.”

So now you have a new picture to view when someone tells you to “Zip It!”  That is exactly what discipleship is.