What the Bible Says About Relationships
The short answer
When people search for bible verses about relationships, they often expect advice about romance or friendship. The Bible does speak to those things, but it starts somewhere deeper: with trust. Proverbs 3 famously says, "Trust in Yahweh with all your heart," and then, just a few verses later, turns to the neighbor: "Don't devise evil against your neighbor," since he lives securely beside you. The same chapter that tells us to trust God tells us to be trustworthy to the people around us. Those two things are not separate topics. They are the same fabric.
John Goldingay draws out what this means. He suggests that one way to define love is 'making the world safe for the other person'—being someone others can count on. On this reading, trust is the hinge of every relationship the Bible cares about: with God, with a spouse, with a friend, with the neighbor next door. At the same time, Goldingay notes that Proverbs also counsels discernment about whom you trust. Biblical wisdom is not naive; it holds openness and prudence together.
Walter Brueggemann widens the lens. He argues that the Bible, from creation to incarnation, insists that God cares about the material world—real earth, real bodies, real economies. If that's true, then relationships in Scripture can never be reduced to warm spiritual feelings. Caring for 'the bodily well-being of the neighbor' becomes a primary task of life with God.
Put together, these two readings give a fuller answer to what the Bible says about relationships. Love means making life safe and dependable for another person, and that safety is concrete: it includes their body, their livelihood, their daily security. Relationships, biblically speaking, are trust made practical.
What scholars say
Goldingay answers the question of what actually holds relationships together—trust, offered wisely and made safe for the other person—while Brueggemann explains why biblical love can't stay abstract: a God who cares about the material world makes the neighbor's bodily well-being our business.
“The other reference to trust comes when it talks about the neighbor who is living trustingly with you; you’re not to make some plan against him. One definition of love is making the world safe for the other person, who can then know it’s possible to count on you to do so. So trust isn’t only key to our relationships with God but key to relationships with other people. My father was a trusting person, and my mother sometimes despaired at the risks he would take in connection with other people. I follow my father, whereas my wife is like my mother. The complementarity in both marriages is good; Proverbs has already given good reason for discernment about whom you trust.”
“WB: What I did was to offer an introductory chapter about the incessant materiality of faith in the Bible, from creation to incarnation. The Bible begins with God’s generative love for the world, the real plant-producing, life-sustaining earth. And then Jesus came in the flesh to love the world. The real world cared for by God and the flesh of Jesus attest that God cares about material reality, with all of its economic palpability. But the church too often has preferred things “spiritual” and “other-worldly,” as though the material world were dispensable. The Bible is an insistence that the material world is God’s big preoccupation. The inescapable outcome of that claim is that the bodily well-being of the neighbor is a primary task of our life in God’s world.”
What it means for you
Start by asking a simple question: am I safe to trust? Not just honest in big moments, but dependable in small ones—keeping confidences, following through, refusing to scheme or take advantage of someone who has let their guard down around you. That is love in the Bible's plain sense.
Then let the love get practical. If God cares about the material world, then caring for the people in your life includes their actual circumstances—rest, food, finances, health—not just their feelings. And exercise discernment, too: trusting wisely is part of wisdom, not a failure of faith.
In context
Proverbs 3 opens the book's extended appeal from a parent to a child, urging trust in God rather than one's own understanding. But the chapter doesn't stop at the vertical relationship. It moves directly into everyday ethics—don't withhold good from those who deserve it, don't plot against the neighbor living trustingly beside you. In Proverbs, wisdom about God and wisdom about people are one continuous lesson. Brueggemann's comments come from a broader conversation about the Bible as a whole, tracing God's care for the material world from creation to the incarnation.