All you need is love. Love wins. Love trumps hate. These are just a handful of widely circulated slogans on love. This idea of love is supreme. Give me an unconditional love, the kind I deserve, the kind I want to return. But what is love?
The ground or basis for all that can be counted as love is God. But it is far deeper than just living by the golden rule (treating others the way you want to be treated), being content in this life, with neither need to be fixed nor part of any organized religion and going to heaven when you die. It is not some sort of moralistic therapeutic deism.
There is nary any room for a God of love in moralistic therapeutic deism. If this is true spirituality, then we really are without a place for a Heavenly Father. What we can only find is a deadbeat dad like deity who sired us but has been out of the picture ever since then. Right? If one is without need of fixing or change, then then there is no reason for spiritual disciplines (e.g. prayer, giving, self-denial, etc.), which cultivate within us godliness, so that we can live out our calling to be reflections of Maker in this world — the imago Dei. Neither can there be the intimacy with God which comes through the study of the Scriptures and the development of a robust theology, which is often discarded as the stuff of organized religion. But, there is another way.
The Apostle John tells us,
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us (1 Jn. 4:7-12).1God is love and the loveless one is without intimate knowledge of God. But God acts first, showing us the way of love by the giving of the Son to die for sinners so that they can have life. This is the amazing grace of the Triune God working in the universe to bring the least, lost and lowly of the world back home. The Father sends the Son to redeem the sinners, and Spirit dwells with believers to perfect in them divine love.
Divine love never drives God to turn a blind eye to things His children do which are self-destructive. God never gives a pass to those who abide by hate, the antithesis of love; rather, He calls them out. “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness,” writes John the Apostle, who further adds, “whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes” (1 Jn. 2:9, 11). Christians must reject the hate which divides people made in the image of God on the basis of race, gender, or status, building the wall of separation, and cultivating tribal warfare.
Christians can neither build a wall separating love and truth. The Apostle Paul tells us, “[Love] rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6). Elsewhere, he writes, “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Eph. 4:25). Truth is that which corresponds to reality. An oncologist tells the patient about testing positive for cancer. It would be incredibly wrong for an oncologist to lie about the diagnosis for the sake of sparing the patient from feeling hurt over the bad news. Truth about the cancer moves the patient to a place where discussion of treatment options become possible. It is the same way for sin. We all sin and the sin problem need to be fixed.
The Apostle Paul never spared the feelings of anyone who might have held tightly on to a pet sin; rather, he wrote,
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God (Gal. 5:19-21).
Elsewhere, Paul stated,
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Cor. 6:9-11).
Sin is destructive. It separates us from God, divides people from each other, corrupts the mind even to the extent of driving some to the unnatural use of their very own bodies, and left unchecked, sin can destroy a society. Nobody feels good about hearing this or that thing they do is sin, nobody wants to readily admit to being a sinner, but love rejoices in the truth. The matter of sin is never about calling out someone on this sin while letting someone else slide on that sin, this sort of duplicity is too a sin, which needs fixing; rather, the problem has to do with the realization that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23).
The greatest deception is supposing that sin is something good and God’s prohibition is really keeping us from good something good. “For God knows that when you eat [the forbidden fruit] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” says the Devil. (Gen. 3:5). It is truly a topsy-turvy when people start talking about Christianity is bad for you because it tells others this and that sin is bad for you. Woe to the one who calls good evil and evil good (Isa. 5:20). Sin is the thing which destroys, and love ought to compel the Christian to warn of people against their own self-destruction.
God’s giving of the Son to save sinners is the greatest act of love one can possibly imagine. After all, “one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:7-8).
Love extends mercy to the offender. Love showers grace upon those who neither earned nor deserved it. But, love never leaves the fallen wallowing in the same mire of sin they have been in their entire lives. The Lord lifts us up out of the mire and sets our feet upon a rock (Psa. 40:1-2).
— WGN
Notes:
- All Scripture cited from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2016), unless noted.
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