God Is Love. God Hates Evil! Part 2

God is love. His character and essential nature is love. It is not just that God loves us with loving-kindness. He is love. But God also hates. As I read about Esau and the Edomites (and every other spirit of evil and their human followers), whom God hates, it became clear to me: God hates evil with a passion. And I must live with this tension. In our own pride we often want to minimize God, to make Him into someone we can feel comfortable around, someone who plays the game by our rules, someone we can understand – really, someone we can control. We want to reinvent God. To make Him safe and not too demanding – like Mr. Rogers or our uncle Walter.

We are comfortable with a loving God. But a God who hates? There is nothing to fear in a loving God. As long as He loves us, can’t we live life relying on our idols to provide what we need and come to God when we have no other place to turn? He is love. He won’t abandon us. After all, we are Christians – we live under grace. Yes, true. But this is “cheap grace” according to Bonhoeffer.

“Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin . . . This is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner . . . cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance . . .” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The Cost of Discipleship, pgs. 44).

If we believe in this kind of grace and this kind of God, we are living a life of self-denial. This is God:

“He who forms the mountains, creates the wind, and reveals His thoughts to man, He who turns dawn to darkness, and treads the high places of the earth – the Lord Almighty is His name” (Amos 4: 13 NIV).

“Because they have rejected the law of the Lord, and have not kept His decrees, because they have been led astray by false gods, the gods their ancestors followed, I will send fire upon Judah and will consume the fortresses of Jerusalem” (Amos 2: 4, 5 NIV).

Our God is a consuming fire! He loves, true. But God hates. And the scriptures make clear, at least to me, that God’s hate is primarily directed at evil and those who willingly align their lives with evil for the purposes of destroying God’s perfect creation and murdering God’s people – God calls these murderers ‘wicked’. I think there is a difference between the person who unwittingly embraces idolatry to find value and acceptance in a painful and devaluing world and someone who knowingly and willingly embraces the Esau spirit – spurning God, His gifts and blessings, with the intention of pulling down God’s ‘culture’ out of spite, anger, or just because he can. When offered another ‘way’, the former is more likely to choose Jesus – repent, believe, and be saved – while the latter is more likely to reject the goodness of God, in the same way Esau rejected his birthright, and therefore ultimately be ‘cast into outer darkness’.

Can we reject God’s Kingdom, which is to ask, “Can we reject His salvation”? Of course we can. Recall that when God brought all of Israel to the edge of the Promised Land for the first time, the Old Testament equivalent of the Kingdom of God today, the people rebelled and rejected God’s plan of salvation. God cried out to Moses, “How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I performed among them” (Numbers 14: 11 NIV). They rejected God; they chose fear and death over the life He was offering them. They even wanted to return to slavery in Egypt! We can reject the Kingdom of God in the same way today when God offers it to us.

“How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know Him who said “It is Mine to avenge: I will repay”, and again “The Lord will judge His people”. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands to the living God” (Hebrews 10: 29 – 31 NIV).

Amen. This is serious business!

God’s wrath is directed against all idolatry and disobedient sin. God hates evil, that anti-God force and its personification, satan, the powers and principalities of the dark world, and the wicked who embrace evil to kill, steal, and destroy God’s creation. Are any of us free from the sins of idolatry or disobedience? How much of the world is under the influence of satan, even living in the grip of the spirit of Esau or other demonic powers. What hope is there for us?

In Mark 10 a rich young man approached Jesus asking, “what must I do to inherit eternal life”, or in other words “what must I do to enter the Kingdom of God?” Jesus looked at him and loved him. Realizing that this young man found his value, acceptance, and sense of belonging in his wealth, Jesus told him to sell all that he owned, give the proceeds to the poor, and then follow Him. In other words, Jesus saw this young man for who he was – an idolater. The young man could not follow Jesus’ instructions. He rejected this offer of salvation – life in the Kingdom – and left Jesus sorrowfully. In the young man’s case, the idol was wealth. For us, the idol might be something else. The point is Jesus knew that idolatry is a dead end – we can never enter the Kingdom of God – we can never be saved – as long as we find our value and acceptance in the things of the world. As long as we worship at one of the many altars the world raises up for us. And for sure, we can never gain salvation – enter the Kingdom of God – on our own merit apart from repentance, faith, and the work of the cross.

Then, Jesus makes this point with His disciples. He tells them that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man (or any idolater) to enter the Kingdom of God. The disciples respond by saying, “who then can be saved?” They equate salvation with living with Christ in the Kingdom of God and they are saying, in accordance with first-century Jewish belief, if this rich, powerful guy who obviously is looked upon favorably by God (because of his wealth and power) can’t get into the Kingdom, who can?

And Jesus answers them: “You are correct. With man this is impossible”. Uh Oh. We are in trouble. Here we are – sinners, idolaters, some of us following the prince of the air, all of us objects of wrath. As David says, “All have turned from aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Psalm 14: 3 NIV). We can’t do it! What hope do we have? We should just give up – all of our righteous works are like filthy rags to God (Isaiah 64: 6 NIV). We are all destined to be cast into outer darkness, for eternity. Hopeless!

And then Jesus says; “But not with God; all things are possible with God” (Mark 10: 27 NIV). Hallelujah! A glimmer of hope. What can this mean? (Really, a rhetorical question – most of you know the answer). Stay tuned.