Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin?

So many people live life worried that God is angry at them. For reasons that might include things like a poor father image, theological misrepresentation, or just faulty assumptions, there is this view of God that He is our enemy until we get things right with Him. That’s only a twisted half-truth.

The true part is that WE were HIS enemies. We wanted nothing to do with God, and thus we embraced our bondage to sin. God’s relentless pursuit of us drove Him to raise up a people (Israel) to whom He could publicly show His love, send spokesmen (prophets) through whom He could speak His love, and finally incarnate Himself (Jesus) so that whoever believed in Him would be reconciled to Him.

The wrath of God has been expressed in Scripture against those who rebelled against God, but that wrath is fully directed at sin and at those who continue to embrace their sin—sin that rejects God and that destroys people. The Bible talks about God’s enemies but the reason they are called that is that in their sin, they will have nothing to do with a loving God. As long as humans are wrapped up in rebellious, selfish, destructive sin, God’s wrath will deeply impact us, even while at the same time God deeply loves us.

That’s one reason Jesus died on the cross! Humans had so embraced sin, there was no way we could excise it, even if we wanted to (and while some of us wanted to get rid of some of it, none of us wanted to get rid of all of it).  Because sin is so totally anti-God, and because it so totally messes up those He loves, God’s fury was directed at that sin. Even though He loved us, He didn’t love what we had engaged in or what we had become; we were selfish, rebellious and ungodly. We needed to be spiritually transformed and totally set free from the bondage of sin.

On the cross, Jesus (who was fully God) killed ALL our sin, which not only satisfied the wrath of God towards sin in those who have faith in Him, but also destroyed any power that sin had over us. Now, we can accept salvation from sin and from the consequences of sin as a free gift from God! This includes salvation from Hell and the consequences of eternal separation from a God who is perfectly just and holy, and will not live with someone who hangs onto their sin instead of letting it die on the cross with Jesus.

And if we have been offered such a great gift born from unconditional love—even while God was our enemy—we should also love those who are entrapped in sin. That is why “love the sinner, hate the sin” can make any sense: because if we really love people, we are going to hate anything in their lives (as we hate anything in our own lives) that drives them further from wholeness and friendshihp with a loving God.

Romans 5:6-11