Transcription
Welcome to the deep dive. We're here to take on some of the most essential and sometimes challenging source material, essays, research, scripture, and really unpack it for you so you can move from just being curious to feeling well informed.
And today we are tackling a big one. I mean, it's a tension that sits right at the heart of Christian thought. If you get this wrong, it can really fracture your whole view of God.
It's a huge one. It's this challenge of trying to reconcile two truths from the Bible that at first glance seem to completely contradict each other.
That's right. On the one hand, you have God's boundless universal love for the world and on the other, you have his, well, his intense hatred of evil and specifically of those who practice it.
That is absolutely the core of it. It's a conflict I think so many thoughtful Christians really grapple with. We hold up John 3:16, you know, it's a banner verse for so many of us. "For God so loved the world."
Exactly. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son." That verse for many defines the very heart of God. But then you turn a few pages maybe to the Old Testament to the Psalms.
And it feels like you're reading about a completely different being.
It really does. You find these passages that seem to paint a, well, a dramatically different, almost hostile picture of God.
Yeah. Take Psalm 5:5, just says it plain as day. "You hate all evildoers." Or, uh, Psalm 11:5, it says, "The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence."
So the question becomes, how can the same God, the same divine being, passionately love and passionately hate?
It creates this, you know, this real cognitive dissonance. What do we do with that? Are we supposed to pick a side?
Right? Do we choose one truth and just kind of ignore the other one? Is it right?
Is it God in two different moods? Right.
And so our mission for this deep dive, which is based on a really careful theological essay on this very topic, is to see if we can resolve that seeming contradiction.
And the essay argues very forcefully that these are not rival ideas.
Not at all.
They are instead two necessary angles on the very same perfectly holy God. One angle is showing his genuine, sustaining compassion for the people he made. And the other,
And the other shows his unwavering, his moral opposition to the evil that is actively destroying those people.
Okay, let's pause there because that is such a crucial point. Our goal today isn't to water down God's love or to, you know, explain away the hard passages.
It's to let the Bible, the whole of scripture, define its own terms, to let it tell us what it means by love and hate. Because as we're going to see, our modern understanding of those words, it's just not always the right tool for the job.
And the place where this all gets resolved, the very mechanism that holds the tension is the cross. That's the core thesis of the essay. The cross is where the judgment that evil requires is fully met and where boundless mercy is at the same time completely opened up.
So, we're going to be looking at John chapter 3 pretty closely. We have to, because that same passage, the one with the famous declaration of love, also holds this warning of wrath and this just perfect balance. God's love reaches wide and sends the son. But willfully rejecting that son means that a person simply remains under the righteous wrath that God, because he is good, has to uphold.
So let's start at the beginning with the foundational issue here, which is vocabulary. I have a feeling that a lot of the anxiety we feel as, you know, 21st century readers is because we're projecting our own emotional definitions of hate onto these ancient texts.
That is absolutely correct. That is the first and maybe the biggest hurdle we have to get over. It's understanding the ancient Hebrew use of love and hate.
And it was just different.
Very different. Once you realize these words were often used comparatively, it's, you know, especially in a covenant context, a lot of that emotional sting just starts to lift. The language wasn't always a statement of like personal hostility. It was often a kind of shorthand.
A shorthand for what?
For preference, for standing, or for status.
Okay. Can you unpack that a bit more? What does covenant shorthand actually mean? How would someone 2,000 years ago have heard that differently than we do?
Sure. In that context, it could mean to not choose, or to love less, or even to relegate to a lower status for a specific purpose. The most famous example, the one that always comes up, is from Malachi 1, where God says, "Jacob I love, but Esau I hated."
And when we hear that in English, our minds immediately go to individual salvation. We picture God just completely rejecting Esau, denying him any compassion, condemning him.
That's the modern assumption, and it's a really dangerous one to apply to that text. Because if you look at the context of Malachi, what God is talking about is a historical choosing for a role. He's talking about the nations that came from those two brothers, Israel from Jacob and Edom from Esau.
Ah, so it's corporate, not individual.
It is. God chose Jacob's line to be the one to carry the covenant promise, the line that would, you know, eventually bring forth the Messiah. The hatred here is a statement about election, about a function within the story of redemption. So, it's not about God denying Esau common grace or or even compassion as a person. It's about the nation of Edom not being the chosen vehicle for this divine promise that was meant to bless the world.
Exactly. The choosing of Jacob by definition necessitates the hating of Esau in this covenant sense.
Yeah.
It just means his line was not selected for that one unique messianic job.
And that's a crucial distinction. The specific choosing, the election of one line, is actually done to advance this worldwide purpose.
That's it. So the language of hate here is defining the historical boundaries of the promise, not the limits of God's general compassion for all people.
Okay, that makes perfect sense for, you know, nations and big historical movements. But this same shorthand gets applied in the New Testament by Jesus himself. And that's where it gets really uncomfortable for me.
Yeah. Oh, it does. If you go to Luke 14:26, and Jesus gives this staggering command. He says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."
And that verse just stops you in your tracks. I mean, if you take that literally, it sounds like he's commanding emotional cruelty. Like he's telling us to destroy the family, which the rest of the Bible so strongly upholds.
And it's designed to startle us. It's meant to grab our attention. But again, if we place it back into this ancient comparative way of speaking, the meaning becomes much clearer.
So hate here doesn't mean what we think it means.
No, it means loving him supremely. It means prioritizing your allegiance to him above every other relationship on earth. Jesus is defining a necessary hierarchy of love.
So he's not telling us to feel hostility toward our parents. He's saying that the love we have for our deepest human relationships, it has to be so much smaller than our love and loyalty for him that by comparison, it almost looks like hate.
That is the key insight. He is demanding total, undivided, primary loyalty. If your allegiance to Jesus comes into conflict with the demands of your family, you have to choose Jesus. And to choose him so supremely means all other loves are by necessity put in a secondary place. And we can actually see this same kind of language, this household idiom, even earlier in the Bible, right? Like in the story of Jacob's wives, Leah and Rachel.
Exactly. You go back to Genesis 29. The text says, "Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah." First, it describes Leah as loved less, but then in the very next breath, it uses the verb "hated" to describe her standing in the family.
So, the less favored wife is called the hated one.
Right? Which shows us pretty clearly that the term is about standing or status, or being the less favored one in a structure, not necessarily about malice.
Okay. So, if we can hold those three examples in our minds, Jacob and Esau, Jesus's command about family, and Leah and Rachel, it really starts to dismantle the idea of a God who is just, you know, moody or volatile. It clarifies that hate in these specific contexts is a technical term.
It is. It's about comparative preference. And that's the first essential key to reading these hard passages.
But the essay is very clear that there is a second way the Bible uses the word hate.
And this one is different.
It is. This one is far more uncompromising. It describes God's moral opposition. And this is where we get back to those Psalms that we started with.
This is where the rubber really meets the road, because now we're talking about God's settled, firm stance against entrenched wickedness.
We're moving from comparative language to moral language. Texts like Psalm 5:5, "You hate all evildoers," or Psalm 11:5, "his soul hates the one who loves violence." These are declarations. They're telling us that the Holy One is fundamentally not neutral about things like harm and injustice.
So, this isn't about choosing one group over another for a mission anymore.
No, this is about God's inherent holy character reacting against moral evil. I think a big point of confusion for a lot of us here is the idea that God hates the evildoer, not just the evil. We've created this nice neat saying, "God hates the sin but loves the sinner." Does the source material, does the Bible let us make that clean of a separation?
That's a great question. The source is very careful here. It argues that while that phrase "hate the sin, love the sinner" is pastorally helpful, the Bible itself often doesn't make that clean distinction. It doesn't abstract the evil from the person who is doing it.
And why not? Because when God declares his opposition, he's targeting specific actions that are flowing from a person's will, from their heart. The evildoer is defined by their devotion to destructive things.
So, it's the practice, the commitment to wickedness that is being targeted.
Precisely. Look at that famous list in Proverbs 6. It lists seven things the Lord hates. And what are they? "A lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to run to evil." These are all actions.
They were all actions. And when a person dedicates their life, their hands, their heart to these things, the Bible says God is set against them. His holiness demands opposition to that which ruins goodness and life.
And that makes perfect sense. I mean, if God is good, he must hate what destroys life and truth. You wouldn't want a judge who was neutral about injustice. That would be a terrible judge.
Absolutely. A love that just tolerates violence and deceit isn't holy love. It's just, it's moral indifference. So God's moral opposition is absolutely essential to his goodness. But, and this is the crucial move, this moral opposition doesn't just exist in a vacuum. It sits inside his bigger, overarching, worldwide mission of mercy.
Okay, I want to pause on that. How does God's very specific stance against wickedness connect to his mission to bless the whole world?
The source points us right back to that promise to Abraham in Genesis 12. God chooses a line, right? But he chooses it for a purpose: to bless all the families on earth.
So the choosing of Israel is linked to the inclusion of the nations.
Inextricably. His hatred of wickedness is the boundary that keeps that chosen channel of blessing pure so that it can actually fulfill its purpose. His moral clarity protects the very mechanism through which universal mercy will eventually flow.
So it's not exclusionary, it's preservative.
That is the elegant theological structure. God establishes this, this beachhead of holiness through a chosen people so that the blessing can eventually flow out to all the nations, just like Isaiah 49 promises. His particular choosing actually advances mercy's wider reach. It doesn't restrict it. And understanding those two contexts, covenant comparison and moral opposition, that's how we start to hear the full, complex cadence of God's character.
Okay. So with that more refined vocabulary, let's trace this double reality, this expansive love and this uncompromising opposition, through the grand story of the Bible. Let's see how this tension builds and ultimately points toward the cross.
The story really starts with creation, which God declares "very good." That's the baseline. God's posture toward humanity and the world is from the beginning one of love and affirmation.
But that perfect state is immediately shattered,
Right? By human revolt, the fall, and wrath is incurred. But at the same time, a promise is given right away. The protoevangelium, the very first hint of the gospel, comes through the seed of the woman.
So the pattern is set right from the start. Love is expressed in creation and promise, but moral boundaries are crossed, which necessitates judgment, which is then immediately met with an advancing promise of salvation.
And that promise moves forward through Abraham for the sake of all families. The choosing of Israel is a continuation of that same pattern. They weren't loved because they were better than anyone else. Deuteronomy 7 says they were chosen by sheer grace.
God commits to them, but that relationship comes with demands. It requires holiness. It involves discipline.
And that's a key point. Why the discipline? Why the constant insistence on holiness? Because they were commissioned to be a light to the nations. That was their job. They were meant to be the living, visible example of God's redemptive power and justice in the world. So if Israel failed in holiness, if they started to look just like the nations around them, they failed in their whole mission.
They failed to be that light. So God's discipline wasn't just arbitrary punishment. It was restorative love. He was opposing the very things that would destroy them and block the blessing that was intended for the rest of the world.
So it's a kind of tough love aimed at their ultimate restoration and the fulfillment of the mission.
Exactly. And the prophets, they hold this tension so beautifully. On the one hand, they declare God's identity, you know, from Exodus 34, "He's the Lord who forgives iniquity and rebellion and sin."
But they immediately pair that incredible mercy with this blistering moral clarity.
They do. The classic example is Amos. He's crying out against the wealthy who are crushing the poor. And he proclaims from God, "I hate, I despise your religious festivals.
I take no delight in your solemn assemblies." That is a perfect illustration of that second type of hate, moral opposition. God rejected their religious rituals because they were totally disconnected from justice and love for their neighbor. They were putting on this outward show of piety while their hearts and hands were full of the very wickedness God hates.
And the message from the prophets is crystal clear. You cannot claim God's love while you are actively practicing things that he morally opposes.
It's an impossibility. And this whole duality, this balance of tender welcome and fierce opposition, it reaches its absolute peak in the person of Jesus. He is the full embodiment of this double edge.
His ministry shows this radical welcome unlike anything people had ever seen before.
He didn't just tolerate tax collectors and sinners. He ate with them. He was in their homes, which was this profound act of social acceptance in that culture. And he explained it with that physician's analogy. "It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." Which shows that his saving welcome is aimed precisely at those who are subject to God's moral opposition.
Yes, but the story also includes these scenes of righteous opposition, which I think we often like to gloss over because we prefer the image of the gentle, healing Jesus.
But he was also firm.
He was gentle, but he was also terrifyingly firm. You see him exposing the hypocrisy of the Pharisees with this surgical precision, calling them "whitewashed tombs." You see him pronouncing these severe warnings over the cities of Capernaum and Chorazin because they saw his miracles and still refused to repent.
And maybe the most vivid example is the cleansing of the temple.
Let's talk about that for a second because that wasn't a gentle rebuke. That was physical. It was fury.
He made a whip.
He made a whip and physically drove them out. He overturned tables. He declared, "My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers." This wasn't a mood swing. This was an active, holy opposition to the structural wickedness that was blocking people from worshiping God.
He was tender to the broken individual,
but utterly firm against the systems of harm. And that contrast is so essential. He welcomed individuals no matter how great their sin. But he actively opposed the corporate, institutionalized wickedness that harmed them.
That is the pattern. And the essay brings us right back to the centerpiece of Jesus's own teaching on this, which is John chapter 3. We started there, and all these historical threads really converge there.
They do. Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, and he tells him that God loved the world so much that he gave his son so that whoever believes in him might live. The love is universal in its scope. It's for the whole world. The provision is singular. It's the son.
But then immediately he outlines the consequence.
Immediately. "Whoever looks to him lives."
"Whoever refuses him remains under wrath." It's a statement of both availability and incredible urgency. And the source reminds us that Jesus connects this idea to the story of the serpent in the wilderness. Why is that image from the book of Numbers so crucial here?
That image is absolutely vital because it connects the love and the judgment seamlessly. In Numbers 21, the Israelites are in the wilderness. They're complaining. They're rebelling against God.
As they often were.
Right? And they're being bitten by these deadly, fiery serpents. It's a clear manifestation of God's moral judgment on their disobedience. The judgment was real. The consequence of their sin was death.
But God provided a remedy.
An immediate and simple one. He told Moses to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole. And the provision was miraculous. "Just look up at the cursed image and you will live." Required two things: acknowledging your desperate situation under judgment and having faith in the unique remedy God provided. And Jesus says, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent, so must the Son of Man be lifted up."
You see the parallel? The cross isn't just an act of love. It is the solution to an already existing, fatal judgment. The love is expressed in providing the son who was lifted up to absorb the curse, just like that bronze serpent bore the image of the curse.
So the verdict of "remaining under wrath," which is the default position for anyone in revolt against a holy God, it's only for those who actively refuse the remedy. It makes the wrath conditional on rejection, not on God's mood.
Exactly. And this message stays consistent after the resurrection. The apostles didn't soften it.
They didn't just preach the love part.
No, they maintained the balance. They went out to the nations preaching the good news of forgiveness in Christ, the vastness of his saving welcome. But at the same time, they urgently warned that wrath is coming on those who harden themselves in disobedience. They listed the very evils God opposes: impurity, greed, idolatry.
So the warning of wrath isn't just an optional accessory to the gospel. It's an urgent part of it. It provides the context for the rescue.
It does. I mean, without the warning of the danger, the rescue doesn't sound all that impressive. This truth-telling actively serves salvation. The clarity about judgment just underscores the urgency and the incredible cost of the rescue that was provided by God's infinite love. The whole biblical story confirms this.
Okay, so we've looked at the vocabulary and we've traced the narrative. Now, let's get into the theological engine room, so to speak. Let's systematically analyze how God's opposition, both that covenantal kind and the moral kind, doesn't just coexist with his love. It actually safeguards his character and makes the cross necessary.
That is the highest level of insight we can get from this. The two different ways the word "hate" is used actually work together to protect God's perfect character.
How so?
Well, the covenant idiom of hate safeguards God's freedom. It's his right to choose the means and the instruments for his plan without being bound by what we think is fair or what people deserve.
And the other kind of hate?
The moral language of hate safeguards God's goodness, his settled, unwavering opposition to destructive evil. If he didn't have the freedom to choose or the goodness to oppose evil, his character would be deficient.
So the complexity actually makes the solution at the cross even more profound. If God were just indifferent to evil, we wouldn't need a cross. He would just, you know, let it slide. But because he is morally pure, he has to deal with it.
Precisely. And this leads us to another key theological point. God's love isn't just one single, simple emotion. To really get this, we have to understand that there are layers to God's love.
Okay. The source outlines three distinct layers. Let's walk through each one and connect it to our everyday experience.
The first layer is what we could call preserving kindness. Some theologians call it common grace. This is the foundational love, the kindness that's extended to all of creation, to all of humanity, regardless of their moral standing or their relationship with God.
This is what Jesus was talking about when he said, "The Father makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."
That's it. Exactly. In practical terms, it's the air you're breathing right now. It's the laws of physics that hold the universe together. It's the beauty of a sunset. It's the moments of joy and relationship that people experience. It's the unearned grace that sustains life itself, even for people who are actively engaged in wickedness.
So God sustains the very people whose actions he morally opposes.
Yes. This love is restraining judgment, offering patience, and upholding the world. It's why an evildoer can still have moments of happiness or success in this life.
Okay. What's the second layer?
The second layer is the saving welcome. This is the specific love that is offered uniquely through Christ to anyone who will believe. This love is targeted at fallen humanity, offering redemption and reconciliation.
This is Jesus saying, "Whoever comes to me, I will never drive away."
That's the one. This is the universal, sincere invitation of the Redeemer. It's available to any person, no matter what their past looks like. It moves beyond just sustaining their life. It offers to save their soul by dealing with the sin that separates them from God.
So, layer 1 is general provision. Layer 2 is the specific remedy. And what's the third layer? The most intimate one. Layer 3 is familial care. This is the adopted love. It's reserved for those who have responded to that saving welcome and have been brought into God's family through the Holy Spirit. Paul talks about receiving the spirit of adoption by which we cry out, "Abba, Father."
Which means, "Daddy, Father."
Exactly. It's an incredibly intimate term. This is the deepest, most permanent expression of God's love. It's a love that guarantees our eternal security and the promise of our ultimate restoration.
These layers really help frame the whole issue. God can show layer 1 kindness to an evildoer and at the same time feel that moral opposition, the second type of hate, to their actions while reserving that layer 3 intimacy for those who accept the layer 2 saving welcome. The system is coherent.
It is. But that brings us back to that challenging concept of wrath. If God is fundamentally love, how do we explain wrath? Is it just a breakdown of that layer 1 kindness?
Right? Is it just God getting angry and losing his temper?
The source is very clear on this. Wrath is not a mood swing. The theological definition, which comes out of Romans 1, is that wrath is the steady face of God's holy love turned toward whatever ruins us. It's the necessary reaction of perfect justice against unrighteousness.
So it's not an emotional outburst. It's a settled, holy verdict that's built right into the moral fabric of the universe.
Exactly. And if you deny the reality of God's wrath, you actually shrink his love. A love that doesn't care about injustice or the ruin of his creation isn't holiness. It's just indifference. Wrath confirms his commitment to justice. But on the flip side, if you deny his love, all you're left with is despair. Love and wrath are linked.
And this brings us to the ultimate intersection, the cross. This is the one place in all of reality where these two necessary forces, boundless love for the world and uncompromising wrath against its evil, can meet without destroying creation.
Golgotha is the meeting point. It's where God, in one single public act, sets forth Jesus to satisfy the demands of wrath. The Bible calls this propitiation. And at the same time, to justify the believer without compromising his justice.
Okay, propitiation is a big theological word. How does the cross actually do both of those things at once? Satisfy wrath and extend mercy without, as you said, bending justice.
The key is substitution. Justice demanded that the penalty for sin, which is death and separation from God, be paid. Love demanded that the sinner be welcomed back. God solved this dilemma by allowing a perfect substitute to bear the penalty. In Jesus, God absorbed the cost himself.
So, Romans 3 tells us Jesus was presented as a propitiation. He turned away the just wrath of God. He took the judgment we deserved, which upholds God's justice. But because the payment was made by God's own son, God can remain the justifier of those who believe.
That is the very heart of the resolution. The substitution is just profound. The sinless one is made sin for us. The one who lived under the Father's perfect favor becomes cursed on the tree for us. The judge literally bears the judgment himself so that the guilty can go free.
And that answers the paradox perfectly. How can God love sinners and be against sin? Because he dealt with the sin personally and justly in the body of his son. The moral opposition of God was satisfied by God himself, which then freed him to extend that saving welcome to the world he loves. John 3:14 comes alive right there. When we look to the lifted-up Christ, the one bearing the curse, the embodiment of judgment satisfied, we receive life and the condemnation is removed.
Okay, I have a follow-up question that I think a lot of people struggle with. If the love is universal and the remedy is perfect, how do we reconcile that with the idea of God choosing specific people or instruments, what we call election?
That's a great and thoughtful question. The source addresses it by showing how these two ideas work together. Election and invitation aren't rivals. God chooses specific instruments, a person like Jacob, a nation like Israel, so that the blessing can reach farther to all the families of the earth.
So the specific choice of the means doesn't cancel out the universal call of the message.
Not at all. Alongside that specific choice, God issues this universal, sincere call for all people everywhere to repent and believe. The mechanism for salvation is simple and open. "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." Election makes sure the gospel message gets out. The invitation makes sure it's freely offered to everyone.
And we see God's character staying constant, even though the way he administers his will changes over time.
That's right. The administration shifts. The law on stone gives way to the Spirit on hearts. The repeated sacrifices give way to one finished, perfect offering. A single nation gives way to a worldwide people, the church. And so, what is the mandate for the church in this current age?
Our job is to announce the good news. We are commissioned to proclaim forgiveness in Jesus's name to all nations. But because we serve a God of moral clarity, we also have to warn of judgment for those who refuse him. Both the invitation and the warning are vital, honest parts of the full gospel message.
Okay, this high theology of the cross is so powerful, but let's bring it right down to ground level for the thoughtful person listening. How does this deep understanding of God's love and his moral opposition actually change how we live day-to-day?
Well, the primary application is learning how to read those most difficult parts of scripture in context and in harmony. We have to train ourselves to hear the full, complex chord that these two truths make together, instead of just letting them clash in our minds.
So, let's establish a working method. How do we read those hard words we started with?
Rule number one has to be: context is key. When you come across the word "hate" in the Bible, you need to pause and ask which context is at play. Is it describing God selecting one person over another for a redemptive job?
Like Jacob and Esau.
Exactly. Or Jesus's command in Luke 14. If so, you know this is covenant choosing, a comparison of priority.
And what if the text is talking about God's subtle opposition to wickedness?
Then you let the Psalms and Proverbs sharpen your conscience. This is God's moral clarity against harm and injustice. And that opposition should remind us that God is actively good and he is committed to stamping out anything that ruins his creation.
And what's the umbrella rule? The one that governs everything else.
Rule two: stand under John 3. You have to submit both the note of covenant choosing and the note of moral opposition to the bright, clear light of John 3:16. That's the truth that resolves the whole tension. The son is offered to the world, and wrath is removed only in him. If we do that, the unified chord rings clear. So the truth that God hates violence shouldn't make us despair. It should drive us to Christ, who takes the condemnation for our violence.
Exactly. And the truth that God loves the world should fuel our mission to that world with the message of reconciliation. The application at the end of the day is to come to Christ and, by trusting him, to learn the Father's heart for yourself.
And the radical nature of the gospel is seen in who gets invited.
It really is. The invitation isn't just for the people who have their lives together. It's for the broken, the lost, and yes, for the evildoer who finally recognizes they need the remedy.
And the Bible is full of examples of this.
Just think of them. The thief dying on the cross next to Jesus. He was a convicted evildoer, deserving of his punishment. He confesses his need, and he finds paradise that same day.
Or Saul of Tarsus.
The persecutor of the church, the man who called himself the worst of sinners. He becomes Paul the Apostle. Think of the Gentiles who are culturally and religiously far off, and they are brought nearer through the blood of Christ. The invitation is universally wide.
So once we're in the family, how do we reflect this duality ourselves? How do we live out this family likeness of hating evil but loving people?
We're called to imitate Christ in this balance. Paul tells us in Romans 12, "Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good." So the moral clarity has to be there. We can't be indifferent to injustice or wickedness. That's the hating evil part.
And what about the loving people part? Especially when those people are actively doing the things we're supposed to abhor.
It requires active compassion. Jesus explicitly tells us to pray for our enemies. And when we share the gospel, we have to speak the truth in love with patience, remembering that it's God's kindness, that layer one love, that is meant to lead people to repentance. Our firmness against evil has to be tempered by a genuine hope for the person's redemption. That's a critical distinction for the tone of the church. We can't be seen as people who are just rejoicing in judgment.
Absolutely not. Our tone has to mirror Jesus's ministry. And that means being tender at the table, welcoming the broken and the outcast, just like he did.
But it also means being firm in the temple, standing against harm and hypocrisy, just as he did. We uphold holiness while extending a radical welcome because we know that we ourselves were once the focus of God's moral opposition. And yet we received his saving welcome through his son.
So the practical application then is to stand in that space between the certainty of God's hatred for evil and the certainty of his love for the world. Always, always pointing to the solution in Christ.
We can never forget that every single person we meet is a recipient of God's common grace. And every single person is an object of God's gospel invitation. We have to speak the truth about wrath because it's real, but we have to shout the truth about love because the remedy has been provided. So, as we wrap up this deep dive, let's bring it all back together one last time.
I think the final truth is this: Scripture's hard lines about what God hates and its radiant lines about whom God loves, they aren't meant to be read in isolation. They belong together. They are the two halves of God's perfect, holy character. And they are only fully resolved at the cross.
A love that doesn't oppose evil isn't love. It's just indifference. And an opposition that offers no way out is just despair. The cross is that doorway where God proves he is both perfectly just and perfectly loving.
And John 3 is the banner over all of it. "For God so loved the world and gave his son." Those who believe are rescued. Those who refuse remain under that steady verdict of wrath. The fact that the judge willingly bore the judgment himself explains how both claims, his hatred of evil, his love for the world, can be true at the exact same time.
So when we next come across one of those challenging Psalms where God declares his hatred for evildoers, what should our final posture be? We have to immediately go and stand at Golgotha. There we see wrath answered and justice upheld. We see holiness maintained. And yet we see sinners welcomed. And we have to remember that the verdict carried by the unbeliever, it does not have to be their final line. The definitive proof of the Father's heart is eternally written in the wounds of his son.
Let's return to the full promise and warning of that central text from John 3:16-18. It holds all of this truth together.
It says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned. But whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only son."
That passage just holds the truth and the tension in perfect balance. The encouragement is so profound. God's love has provided the complete and total way out of condemnation.
And the warning is just as solemn. That provision has to be embraced by faith.
Mhm.
May you be granted the wisdom to read all of scripture, both the hard and the radiant passages, with patience and with context, the faith to stand firmly beneath the banner of the son, and the hope and patience to share this incredible truth that God's saving welcome is open to all.