The Bible Will Really Screw Up Your Theology 1.0
In Anglican devotions, you’re supposed to read Psalm 95 every morning. As I was reading that psalm today, I was blown away by the stark juxtaposition of God’s love and God’s wrath. Verse 6 and 7 are heart-warming. The Psalmist starts off with a rousing call to worship:
6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.”
Most Christians would wonder, “Why in the world would you want to start every morning with that?!” That’s a frightening set of verses. You see this all throughout the Psalms. The whole spectrum of God’s character, his love for his people and his hatred for his enemies, set right next to each other. The wrath of God is an attribute of God as much a part of God as any other attribute, an attribute without which God would be less than God.
Many Christians have a hard time reconciling the reality that God’s is both loving and wrathful. We struggle to believe that God would hate anyone. But the Bible is replete with the reality of God’s judgement, and the reality of Hell. This is a hard truth to swallow. A. W. Pink observes:
It is sad to find so many professing Christians who appear to regard the wrath of God as something for which they need to make an apology, or at least they wish there were no such thing. While some would not go so far as to openly admit that they consider it a blemish on the Divine character, yet they are far from regarding it with delight; they like not to think about it, and they rarely hear it mentioned without a secret resentment rising up in their hearts against it. Even with those who are more sober in their judgment, not a few seem to imagine that there is a severity about the Divine wrath which is too terrifying to form a theme for profitable contemplation. Others harbor the delusion that God’s wrath is not consistent with His goodness, and so seek to banish it from their thoughts.
Yes, many there are who turn away from a vision of God’s wrath as though they were called to look upon some blotch in the Divine character, or some blot upon the Divine government. But what saith the Scriptures? As we turn to them we find that God has made no attempt to conceal the fact of His wrath. He is not ashamed to make it known that vengeance and fury belong unto Him.
“Hate the sin, love the sinner.” – Mahatma Gandhi
And it got me wondering, “Is this statement biblical?”
Most Christians would say “Yes”. I’m not so sure…
“How then, should the love of God and the wrath of God be understood to relate to each other? The evangelical cliché has it that God hates the sin but loves the sinner. There is a small element of truth in these words: God has nothing but hate for the sin, but it would be wrong to conclude that God has nothing but hate for the sinner. A difference must be maintained between God’s view of sin and his view of the sinner. Nevertheless the cliché (God hates the sin but loves the sinner) is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36).
Our problem, in part, is that in human experience, wrath and love normally abide in mutually exclusive compartments. …But this is not the way it is with God. God’s wrath is not an implacable, blind rage. …God in his perfections must be wrathful against his rebel image-bearers, for they have offended him; and God in his perfections must be loving toward his rebel image-bearers, for he is that kind of God.”
-D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, Crossway, 2000, p. 68-69. (http://books.google.com/books?id=quHEah32OhAC&pg=PA68&lpg=PA68#v=onepage&q=&f=false)
Each time I have brought this point up to Christian leaders in my life, leaders whom I deeply respect, they have accused me of “drinking the Reformed koolaid” or being a so-called “Hyper-Calvinist”. It really gets people riled up, and I find that interesting.
I’m convinced that the cross makes absolutely no sense, and for that matter, Hell makes absolutely no sense, if God’s wrath does not rest equally on the sinner as it does on the sin. So many people just assume that the “Hate the sin, love the sinner” view of God is biblical. I would submit that it’s only half of the truth.
This truth is fundamental to the Gospel. We can’t just throw this into the “mystery” bucket, ignore a perceived blemish on God’s character, or harbor a secret belief that God sends people to hell against his will. Why would God subject those that he “loves” to eternal torment and wrath in hell? There’s no theological integrity there, and there’s no joy there.
We come to the Bible with preconceived notions about who God is and what God is like. One of those notions is that God cares more about us than he does about his glory, that the Gospel is only about God’s love for sinners, and has nothing to do with God’s righteous judgement (hatred) of sinners.