The Bible teaches that God is love.
It says God hates his enemies (Psalm 5:5). It says he is a God of wrath (John
Paul wrote in Romans 5 that when Jesus died to make up for our sins and so to make peace between us and God that at that time God and us were still enemies. Enemies hate each other and want to do wrong things against each other.
When God cursed the serpent in Genesis he told it that he would put enmity between its seed and the seed of the woman, Eve. They would be bitter enemies. Christians say the seed is Jesus and the serpent was just the Devil. So Jesus hates Satan. He doesn't hate the Devil because the Devil causes all sin. The Devil only suggests sin and we make ourselves as bad as him by doing what he suggests. Many of our sins are like his. He didn't have a Devil to tempt him but he sinned and we often sin without a Devil to tempt us. So if the Christians are right then Jesus must hate us too. We are not much better than the Devil.
Romans
Most of Christianity teaches that God loves us unconditionally for two
reasons.
1
Because he
is the kind of person that wants to do that.
2
Because
it is the only kind of love we can get and need for we don’t deserve any
blessing.
Many theologians disagree with the second reason because rights are based
on needs and you can’t have a right to God’s love. God could do good
for you without loving you so you don’t need his love. Besides, this love which will mean that God
wishes you well is ridiculous for it means that God wants you to get away with
your sins and be rewarded for them which is not love
at all according to the Bible which says that love must agree with justice to
be true love.
It is one thing to love a person unconditionally when they are a mixture
of bad and good but another if they are good for nothing. Unconditional love can be a way of trying to
inspire a person to leave their sins behind but that is only sensible if there
is a good chance it will work.
Otherwise you are just encouraging them to be useless.
No verse in the Bible teaches that God loves unconditionally. The Bible speaks of God’s redemptive love
which is the love with which he wants to save sinners so that he can hate them
no more. It speaks of his covenant love
by which he keeps his promises. It
speaks of his intimate parental love which is love in the full sense. So whenever the Bible speaks of divine love
it does not always mean the same kind of love.
A God who won’t make Hell where sinners go to be punished forever like
an eternal party is not a God who loves unconditionally but conditionally. If we are to love the sinner and hate the sin
it follows that we should feel terrible about the souls in Hell. This means Heaven is as bad as Hell
pain-wise. The only difference is that
there is no sin in the first place.
Obviously the doctrines of Heaven and Hell deny that you should love the
sinner and hate the sin. Sinners are
punished in Hell and in jail not sins for you can’t make sins pay for what they
did, you can only make people pay. You
punish people not sins. We say you
punish yourself when you drink too much or whatever but that is not making
yourself pay for your sins so it is not really punishing yourself. You are not doing it to punish. Jesus called Hell everlasting punishment
(Matthew 25:46) so God punishes there forever.
Real unconditional love cannot be forced.
It is something you voluntarily choose to do. Some theologians even question that God’s
love can be unconditional when he is the kind of being that does this meaning
he cannot be any different. It’s his
nature so not his choice so it is not real love! He would need to be capable of not loving at
all for this love to be real voluntary love.
But he is not. God would know
that his nature forces him to love and being so intelligent would realise that
this is not real love at all. It’s
forced and he lies to himself that it is unconditional love. So if God loves anybody unconditionally he
must actually be able to hate.
Religion counsels us to hate the sin but love the sinner. Hate means to dislike intensely and with violence of emotion, not necessarily action. It is really treating sin like a thing. To hate a thing like sin is irrational. You cannot hate a thing and be rational. When we hate a thing it is because an irrational emotion has kicked in. The hate is emotional but it is not us being truly ourselves. Proper hate involves and necessitates us being truly ourselves. Religion warns that you can hate the sinner and imagine you hate the sin not the sinner. Religion warns that hatred of sin easily becomes hatred of the sinner. Logically, the more you hate sin the more easily you might hate the sinner and be in denial. The more you hate the sin the more likely you are to be a danger to the sinner and hate the sinner. Jesus said in Matthew 5 right at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount that if your eye makes you lust for a woman and lust is a sin that you must hate the sin of lust so much that you would gouge the eye out. Some take him literally but all agree that whatever he meant he was commanding an intense hatred for sin. We know that when we hate sin we cannot leave the person out for sins don't happen on their own. They are what people do and they reflect and reveal the kind of persons they are, whether they are bad or good people. To advocate hatred of sin is to advocate hatred of the sinner. The person is the sin in a real sense. The more people want you to hate sin the more they put you at risk of hating the sinner even if the sinner can sometimes be loved and his sin hated. To advocate extreme abhorrence for sin as Jesus did is advocating hatred of the sinner and leading to it.
The Bible says that God hates unsaved sinners. It says it so many times that we know we can
be certain it teaches that so any interpretation of the Bible verses that seem
to say God loves sinners should be interpreted in the light of these. And even more so when the ones that seem to speak of his universal love are in the
minority. Only three verses in the Bible
seem to say that God loves everybody.
They are, the one in which we are told that God so loved the world that
he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him could have eternal
life, John 3:16, and the one which says that God wants all to be saved and come
to the knowledge of the truth, 1 Timothy 2:4, and the one where we are told
that God so loved us that while we were still sinners he saved us which is
Romans 5:8.
In John 3:16, Jesus is telling Nicodemus who thought that only Jews could
be saved that anybody in the world who believes could be saved. He said that God so loved the world that all
who believe will be saved meaning that all who believe are the world that God
loves. God hates the rest. “God so loved all that he sent his Son so
that all who believe in him have eternal life”.
He does not love the unbelievers for he could save them because of their
sincere desire for divine forgiveness and their sincerity. So love must stand for do good. It has to mean that God did good for the world in sending his Son but strictly speaking
he hates the world for it is sinful. You
can hate your enemy and love him in the sense that you give him some
opportunity to turn to you in reconciliation.
God so loved the world in giving his Son to the world. That is what we are told. But you could hate your enemy’s guts but love
him so much that you gave him your dinner because he was starving.
God does love all he made in the sense that if he hated it, it would not
exist. He loves the damned so far as he
allows them to exist and regards them as nice creations but hates them for what
they do with this niceness – they twist it and become evil. The world could stand for creation. The verse can be taken this way, “God so
loved the creation that he gave his only Son to it so that anybody who believes
in his Son has eternal life.” This means
he might love to keep his evil creations in existence but he still hates them
for being evil. To give his Son is an
honour to his creation.
Paul’s disciple in the Bible says that God wants all to be saved and know
the truth for there is one mediator, Jesus, who is the only way to God (1
Timothy 2:4). He means all who can know
the mediator and respond to him. It does
not refer to all on earth.
Even if it did it would make no difference. God could hate sinners and love them in the
sense that he knows they will change if he saves them from sin and wants them to
change. But that is why we hate people for they won't change
to please us. It doesn't make our hate any less real. Perhaps
God wishes he could save them all though he
has to hate them. He hates them now but
he does not let that hate stop him from making it possible to love them
later. The love for what they will be is
the reason he makes their salvation possible now not the love for what they
are. This is the explanation for the
Romans verse (5:8) as well and it is the only explanation for the persons
referred to as being loved are clearly those who have embraced the gospel in
sincerity and have been saved by it.
Many believe that God hates all sinners except sinners he has
predestined to salvation. He loves them
in their sins now for he sees they will be saved. In other words, their sins are paid for
unlike those who will never be saved so he has nothing to hate them for though
they are sinners now. But this view is
not in the Bible at all. The Bible says we are under God’s wrath until we are
saved. God could hate you even if your
sins are paid for on the basis that the payment has not been activated
yet. It has not been appropriated. He could save you to stop hating you not
because he loves you now but because he loves you in the sense that he wants to
help you so that he can love you properly.
Love that is not just intimate but involves approval of the other
person’s actions is more real than love that disapproves because the intimacy is
harmed and because to disapprove of the sin a person commits is to disapprove
of the person. In so far as you reduce
love you increase hate or not caring about the person. The idea of a God that always cares is too
ridiculous for words and yet if the Church knew what it was talking about and
taught a more honest God who didn’t love unconditionally it would lose most of
its members. If it is comfort you want
and if you want to feel loved and cherished then God is not the answer.
The bit in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Gospel of Luke (Luke
6:27-36) where Jesus says we must love our enemies for God gives earthly
blessings even to the wicked refers to enemies who sincerely mean well but just
are against us for the wrong reasons.
Since God gives blessings to the wicked not for their sake but for the
good people among them it is clear that Jesus is not saying you go out of your
way to help your enemies. You help them
when you could be doing the good harm if you don’t. Even people who hate their enemies and
believe they should agree with that. By
love Jesus means do good to not value. Jesus was not saying God loved the
wicked. Rather he was denying it.
Jesus telling us to love our enemies does not mean God loves them. We are not God and we don’t know the things he
knows but he knows everything. Because
we can’t judge like he can we have to be nice to bad people for we don’t know
if he hates them much or not.
The Bible is clear that God hates those who hate him. It is equally clear that we are not to love
God’s enemies. We are told to be good to
our own enemies only when we have to be to prevent the just from
suffering.
All who hate one another wish that they did not and that the persons
would change so they love in a sense.
God could wish the wicked would change but refuse to succumb to this
wish. It is because this wish is present
that he is able to hate perfectly. You
only hate a person when they won’t use the good you see in them.
Proverbs 11:20 and Psalm 5:5 and several other places state that God
hates sinners as does Romans 9:13-15. 2
Chronicles has God saying through a prophet that anybody who helps the ungodly
incurs the anger of God. The context
shows that the king who this threat was directed at did no real harm. It show that the
king would not have helped the ungodly in such a way that he would have been
assisting them in destroying his people or him.
And the prophet said that God’s problem was not any risk like that but
the fact that people who did not cherish God were treated with a bit of
kindness. They might have been
unbelievers but that does not make them bad or any worse than the people of God
and the king knew that.
To say that the Bible forbids hating sinners though it commanded the
cruel execution of gays and Atheists and other people that God wanted out of
the way is total blindness. We see how
wrong it is to say that hate is wrong while cruel actions like that are
not. It would be better to hate others
than to kill them. We see here how the
Bible seeks to turn morality upside down.
We have more references to God’s hatred for sinners than we have for his
alleged love for them and the latter verses are misinterpreted so nowhere does
the Bible say that God loves sinners. If
it did the minority verses would have to be interpreted in the context of the
majority verses meaning that we would have to take the love non-literally and
the hate literally and not vice-versa as many Christians do.
Christians say that since we do not know who will be saved we have to
love everybody and only God can hate sinners for only he knows who will be
saved and who will not be. But it is a
contradiction to say you value a person as a potential saint. That is valuing what God wants and not the
person. It is putting the qualities
before the person to the person being left out if the equation. It is denying the fundamental principle of
real right and wrong in which field the Bible has no competence whatsoever,
that the person is the absolute value.
If the person is the absolute value then a God who creates the laws that
lead to death and everlasting torment is wholly evil.
The Bible says that those who die estranged from God will suffer in Hell
forever and are put beyond repentance.
If you could condone that you could condone anything. God must do something to them to stop them
repenting and turning to him. With
doctrines like that it makes no sense to forbid hatred. It is worse to wish that your faith be true
even though the faith says that X will go to Hell if he dies in sin than to
wish that X would fall and break a leg.
God may have to punish in this world to restrain sinners but that is only
necessary because of the kind of world it is.
He could make another world and populate it with people in force fields
where nobody can harm anybody else.
Punishment is certainly an evil.
It is not a nice thing even if it is necessary. It does not change the evil inside the person
unless the person decides to change so it is really the person who can
change. Punishment may educate and
inspire change but these things can be done without it. Though it is good to try and convert through
punishment on earth - when we have to punish we may as well try to change the
person through it - punishment is adding the evil of suffering to the evil in
somebody's heart and the evil they have inflicted. It doubles the evil. It is worse to commit theft in a country that
will jail you for it for then you are not just committing the evil of theft but
committing the evil of pulling evil on yourself by the risk of jail. Theft is not so bad where you will get away
with it as long as you stop doing it.
God should make it possible for the person to have the bad intention but
do no harm with it for he makes it possible for the person to evade any
punishment by repentance. Though it is
good to will the punishment of the evil in the person on paper it is bad in
practice. There is some sense in saying
the person should be punished but there is not enough sense in it to justify
punishing. To make sense of this perhaps
this parable will be of assistance: A woman murdered her lover in cold
blood. She deserves death because she
killed him. That is pure logic. But it does not mean we should kill her. One way it does but because you cannot
destroy a person for a person is valuable even after they take a life so you
cannot do it. This implies that the
welfare of the person is more important than punishing them. The person comes before the punishment. It implies that God has no business punishing
anybody once they leave this world and certainly that he has no right to punish
people forever in Hell. If the person is
absolutely valuable then it follows that every moment of that person's life is
as well. Therefore the person deserves
only happiness in this world and in the next no matter what he or she
does. Yes she or he does deserve to
suffer but this deserving is blanked out by the treatment she or he deserves as
a person. The doctrine of Hell shows a
lack of moral sense among the Christians and just how abominable many of their
doctrines are. God is an evil doctrine
because it implies that a cosmic fuss should be made over the hidden and
harmless but evil intentions of the heart.
If punishment is so faulty then it is worse to hurt a person to reform
them. Why? Because if the punishment is bad though they
ask for it and deserve it then to hurt them without thinking of what they
deserve is worse because if it is bad to give a person what pain they deserve,
it is worse to give them pain that is not concerned with what they
deserve. This reasoning is based on the free
will defence. The free will defence
teaches that God gave us free will and we abuse it so evil is not his fault. Because we do bad we
deserve evil. So when we suffer it is
not that God wants to reform us, it is that he wants to punish us.
Religion has to say that if evil is for a divine purpose then it follows
that all suffering is rooted in punishment and that is its prime purpose.