God as he is

Love is not a verb that God does; it is a noun that he is. God, who is all-powerful, can not cease to be love without ceasing to be God. It is *the* essential element of his nature.

I can anticipate the objection, "yes, God is love, BUT...what about holiness (or justice or mercy or wrath or forgiveness, etc.)?" The problem with this question is that it pits one divine characteristic against another, as though they were separate, discreet things, but they are not. Holiness, mercy, wrath and forgiveness proceed from God's love. This is how we end up with the schizophrenic god who loves with one hand and smites with the other, who takes our sin away on a cross but holds us to account for every misstep after that, who gives us freedom so that we can love him meaningfully but withholds that freedom at the same time, who tells us that he is just and good, but that he has destined millions and millions of people for hell for doing *exactly what he created them to do*. These are not apparent contradictions, they are in fact contradictory notions, which means that you can't rationally hold both of them at the same time. It's at this point that we retreat into "the mystery of God", as though it were a rug under which we sweep all our bad philosophy. We must not believe these things under the rubric of faith, accepting self-contradictory notions because "God can do anything". They are self-contradictory because they are not true.

If we get the love part wrong, everything else downstream of it gets screwed up. We end up living a quid pro quo life with God, whereby we give him our loyalty and obedience and he keeps us from going to hell and (hopefully) gives us a home in heaven when we die in return. This is the "contract" worldview. When we have this worldview then everything becomes a process of self-evaluation. How am I doing? Am I doing it right? Am I doing enough? What am I getting in return? Is it feeding me? Everything is a deal. Love is filtered through the lens of how it will benefit me. I become an expert evaluator of people (based on what the do, of course).

God works through covenant, not contract. The covenant worldview is other-centered. It's based on love, the central characteristic of which is knowing, intentional self-sacrifice. It is an act of the will which is aware of the probably cost. Covenant does not love because of something the beloved has or doesn't have or because of some character trait the beloved possesses; it loves because the beloved *is*, and so it is not conditioned by its environment, is not lessened by time or reduced by circumstances. There is no self-evaluation in the same way that we do not look at our eyes with our own eyeballs. They are not an apparatus for evaluating that; it is not what they do. So it is with covenant love. It is not an apparatus for self-evaluation. It is not what it does.

God tore up the contract on the cross. He entered into a unilateral covenant with us just like he did with Abraham. God is pouring all of his love into me right now as though I were the only person on the earth and he had only this second to do it, so dump the contradictions. Shred the contract. When God exercises all the power he has, it looks like love. When God, who has all the resources and power available to any being, wants to respond to sin it looks like free pardon. When God, from whom all wisdom comes, responds to suffering it looks like rescue. To God, omnipotence looks like free relationship.

As if that were not enough, it's not just that God *will* not stop loving me; it's that he *cannot* stop while remaining what he is. That's the kind of love I need a supernatural revelation from God to believe. That's the love found in the gospel.

Love and Fear

I can't stand pat answers to problems. To me the message in a pat answer usually is, "I don't really care" or, "I don't know what to say, and I have to say something, so I'll say this". We throw poorly understood bible verses at people's pain to see what sticks.

How many times have I heard this verse in response to someone who's facing something scary, like just finding out he/she has cancer or something:

"Perfect love casts out fear!" (1 John 4:18)

In other words, don't be afraid! God loves you and that love takes the place of any fear you might have today! Isn't that encouraging?

Well, no. I still have cancer. It still sucks. Now I'm not only afraid, but I feel guilty for being afraid because I have obviously not understood something important about God's character. I have cancer, I'm afraid AND I'm a bad Christian. Great.

This is a perfect example of why reading (and quoting) scripture in context is important. Here's the context of 1 John 4:18:

"God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love."

Fear is not bad. Fear is not necessarily evil. If you're afraid of something scary (like cancer), that is not an indication that anything is working improperly. Fear can be a very useful thing. For example, if one is being chased by a large, hungry tiger, fear is an appropriate adaptive survival response. Your body responds to fear by producing HUGE amounts of adrenaline, which makes you more aware, increases blood flow to the muscles you'll need to fight or flee and increases the amount of oxygen you're processing so you can do all of this. Fear focuses your attention on the dominate issue at hand, literally blocking out almost all stimuli other than what you need to do what you're doing.

From a the point of view of mental health, being afraid of fear is a very sad state of affairs. That leads nowhere fast.

1 John 4:15-18 has nothing to do with that kind of fear. The fear addressed in this passage has to do with following God out of fear of punishment or judgment. You cannot love someone you're afraid of...not even God. ESPECIALLY not God. I anticipate the objection, "but what about the 'fear' of God?" That's a completely different word with a completely different meaning. It has to do with wonder and awe, not fear of what he'll do to you if you sin.

God's love overcomes all of that. The broader context of 1 John is...LOVE. We know that God loves us because he sent his Son as a sacrifice for our sin. That (and that alone) is the revelation of God's love for us. We love each other because we understand what that love has done in us; we change the way we live because we understand what that love has done for us. The one and only litmus test is love. This is not about punishment; this is not about judgement, because perfect love casts out fear.

I'm afraid of a few things today, and that's okay. I'm not afraid of being afraid. God has poured his love into my life. He is currently pouring it into me right now at this moment. In the immortal words of the Prophet (Bob) Marley, "...every little thing gonna be alright."

I am a Pharisee.

After some uncomfortable introspection, I have come to a painful truth. I am a Pharisee. To be more specific, I am an anti-Pharisee Pharisee. That's no better.

To me, the definition of Pharisaism is the pursuit of rightness rather than love.

Pharisees will argue endlessly because at their center is a desire to be better than you. We might wrap it up in pretty paper that says, "in defense of the gospel" or "standing for right doctrine" or "in support of proper biblical authority", but that only increases the obviousness of the arrogance underlying my attitudes. All of those things can defend themselves.

Pharisees draw their sense of of worth from their sureness that they know what is right and wrong, and from that high pillar are fit to find you wanting. They'll write a 10-page paper on the scriptural basis for the speck in your eye while ironically missing the fact that this very activity constitutes a log in their own.

Pharisees draw life from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead of drawing life from their Creator.

There are some circumstances where rightness is important, make no mistake. You need to be "right" when working out a mathematical sum, or when following a map. The same is true in Christian theology and doctrine in some cases. We cannot know where we are going or how to get there unless we make some distinctions between what is correct and what is not. However, something my church hears from me just about every Sunday, or pretty much any other opportunity I have to express it is this: we have to get the LOVE piece right, or everything else downstream is going to be messed up.

I've had the love piece wrong. I've crushed brothers and sisters in academic debate rather than denying myself or going out of my way to die to self-righteousness. I've found a place atop the philosopher's stump in the center of Rome instead of nailing myself to a cross atop Golgotha. I've become a technician of Greek and not a Pastor. I've become more interested in making sure you know how smart I am than making sure you know how loved you are.

If I have injured you, please accept this humble apology. God is dealing with me lovingly but firmly. As for every addiction, it is a dangerous thing to simply quit without a replacement plan. God is leading me toward a few spiritual disciplines to fill the void.

Jesus loved even the Pharisees, though I'm sure it was not his intention that they remain as they were. That makes me feel a little better.

Corinthians, unity and the Lord's Supper

There are passages in scripture that are hard for me to understand. I still don't quite get many of them, but once in a while one will come into focus after some work. 1 Corinthians 11:27-30 is one of them.

To put it very generally, chapters 1-10 are all about divisions in the church and the specific issues that are behind the divisiveness. Paul works his way around to a broad discussion of liberty, our "rights", and how we walk that out in the context of widely varying sensibilities. Paul is trying to build a cohesive, attractional community. He can't do that if believers are victimizing each other sexually, launching lawsuits at each other, disregarding each other's varying sensibilities and ignoring social issues that bear on politeness and modesty. So, the first 10 chapters are all about unity.

Here we are in chapter 11, which starts off with male/female social relationships. Paul gives instructions that would have been common to both Roman and Jewish moral codes in the first century, then addresses head coverings for women (hair length is an analogy). THE POINT IS MODESTY, NOT GENDER ROLES. Then comes the issue of the Lord's Supper, which was in that era a communal meal. People brought food that was typically shared by all. For the poorest among them, that might be the best meal they had all week, so it was a means by which they received care and support. It was also a symbol of the equality of all believers in Christ. Men, women, slaves, children, rich and poor all ate together. It was the only place in the Roman world where that was true. Paul clarifies the problem in the Corinthian church in 11:21:

"For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry, and another becomes drunk."

The Lord's Supper has become yet another issue of divisiveness. People are separating along socio-economic lines and introducing aberrant behavior with causes further divisiveness. In 11:27 Paul says:

"Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord."

An "unworthy manner" means "divisively". Paul is telling the Corinthians that if they continue turning the Lord's Supper into exercise in socio-economic stratification, then they're not only defeating the purpose of it, but they are sinning against Jesus himself, who died for everyone. In 11:29 Paul says:

"Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup."

Compare that to the words of Christ in Matthew 5:23-26. I suspect that that was Paul's mindset while writing those words. He's saying, reject the social assumptions that produce divisions along the lines of social standing and economic power. Reject the behaviors that victimize others or cause unnecessary offense. Do not go to the Lord's Supper divided or you'll make yourself even worse than you were before (13:1?). That seems to form a cohesive argument from throughout the entire letter.

I know, probably completely uninteresting to anyone but me. It's my journal though. Enjoy the ride.

Will The Real God Please Stand Up, Redeux

I got quite a few responses on the journal entry on sovereignty versus suffering (Will the Real God Please Stand Up?), mostly centered around the idea of discipline. It's a very good point. I had to think about that for a while, because it's definitely biblical:

Deuteronomy 8:5 - Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord disciplines you. (Note the simile here: we're supposed to refer to our own experience of disciplining our children to find a clue about how God disciplines us)

Job 5:17 - How happy is the one whom God reproves/therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. (Conviction and discipline are paralleled)

Psalm 94:12 - Happy are those whom you discipline, O Lord,/and whom you teach out of your law. (Discipline and teaching are paralleled)

Ephesians 6:4 - And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Provocation and discipline are contrasted to one another)

Hebrews 12:5 - My child, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,/or lose heart when you are punished by him;/for the Lord disciplines those whom he loves,/and chastises every child whom he accepts.’/Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? (Discipline and chastisement are the same Greek word. Though punishment and discipline seem to be paralleled, note that the specific "punishment" are "trials". The Greek word there means "persecution". God is not punishing; this is probably referring to the rash of persecution that ocurred in the years after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD)

We could go on citing scripture, but this partial list includes passages from most of the major genre. It's a dependable cross-section, in other words.

First, let's look at the word "discipline". Good bible students always move from exegesis (what the text originally meant) to hermeneutic (how to apply it now) and not the other way 'round. So how is that word typically used, both in the bible and in Koine period literature? First, there are several Greek verbs used, and each has a different nuance. The one most commonly used is padeuo, which means "to discipline”. Another verb used is elegksu, which is used to mean “to reprove”, but most commonly means, “to bring to light or expose”. The last verb is mastigoo, which means “to whip” or “to scourge” most commonly. It’s the word used for the beating given those who were condemned to death (implying that death was too quick). “To discipline” is used far more than the others by a ratio of nearly 10:1. Also note that the other words are used in parallel with “to discipline”; they are amplifying the meaning of “discipline” in a poetic sense, and not necessarily to for the sake of accuracy. Furthermore, note the other words used in parallel: "to train" for one, "to teach" and also the imperative, “do not provoke”. A comprehensive reading of word usage and context would lead us to the conclusion that “to discipline” is the word carrying the force of God’s primary intention.

Staying with the verb “to discipline”, padeuo is used thirteen times in the New Testament; ten instances out of those thirteen mean specifically “to bring up”, “to instruct”, “to train”, “to correct” or something like that. Two times in means “to punish” and once it means, “to beat”. Padeuo almost always means “to discipline” in common Greek usage outside the bible during that period as well. When it was used to mean “to punish” in a physical sense, the subjects were human parents. The passages in the bible, the apocrypha and in Koine literature that use the word padeuo to mean "to punish" where God is the subject (the "punisher", so to speak) can be understood equally well (and I think better) by substituting the verb "to discipline". In other words, padeuo does not typically mean "to punish" when God is the one doing it.

Assuming that, let’s move on to the application. Consider what “discipline” means to us. First, discipline is a very different thing that punishment isn’t it? Discipline is intended to correct destructive behavior. Properly implemented, discipline should move a person from a negative place to a positive place. Discipline comes from a place of love, which always cares about the overall, long-term welfare of the beloved or else it isn't love, and it probably isn't good either. When used in the context of “Church discipline”, the goal is always reconciliation even when Paul uses it in the NT. Punishment can be a component of discipline, but isn't always. Actually, a parent who has to punish a child all the time is not a very good parent is he (assuming that the child isn’t suffering from a physical or behavioral disorder)? Why not? Because it's not very effective when it’s executed that way. The child quickly connects the punishment to the person meting it out rather than to the behavior that lead up to it. We never use punishment with adult sons and daughters do we? Why not? Because it’s humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing; it’s utterly counterproductive. If the adult child doesn’t trust the parent by that time, then no amount of punishment will convince him/her to alter the undesirable behavior.

The goal of parenting is to move beyond the punishment stage to the more productive kind of discipline, which involves allowing the older child to simply experience in a real way the full impact of his/her choices. When your 23-year-old son or daughter gets fired from a job because he/she couldn’t be bothered to be up on time you don’t call his/her boss and beg for the job back do you? Of course you don’t. You let them experience scraping by without any money for a while. Why? So that they’ll remember it the next time the alarm goes off and they're tempted to stay in bed. That’s what the Greek word for repentance (metanoia) means: “to think after”. The idea is that one experiences the consequences of one’s actions, then remembers those consequences when the opportunity to repeat the behavior arises. Then the second Greek word for “repentance” (epistrepho), which means “to turn around”, takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? You think about what happened the last time, then turn around and walk in a different direction.

The bottom line is, I can’t say that God never punishes. His goal is the same as ours: to raise healthy, responsible, loving children. I suppose if we leave him with no other alternative, then he’ll do what he needs to do to get our attention. I would strongly assert that this is the exception and not the rule though. I think that scripture teaches this: if everything is occurring normally, God treats us like adult sons and daughters. He gives us freedom so that we can love him meaningfully, and then lets us experience fully everything that entails. God does not enable us in the way that we enable each other. He allows us to experience the real consequences of our behavior. Nothing in any of this implies that God kills our children, causes natural disasters, creates diseases or wills violence or anything like it in order to teach anyone "a lesson". That's not discipline. That's abuse, and abuse never changes or improves its object.

Many of us grew up with parents who were inappropriate to say the least, and some of them were abusive, violent and neglectful. When we say "punish", they hear "abuse". As a result, their experience of God is, "I'm not safe", and they never stick around long enough to get a more well-balanced perspective. We who have that understanding need to be loving toward the many who don't. We have a very unbalanced understanding of what appropriate punishment is in our culture, and I think it has partially to do with the framework with think we're exporting from the bible. God is not leaning over us waiting to lash out in punishment at the first available opportunity. He is correcting, instructing and training us. He is bringing us up like any loving father would.

Sociopathic Love

I love the Showtime series "Dexter". It's about a serial killer who works in the Miami police department doing crime analysis, specifically blood spatter (appropriately). As the result of a horrific event in his childhood Dexter is a classic sociopath. He doesn't feel emotions like the rest of us do. He doesn't really understand them. He doesn't have a "conscience" in the classic sense because "wrong" and "right" have no meaning. Dexter's adoptive father (who was also a Miami police officer) realized this early in Dexter's life and did everything he could to teach him how people work, how emotions play out and how to fake them convincingly to get along. He also taught him a series of "rules" so that he could indulge his murderous urges without causing much harm or getting caught. Now Dexter only kills other killers.

It's fascinating to watch Dexter walk out relationships. He doesn't understand what motivates people, but he is an expert observer of human behavior. He is a top-notch actor. He does and says all the right things at the right times, but Dexter is always sizing everyone up as a potential informant or a potential target. He's the perfect boyfriend, employee and brother, but something is not quite right. People walk away from even casual encounters with Dexter knowing that something doesn't add up.

We Christians are experts at faking relationships. We're well-trained in the fine art of smiling at people who disgust us. We're taught the Golden Rule early and often, and led to understand that this is the essence of Christian love. We are sternly instructed to live in sociopathic love, whereby we love everyone like Jesus did, even the people we hate. You don't need to "love" anyone so long as you act like you do. That's the important part. So put a smile on your face and get it done like Jesus would have.

It all starts with our perception of God and the way he loves us. This is the reason it's so important to understand the way he loves us: we will walk that understanding out with other people. If we perceive our relationship with him practically as an impossible attempt to live up to a set of arbitrary standards, then that will set the agenda in terms of our expectations of other people. If we view Christianity as a rigid set of rules or an inflexible moral code, then that's what we'll expect of other people. This is the meaning behind "forgive us our debts as we forgive those who owe us a debt". It's not "forgive or God won't forgive you", as though God's mercy is somehow dependent on our behavior. It means that the extent to which we understand grace will set the tone for every encounter we have from that point on. God's love will either be detrimental or transformational depending on our starting point.

If we live by rules and not by love then we are Christian sociopaths. We're Dexter, only the carnage is emotional and not physical. People will find us out, probably pretty quickly. People aren't as gullible as we think they are. They know when we're being nice because we have to or because we have an ulterior motive (to get them "saved", for example). The problem is not only that this behavior is ineffective. The bigger problem is that it's counterproductive. It actually pushes people further away from God than they were before.

In his book "A River Runs Through It", Norman Mailer writes that "we can love completely without complete understanding." I have yet to encounter a more biblical understanding of practical, realistic love than that. Love completely and don't worry about complete understanding.

Will The Real God Please Stand Up?

As a pastor I witness quite a lot of suffering. My wife and I are often among the first people contact after something terrible happens. At first there's just shock, numbness and disconnectedness. After the shock wears off and the real pain starts, people begin looking for answers. God is suddenly not who they thought he was. They want to believe that God is good in the same way he was before. They want us to help them understand how what they're going through is good and how it's God's expression of love for them.

The truth is, the honest response is usually this: there is no pat answer to be had. It's really going to hurt, maybe for a long time. There's no fixing it. There's no re-framing it. All we can do is bear community witness that it just flat out sucks. The worst thing that can happen often happens at this stage. People who should be relying on a loving God at this time more than any other find themselves unable to trust him because he's to blame for what happened. Their hearts cry out for justice. In the throes of their pain they ask, "How can I love a God who hurts me like this?"

The classic philosophical quandary is this: if God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all good, how can bad things happen at all? From a philosophical standpoint, evil should not exists if those things about God are true. Either that, or God is not good. The response to this quandary typically tries to clarify what we mean by the word "evil". After all, what seems evil from our standpoint might be perfectly good from the divine point of view. The problem with that answer is that it's a dangerous road to travel. At a certain point our good becomes God's evil and vice verse; at that stage God could just as well be a devil as anything else. The best we could say about him is, "we know him not". Furthermore, if we can know little or nothing about what is actually good or evil to God, then we have no basis for a moral framework of any kind. How would we know what is good or bad if not by discerning with respect to God's ultimate moral authority? That's a big, big problem.

Another response is a different kind of appeal to the divine viewpoint, where we say that from our limited point of view it is reasonable to say that we cannot possibly understand the affect our suffering has on other beings and other circumstances. Our suffering could produce good that we would never know about. We have the narrow point of view and God has the long view. It's like a tapestry that we're looking at from the underside, where it's all knots and tangles. If we were only able to look at it from the other side we'd see the beautiful design that's the result of all of those tangles. The problem with this point of view is that it's deeply unsatisfying. It's not something that you can live. It also runs contrary to the holistic biblical witness that this is, indeed a broken and hurting world in need of rescue. In other words, what we experience the bible verifies as true, but offers to permanent remedy aside from the new heaven and the new earth (Revelation 21).

A third approach is to postulate that a good God could allow suffering if this suffering acted to improve the sufferer. For example, many parents inflict physical pain on their children (spanking) knowing that the child will (ideally) be bettered by it. God sends us painful circumstances (or allows them) because they build trust in him and reliance on him. There are two problems with this theory. First, while the idea sounds good theoretically, our experience usually is that God's reasoning is not at all clear. In other words, people rarely know why it is that they're suffering or what they're supposed to learn as a result. Consequently, if God desires that we be improved but will not tell us what exactly the improvement should be, then the effect is usually exactly the opposite. People are less inclined to trust a God who they believe inflicts arbitrary suffering to build relationship.

Lastly, there's the idea that bad things happen to provide opportunity for God's glory to be revealed. No cost is too high (so it is said) if God receives glory. The problem with this is, it's really not biblical. Neither of the passages in the bible usually used to back it up (Job and John 9:1-5) are actually trying to teach that. The point to Job is in fact the chaos we live in, the affect the accuser (satan) has on our lives, and the way God wants us to respond to that. In the John passage the point is the healing of the blindness, not the blindness itself. Whenever suffering is addressed the overall biblical witness is that the universe is a complex place that only God truly understands. If God is glorified by our suffering, it is only incidental.

The thing is, most people can countenance the idea of suffering generally speaking; it's the meaningless suffering that throws us. It's the Holocaust or a child suffering and dying. It's an utterly senseless, arbitrary murder or an illness that comes out of nowhere and kills a person is his/her prime. It's a car accident or a natural disaster. It's the things that neither build relationship nor improve us, for which we will never have any answers.

There is another way to think about all of this, of course. What if we believed that God didn't do it at all? Of course, that would mean subscribing to a belief that God is not in control of every event all the time. That would mean believing that things happen contrary to God's will all day every day. But that's true, isn't it? God doesn't create, desire or will sin (Genesis 1:31). He created us for a relationship of love, and that requires real freedom, which comes with consequences that God must let us live with. Sickness and death are part of the fall, not part of God's perfect will for us (Genesis 4, Romans 6:23, 1 Corinthians 15:21). The accuser is alive and well, busy wreaking havoc in this world (John 12:31, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Eph 2:2).

What if we really believed that God doesn't want these things for us any more than we want them for us? What if we believed that he greatly desires to bring them to a halt, but that the only way to do that would be to sacrifice the only thing he desires even more, that more people might come to know him (2 Peter 3:8-9)? If we believed that then we could fully engage a loving, good God who suffers with us (Hebrews 2:18, Philippians 2:6-8), who can be relied on to step into our lives and live them with us. That God could bring healing into our suffering precisely because he didn't cause it. That God not only has the power to heal us, but has the desire to do it. For our part, we would become a people who did not try to reject the ambiguity of the world by finding God's will in suffering. Rather, we would work in the midst of the ambiguity of the world to apply God's will to suffering.

God is our advocate and comforter. He is not a rule book, a rigid morality code or an encyclopedia. He can be trusted to love us intensely and dynamically, running to our rescue when we need him most. This is the God of scripture, who tells us we can trust him. He will never leave, forsake or forget us (Jos 1:5, Is 49:15-16). He loves us and moves heaven and earth to bring about the best (Jer 29:11-14, Rom 8:28).

This is not a new view of God; it is God has he reveals himself in Christ. This is all we can ever know of him. This is God who will stop and nothing, who will go to any lengths to rescue us. This is the real God, who lays his hands on you and tells you that everything will be alright...because it will.

Jerry-Springer Stuff.

I think that scripture teaches that we are called to walk out radical, life-giving love and to completely abandon judgment of any kind. Our judgments are largely culturally defined, by nature extremely narrow in scope, and they're usually built toward excluding those who are culturally marginalized anyway. In other words, they are bigoted and arbitrary, focusing on people and things that the bible doesn't seem to think are a big priority. For example, in those lists we focus on are "the greedy" right along with the sexually immoral. Now, we typically define "greedy" pretty broadly while defining "sexual immorality" very narrowly (usually down to one issue). I don't see anyone ejecting the ultra-rich from our meetings. Now why is that?

One of the big questions I get is, "what about 1 Corinthians 5:11-12"? Here it is:

"But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with any who claim to be fellow believers but are sexually immoral or greedy, idolaters or slanderers, drunkards or swindlers. With such persons do not even eat. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. 'Expel the wicked person from among you.'"

The assertion usually goes something like this: "see? The bible tells us to make judgements about the goodness or badness of people in the church. We have not only license, but a duty to to judge."

The key to understanding this passage is the general context (the big point of the whole book of 1 Corinthians) and the local context (the big point of chapter 5).

The general context is that the Corinthian church is in trouble on a number of fronts, but the large issue really is that they've begun to look more like Greco-Roman culture than Christ. Notice the first issue Paul raises in chapter 1? It's not sexual immorality, drunkenness or idolatry. IT'S LACK OF UNITY. DIVISION. The church has already begun to stratify based on the teachings of various Apostles, which is precisely what students of various schools of philosophy did (and still do). They'd begun to view Christianity as another form of philosophy, which led them to form exclusive clubs around Paul or Apollos. The twin issues of inclusiveness and unity are Paul's number two agenda next to his variation on the gospel. So, keeping that in mind: the big issues in the Corinthian church are cultural ones, specifically lack of unity, stratification, dissension and division.

The local context seems to be a man who is sleeping with his father's wife (who is presumably not his birth mother). Guys, this is Jerry-Springer stuff. Paul says that even the Gentiles are horrified by it. We're talking about extremes of behavior here in the context of a church that's already having trouble staying united. This particular incident would be a like bucket of gasoline on a smoldering garbage pile. When Paul does bring up the issue of this kind of behavior not coming to characterize the church in Corinth (vss. 6-8), the idea is that the church remain attractive to the culture outside. Remember, even the pagan Corinthians think that the Christians are messed up. Paul is concerned that the non-believing Corinthians will justly level the charge of hypocrisy at the church, which would have a deep impact in terms of its attractiveness.

The bottom line is, Paul wants the church to love like Christ, which is expressed to the degree that it is unified and attractional. The behavior discussed in chapter 5 is extreme even by our standards in 2010. It's divisive and humiliating. It's dehumanizing and degrading. As open as I am to absolutely every single person with any kind of issue, as a pastor I would deal with that kind of behavior swiftly and sternly, not out of judgment, but out of a desire to protect other people. Grace, love and inclusiveness should not permit victimization.

But why stop at the over-the-top issue in verse 1? Paul doesn't. In verse 11 he includes all kinds of sexual immorality (predictably, Paul being Jewish and whatnot), GREED, idolatry (again a predicate of Jewish morality), drunkenness (Jewish morality), GOSSIPPING and EXPLOITATION (my translation of the Greek words loidoros and arpaks).

Uh oh.

See, that list includes a whole lot of people that we typically have no problem with, doesn't it? We liberally provide accommodation for greed, gossipping and exploitation...we just call them something nicer. We understand that people are often not at their best, so we lift them up with encouragement and kindness, knowing that God is in the process of working everything out for their best...until we get to the couple of things that Christians have decided are really repugnant, then we trot out 1 Corinthians 5.

1 Corinthians 5 is not for the every-day don't-act-like-a-dork stuff. It's for the extreme stuff. Yes, we should act decisively and conservatively when abuse and/or victimization is the issue, and the response can include excluding someone from our fellowship, but this assumes that the individual refuses to be reconciled. On the other hand, 1 Corinthians 5 does not apply to things that are on our arbitrary short-list but are not abusive, victimizing or divisive.

After all, if the bible has a short-list, I'd say it's pretty different than the one Christians usually draw...

Love, Actually.

I have been loved by God from eternity. He has known that I would be, determining it better that I should exist than not, and this not just from before my lifetime, but from before there was any such thing that we could meaningfully call "time" (as the term has no meaning without creatures who experience it).

The idea that he will love me always does not capture the fullness of the security I have in him. It's much more than that.

I have already been loved from eternity and unto eternity.

God, who lives in all times simultaneously taking in every action in all its dimensions in a single cognitive sweep, has loved me through everything I will experience, every doubt I will engage and every challenge I will encounter. This is the reality that Romans 8:38-39 is describing:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is not causality or predestination. This is our God who loves us without past or future, to whom everything is eternally present. Every experience has been fully actualized to God along with his love from eternity and to eternity. One has not pre-existed the other; one has not caused the other. They have existed in a relationship of simulaneity from eternity. It cannot be different because it's already happened. It cannot be different or God would cease to be God. God is loving me, right now, this moment particularly, for all of eternity. He is eternally loving me as an act of his interminable will, fully aware of what it's cost him.

How would today be different for me if I believed this?

Be Ye Perfect...good luck with that.

God is love, literally not figuratively. God is a relationship of mutual self-submission from eternity, Father to Son, Son to Father, from which is generated the Holy Spirit. We owe our very existence to an abundant outflowing of Trinitarian love. Love is a beginning and an ending unto itself. It is the only characteristic of God about which that can be said.

But surely there's more to God that simply love? Love is the central character trait from which comes everything else; it is the hub that all the spokes radiate from. Judgment, wrath, discipline, wisdom, mercy and whatever else you can think of all originate in divine love. If we get love wrong (as we frequently do), then we will misunderstand everything else. God will seem to us arbitrary and angry, capricious and spiteful. When we miss the God of love we will create a god to suit us, and that god will look just like us. This is the reason why idolatry is so dangerous: we become like what we worship.

While God can love and judge at the same time, I submit that no human being, not a single one, can love a person and judge him/her at the same time. Let's forget for the moment the fact that judging other people is at least as hostile a thing to do as the thing you're judging them for. The very act of judgment separates you from God. You, good Christian, have become less than you were before. That is the exact meaning of 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but don't have love, I have become nothing.

That verb, "to become" (Gk. ginomai) is in the first person perfect tense indicative (gegona); it is not a present tense verb. The perfect indicative use of a verb indicates completed action with consequences for the present. You have completed the act of judging and the image of God is diminished as a result.

All human beings are of inestimable worth because they are made in God's image. All of them. Every single one. In a cruel, ridiculous irony Christians have wholly devalued millions and millions of adult people based on inaccurate, biased readings of tiny portions of scripture, while ascribing inestimable worth to the unborn. The fact that the latter is good does not reduce the wrongness of the former.

Matthew 5:48 is one of the most misunderstood passages in scripture:

"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

For a thousand years that verse has been used to point out the duty of the good Christian. Perfection is the goal! We must be perfect as our Father is perfect! Nothing else will do! We have pushed this silly agenda without a thought for the people we would alienate in the process, and all the while we were doing exactly the opposite of what the passage teaches. Pay attention to the context: Matthew 5:43-48 is all about loving people you don't like. Jesus draws a metaphor from nature, about the way the rain and the sun come to the righteous (those in the covenant) and the unrighteous (those outside of it). In other words, our Father loves absolutely everyone all the time. The Greek word teleos is employed in 5:48. It can mean perfect, and it typically does when applied to God, but in context it means this:

"In light of this, be as comprehensive in your love as your heavenly Father is."

Where we want to read exclusive holiness-club messages into the passage, there is only our Father's illogical, radical, all-inclusive love. No marginalizing there. No alienation. No judgment in sight.

God's love does not demand that we be good; it creates the good it desires.

Relax.

God loves life. When we put our hands out to accept it He will fill them. God goes to unending trouble to create life and to preserve it. Life springs up in the most unlikely places under the most hostile conditions and somehow it endures despite our best efforts to snuff it out.

A personal example: anyone who knows me knows that I'm a pretty open-minded person. I know what God saved me from so the last thing I want to do is heap judgment on anyone else. Even after I had kids and had an emotional reference point for the value of life, I still left plenty of room for exceptions, if you will. What about rape? What about extremes of poverty that would doom a child to a hand-to-mouth existence (yes, right here in America)? What about being born to parents who should be in a treatment facility, not raising children (like mine)? My point was, like most things in the world of Christian thought, it's not as simple as we want it to be.

14 months ago, Hannah and I adopted our fourth child, James. James was created under some pretty rough conditions. I won't go into the details...you don't want to know. Suffice it to say that he was the product of all three of the things I listed in the paragraph above. His birth mother pretty much did her level-best to kill him and somehow, miraculously (and I don't use that word lightly) she failed. James was doomed from conception. Were everything to proceed naturally he'd have ended up in the State system at best; that's if he didn't end up growing up in the culture he was conceived in. I hate writing about it. I hate thinking about it.

Something changed over the last year or so. I'm super-hyper-ridiculously conservative about life issues now, and anyone who knows me would howl with laughter to see the word "conservative" used anywhere near the article "I". The thing is, when I thought through my old framework on life, through all the caveats I placed on my values, I realized that the statement I was making was one of importance. I was really saying that one life is more important than another based on the circumstances of its creation. That fit neatly into an open-minded assessment of the issue except that Jame's beautiful little face kept popping up. He was exactly the life I was talking about when I made those qualifications. He was not, in fact, doomed. God had it all worked out. He's pretty important to me.

I think that every single life is important now no matter how it comes to be. The circumstances of creation are not up to me, nor are they necessarily relevant. Life is important because it exists, and that's pretty much that. That said, the Church should be focusing on issues of life and not picketing abortion clinics. We're famously good at treating the headache while brain cancer kills the patient. We need to spend our time on the issues that lead to abortions: poverty, lack of access to health care, good education and relevant social services and so on. A void where hope should be leaves people with little motivation to transcend the limitations of their particular culture.

If we're going to put out our hands, then we have to accept every life God puts into them. That certainly means the lives he gives us through physical conception and birth, but it also means adoption. If we're serious about the idea that no one should ever be left with abortion as the default choice because they have no idea what to do with a baby, then we have to be willing to adopt any child that pops up anywhere under any circumstances for any reason. You won't get any time to think about it. You won't be ready. You won't have everything you need. Your house will be too small. It won't matter.

Mother Teresa, all 5' of her, stood before an American President, shook her finger in his face and said, "If you don't want your babies, then give them to me. There is no unwanted child. Mother Teresa wants your child." That is what it looks like to really love life.

Seriously. What do we actually believe?

So, it seems like much of my pastoring life is centered around trying to get people unified on the important stuff and promoting freedom on what Paul would call adiaphera...matters of indifference. Most of the things that we make a big deal about in Christian circles really don't matter very much as far as the bible is concerned. They are personal preferences that shouldn't form lines that we divide over. These are things like the method of baptism (sprinkling or immersion), drinking (so long as it's not excessive), what day we go to church, how any spritual gift is practiced (so long as no one is targeted), the bible translation you use or any one of a dozen different theological or doctrinal stances (justification is the big one right now, but it also includes the status of women in the church, the stance on Israel, etc).

While we bicker over these things, casting millions and millions of people into hell in our minds because they differ from our preferences, the world looks on and their disbelief deepens. They figure, if Christians can't even decide what's true and what's not, then it's probably all baloney. They observe the contempt we have for fellow Christians who differ from us in tiny ways and think, "if I have to be like that I don't want any part of it." Who could blame them? It sucks to be on the INSIDE of this from time to time and I actually understand what people are arguing about.

So, what are the essentials of our faith? I had the advantage of growing up in the Lutheran church where we learned the Creeds and recited them every week in church. There are two: the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed; the former is essentially a shorter version of the latter, which fills in some of the details a bit more. The Creeds contain the things that the early church fathers thought were indispensible truths, without which critical doctrines fall apart. These things are the sine qua non of our faith regardless of demonination. If you believe something else on any one point, you are something other than an orthodox Christian. It doesn't mean you're a bad person; it has no moral bearing whatever. It's simply a catagory issue. In order to belong to the catagory "Christian", you must believe these things. If you don't you belong to another category.

Here is the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father [and the Son],
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

We must have unity on those issues. If you don't understand them, then it's pretty important that you do some research on your own or ask one of your pastors. They are all critically important Christian beliefs. That said, Absolutely positively everything else is on the table for discussion. If we disagree it's not a big deal. I disagree on almost everything theologically and doctrincally with two very close friends. We have discussions about them all the time and we go on loving one another.

So, anyone want to argue about seven-day creation? Just kidding. You don't really want to do that do you?

Unnatural Activities

In the the last two decades it has been fashionable in counseling circles to address issues of wounding that impact a person's ability to trust other people by helping them build a new framework that essentially goes like this:

The world is basically a good place filled with good people where trust is a normal (read: reasonable) reaction. It is reasonable to make trust your default position until someone gives you a reason not to trust him/her.

Bear in mind that we were (and are) ministering to very broken, hurting people who needed to swing back from extremes of mistrust over to a more workable way of relating to others. In that sense some permutation of the above statement is very practical. On the other hand, I don't think the bible teaches it at all. If you walk away from the bible with one message about the world, it should probably be we live in a broken, hurting world that isn't the way God wants it to be at all. It's filled with people who hurt each other all the time, intentionally and unintentionally, and there are no assurances that the people you depend on (parents, relatives, teachers, friends, spouses and so on) will behave lovingly, reasonably and appropriately. God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to provide a solution because we could not fix it ourselves. He is the only hope for a really, really screwed up world.

When we come to God in Christ and ask him to do what we cannot, we can have every assurance that he will do it, whatever it costs him and whatever it costs us. This results in some level of pain for us at times, but it is the only love he has to give. We must ask him for "the love he has and not the love he has not" (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain). Part of this process is re-learning how to love God and love each other, and much of it is anything but intuitive. When we come to him, God asks us to perform some unnatural and complex activities.:

• When people insult you, I want you to forgive them. (Matthew 18:22)
• When people harm you, I want you to resist the urge to take revenge. (Matthew 5:39)
• I want you to love and pray for your enemies. (Matthew 5:44)
• In the middle of pain and suffering I want you to be joyful. (James 1:2)
• I want you to practice sexual purity. (Matthew 5:28;15:19)
• I want you to pursue peace. (Matthew 5:9; Mark 9:50)
• I want you to trust me in the face of want/need. (Matthew 6:25-33)
• I want you to pray rather than worry. (Philippians 4:6-7)
• I want you to put others before yourself. (John 13:1-17)
• I want you to trust in me rather than material possessions. (Matthew 19:21-23)
• I want you to care for people on the margins – especially the poor. (Luke 4:18)

As a pastor I have opportunity to witness the incredulity with which people approach lives that do not change of their own accord after one has uttered the sinner's prayer (or some variation). It’s naive to think that simply by virtue of saying yes to Christ, we automatically have the grace to exhibit these new behaviors — especially when we have years of experience of doing exactly the opposite. As we train ourselves in godliness, the ability to show mercy and forgiveness, to display patience and trust, to exhibit joy and confidence in God become progressively more natural. It can become second nature to act like Jesus but certainly not without training, not without cost. Forgiveness and a right relationship with God are gifts. They come to us freely, we are told, when we sign on as followers of Jesus and trust his agenda for us rather than our own. But spiritual formation, the molding of our lives into vessels that are useful to him, takes obedience and effort on our part. It was no different for Jesus.

We can fully expect that the judicious and strenuous practice of spiritual disciplines will lead to routine, subconscious behavior that reflects the life of Christ working in us. Initially, great concentration is required; but in time less and less energy is expended and less thought is given to the task. This dynamic is operative in the acquisition of any new behavior, whether we consider the behavior “physical” or “spiritual.” In fact, distinctions between physical and spiritual behavior are artificial; the presence of God is mediated to us only through our bodies. Submitting to God in the use of these exercises means submitting to a very specific and unique training regimen-one that will last a lifetime as we yield to God and he draws us deeper into his life.

This is nothing less than the mechanism by which God is rescuing his fallen creation. There's no use asking for it to be otherwise. There are no magical solutions, no deus ex machina. There is only God and his promises to us. Fortunately the One who promises is eternal and all good; he can be relied on even if others can't.

Righteousness and Justice

In the bible, the word used to mean "righteousness" is dikaiosune. We usually want to use the word as a label for the person who does all the right things, who keeps his promises or all of her commitments. He/she an upstanding person. He/she a righteous person.

The problem is, it doesn't mean anything of the sort...at least not directly. Dikaiosune is a covenantal term. It refers to one's positive status as a member of the covenant. When the bible calls a person "righteous" (dikaios), it is not calling him or her a good person or referring to any positive moral quality. It is not synonymous with "good Jewish/Christian behavior". There are no degrees of righteousness as there can be in matters of morality. One is either righteous or not. When the word is used to refer to God obviously it can't mean the same thing. In that context it refers to God's covenant faithfulness. God is righteous. He will keep the promises he's made to Israel/the Church. ** (see below for the wordy theological/doctrinal note)

Interestingly, the same Greek word...dikaiosune...is used to mean "justice". The terms "righteous" and "just" are interchangeable in Koine Greek usage. A person who is RIGHTEOUS (a member of the covenant, or IN CHRIST in the New Testament) will also be JUST. In the bible, justice always refers to the righting of wrongs, and largely refers to an heart posture of generosity, compassion and fairness with respect to the poor, the orphan and the widow. To put it another way, the bible never envisions a state of righteousness that does not include an ardent desire to speak for those without a voice, to defend those who are alone, to lift up those who are oppressed. Over and over again, especially (but not exclusively) in the Old Testament, in every genre and context imaginable, God tells Israel that the activity of worship is offensive to him outside the context of justice. Without justice God tells Israel there is, literally, no covenant.

Where do we find it in the New Testament? Here's just one good example. Though people have tried to pit Paul against James in the New Testament, there is no conflict between the two of them, only a difference in emphasis. Where Paul is typically more concerned with the inclusiveness of the Gospel (unity), our changed lives (repentance) and our state of membership in the new covenant (justification), the book of James is all about righteousness and justice. Look closely at the book of James. From the first chapter on, what's the context? THE POOR, THE ORPHAN AND THE WIDOW. When he talks about "works" being evidence of "faith", what works is he referring to? CARING FOR THE POOR, THE ORPHAN AND THE WIDOW. When he refers to "faith" as dead without "works", what does he mean? He means the same thing he meant in the Old Testament, that there is no covenant membership without justice. James is all about the marginalized.

Caring for the poor, the widow and the orphan isn't a something God tells us to do if we're inclined to do it. Embracing the outcast and marginalized is not a religious hobby. God says that if that's not what we're about, if it's not our defining characteristic, then we should all go home because he's not listening. Those aren't my words...they were spoken through the prophet Amos (5:21-24). If we're spending Sunday mornings in church, then spending the rest of our time making sure that the poor never have access to the things that we have access to, then we are have become worthless and may as well bulldoze our buildings. I didn't say it...Hosea did (Hosea 12:6-14). Proverbs considers it gnomic truth (as God sees it) that those who oppress the needy show contempt for the One who made them (Proverbs 14:31). Those who exploit the poor (even passively) will face God's judgement (Isaiah 3:14-17).

I could go on and on, citing text after text. There are hundreds. I'll cite just one more. Throughout the whole corpus of scripture, there is just one text where Jesus himself tells us what the criteria for judgement will be on the Last Day. It's Matthew 28. Jesus calls all the nations to himself and separates them to his right and his left (sheep and goats). Look closely. What's the litmus test? Church attendance? No. Holding the correct doctrines? No. How many people you led to him? No.

It's mercy. One group was merciful and the other wasn't. Notice that the goats thought they did all the right things, but they were not righteous. They were not members of the covenant. Why not? Because they were unjust. Their hearts were never motivated by love to gather up the castoffs of society. They didn't even see them! Even if they didn't actively exploit them, they're no better off than those who did. As usual for Jesus, this is all about the heart. They were unrighteous because they were unjust. They were unjust because their hearts were focused in entirely the wrong direction.

Justice and righteousness are inseparable. When Jesus refers to the Law (the document stipulating the requirements for covenant membership), he sums it up by citing a variation of the Hebrew Shema from Deuteronomy 6: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul (self) and mind. But Jesus doesn't stop there. Then he adds a second part, putting it on a par with the first. The Greek used there is deutera de omoia aute: "and the second is equal in every way". Jesus didn't make it up; it's from Leviticus 19:18: love your neighbor as yourself. Loving God and loving people are two sides of the same coin. You cannot do one without doing the other. If you are doing one, you are necessarily doing the other.

He has shown you, O man, what is good.

And what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.

- Micah 6:8

**The objection to this idea usually goes as follows: if righteousness means "a state of covenant membership", then what does the bible mean when it says that we have Christ's righteousness, that we are in possession of a righteousness that is not our own? In other words, this idea is typically viewed as an attack on the reformation doctrine of imputation, which states that the righteousness of Christ, that is, his faithfulness and obedience, is treated as if it were actually ours through faith. The work of the cross is not a legal fiction; we are in fact not guilty. In solidarity with Schweitzer, Davies, E.P Sanders, W.G. Dunn and N.T. Wright, I would reply that a status of covenant membership accomplishes the same thing. We are pronounced "not guilty" not according to any work that we have accomplished, but because we are IN CHRIST, part of the new covenant in his blood. There is no conflict with imputation, or at least not as stark a conflict as the opponents of the so-called New Pauline Perspectives would assert.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin!

Over the millenia, Christians have said things that caused tremendous offense, then let themselves off the hook, retreating into martyrdom as though we shared in the suffering of Christ by provoking the world into indignation. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that we're not doing our jobs right if the secular world doesn't hate us. After all, they hated Jesus, right? In our ridiculous pride, and in an irony that should not be missed, we align ourselves with Jesus, who was hated because he INCLUDED everyone the religious community hated. Jesus spent his time with the poor, the hookers, drug dealers and pimps of his day, and that's why he was rejected.

Of all the abominable things that Christians say, this is the one I hate the most:

"God loves the sinner, but hates the sin."

It's a cyanide pill coated with just enough sugar to make it palatable. There's enough truth to make the lie believable, but like all lies, you can't live it. The thing is, as Christians we're used to creating false dichotomies: body and spirit, science and faith, earthly and heavenly, secular and Christian, God's sovereignty and our free will. This one fits right in with the rest, like a needle in a stack of needles.

You know what I experienced when I heard that phrase as a new Christian?

"God hates me."

I couldn't make the distinction between my sin and myself. I still can't most of the time. It's a silly mental trick, this idea of somehow separating who I am from what I do. It was just another thing that made me think of God as a bad magician, holding the truth behind his back with one hand while distracting me with the other. What I heard was that God hated huge parts of me, parts that I hated every day too and seemed helpless to control. I am the little Dutch boy of sin, plugging holes in the dam with all ten fingers while desperately trying to ignore the leaks springing up all around me. What I heard was the thing I'd been hearing all my life, that I wasn't what God wanted, but that he was willing to tolerate me if I behaved myself and was quiet. That equals big pain for an adopted child like me.

The fact is, sin isn't the problem...it's the symptom of the problem. Sin is the thing we do because we're hurting and because we have broken coping skills. Sin is the way we act out because we're in pain. Sin happens when we live out poor role modeling or try to apply inadequate experience to overwhelming trauma. Sin is us pedalling as fast as we can on a bike without a chain, getting nowhere while we slowly die of exhaustion.

So, I'm never going to use that phrase again. You will never hear in used in this church. Instead, I offer a revision:

"God loves me and he hates the brokenness that causes me pain."

Hating sin is like dispassionately spanking a child for every misbehavior while never giving a care for WHY the child is acting out. Maybe your parents or another authority figure did that do you, but God doesn't. When we say that God forgives sin, we mean that he has perfect perspective on it; he sees beneath it and around it, above it and below it. He sees the sickness underneath and acts on that. He sees the stone hearts that kept us safe for a while and wants to soften them.

God doesn't hate sin! He hates the things that keep you stuck in destructive, painful behavior. He hates the things that have happened to you that leave you confined to narrow, dark emotional places. God hates the cage you live in because people prefer to stand outside and offer cliches rather than getting in there with you to experience your world. God hates the abuse you endure because it's better than being alone. God hates the cheap price you sold your life for because nobody ever told you how much you were worth. God hates the limits you put on his love because nothing in your life ever prepared for radical, irrational, illogical, life-making passion that doesn't require goodness, but CREATES it.

The fact is, God is not concerned with being seen as "soft on sin", and neither am I. Christians tend to be terribly concerned about that issue, but only because we're afraid other Christians won't like us. God is infamously, unfairly tender-hearted. He doesn't hate any part of us.

Quia amasti me, fecisti me amabilem.