The Divine Surgeon
God can't love sin but he can't cease loving sinners, they're his children, wayward and sinful though they are. See the Prodigal Son story in Luke 15 and compare Acts 17:28-29.
Fullness of life with God isn't possible if we are estranged from him by our sin. Life is a two-way experience so it isn't enough that God ceaselessly wants us to have life we must want it also. You can't have “friendship” when one of the two wants and enjoys wanting to be the other one's enemy. In loving our sin we don't want life with God so he moves in Christ to deal with what stands between him and us.
The sin that keeps us apart from him is not an abstraction; it is sin that is an actual part of the sinners and their history with God, so that when God moves against that sin it involves moving against sinners. Sort of, like a surgeon who moves against a tumor or infection. It isn't the patient he's mad at; it's the cancer or infection. But the infection doesn't exist outside the body of the patient so instead of doing surgery on the operating table on which the patient is lying the surgeon puts the knife to the sick patient. While the surgeon would be against “disease” in principle there's more to him and his work than that.
God's "invasive surgery" is no act of spite or foaming rage against sinners, on the contrary, he is ruthlessly dealing with the sin that keeps sinners from him. The Holy Father must do that or there is no life for us. He isn't afraid of sin any more than the surgeon is afraid of the cancer. It isn't that God can't look at sin (we sometimes say silly things like, God can't even look on sin, as if that's what Habakkuk 1:13 meant). It's precisely because he and he alone does look at it and see it for what it is that he is unchangeably opposed to it and works to destroy it.
Only when we're one with God in holy love can we enjoy life to the full (John 10:10) and experience the health that “sound” (health-full) teaching brings. He gives us food, gladness, life and “everything else” (Acts 14:17 and 17:25) but fullness of life is much more than that. Life with God means more than being on the receiving end of his gifts--it means being related to him in oneness of heart. A relationship like that results in blessings beyond imagination but the relationship is not to be reduced to the blessings that flow from it. To reject the Christ is to live before God as a recipient of blessings until we meet him, having said our final no to him. To receive God in Jesus Christ is to experience eternal life, life that will never end and life that is of such a quality that it cannot end. Life like that is found only in a dynamic and ongoing relationship with God in Jesus Christ by the Spirit.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
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