God's Default Setting

This is extremely vital to understand. 
God does not function from a position of hate and anger. By anger here I am intending the type of anger that we humans feel in our sin or that we have experienced coming from others, not theological anger. God's default position is one of love. Love can stand in perfect harmony and balance with justice as well as holiness. God's love is not contaminated or warped by sin. We tend to associate the meanings of words with our experience or how the culture around us uses the term.

I think of the term spiritualized. My spell check does not recognize this as a real word. Maybe it isn't but it perfectly denotes the error Christians have fallen into throughout time. They take a real concrete idea in scripture and strip it of all it's gritty, rawness and visualizing it only in other worldly, spirit realm terms. A something without substance and outside of ordinary human experience. Kind of like the old myth that Jesus' birth was not a normal human birth but that he slid from Mary's body on a ray of light. I guess the very thought of a messy, exhausting, sweaty human birth was just too real and human for some people. They couldn't associate a spiritual and holy God with earthly messiness. Many terms surrounding God get spiritualized in one way or another or by some theologies. We think of love and we worry that it is going to get mixed up and confused for the unregenerate lust or cultural views that love everyone's sins. But we can use the words for what they truly mean. God made words, words have meaning and those meanings can be powerful or dilute depending on whether we fear misunderstandings or not.

On the other hand I see anger sometimes defined in ultra human terms. God has anger. But it isn't human anger, unhinged, explosive, petty, raging, tantrum like. It is a thoroughly righteous, slow burn, sharply directed and 100% oriented to justice. The wrath of a gardener whose beautiful and carefully cultivated production has been run over with a mower and filled with septic sludge. It is the flaming heart of a supremely faithful spouse who has caught their beloved in bed with another. It is the rage of a father whose children have been diagnosed with cancer. Sadly the flesh defines God's anger as the rather human kind. A pissed off king, drunk with power, tantruming that nobody is obeying him, wildly raging and out of control. Praise God the flesh doesn't get its way with this one.

God is a braided cord of love, holiness and justice, to name a few. No one strand is more than another. They all blend and balance in perfect harmony. Yet without love there would be no cross. For God love the world in this way.... God did not hate the world so he sent his only son, he loved it. Sin gave a type of destructive spiritual and physical cancer to all of the original perfect creation. This cancer has bred into every cell of our current world, human and nature alike. God hates this cancer with his whole being. If God didn't love he would just hit the delete, erase button and start over. Justice would be satisfied and so would holiness. But love bring something different to the system. It takes into account the birth defect and infection of creation and seeks to free it from the toxin. Justice needs met so God gives of himself out of love to meet that debt. Holiness must not be marred so God gives his to all believers out of love. He suffers long, waiting until the correct moment to eradicate the sin-cancer and redeem the universe from corruption. Without love there is nothing.

God is at war with sin. Because we were born into the wrong camp we are his enemies but enemies that he sweated, bled, was beaten, thirsted and suffocated for. This is love. God hates sin so much that he sweated in terror of the coming physical events and did it any way. The joy of the cross was not some detachment from experience but the knowledge of what would happened afterward. God hates sin but died of love for sinners. Even at the end when he judges those who refused him it is only after trying everything to woo them from their punishment. God hates sin like we hate cancer. We humans don't hate the cancer patient, we hate the corrupt cells destroying their body.

Why is this so important? Because it changes a lot. If God hates people, then we can too. If God gives up on certain folks as too far gone and tosses them into the fire bin to burn then we can too. It is harder to love them like Jesus, seeing beyond the flesh and into the eternal soul. It is fallen human nature to hate that which causes us or our loved ones pain. It takes no supernatural intervention to hate our enemies. It does take an act of God to see our enemies as people Jesus suffered to death for.