“God, I love you. It’s just your people I can’t stand.”
We’ve all heard people say this, often in passing. Perhaps some of us are even guilty of having said it ourselves. Yet far from being a harmless bit of condescension, this is a profoundly heretical assertion. Although the person saying this believes He is criticizing the Church, in fact he is exposing his own deadly ignorance of God’s Nature.
Consider some similar statements for illustration:
“Mr. Taylor, I love you. It’s just your wife I can’t stand.”
“Mrs. Johnson, I love you. It’s just your children I can’t stand.”
Precisely because the things we love are the deepest and most meaningful expressions of who we really are, loving a person is inseparable from loving the things that person loves and rejecting them means rejecting him. Thus, until we eagerly love those whom God loves, we can’t say that we truly love God Himself. And God’s love is not the love of people as perfect as He is, but of flawed people.
To the idolatrous and legalistic, such love seems profoundly stupid. And judging from their paradigm that love should be given to the worthy, God’s love actually is profoundly stupid. Nonetheless…
“Reckless, foolish, imprudent, and risky;
Your love alone, oh God, is worthy of worship.”
2 comments:
To love someone we must love what they love? Well, what if they love patently evil things: child molestation, murder, or a particular breed of sin? Professed followers of God may be in love with performing a particular sin. Must we then love that sinful act as they do in order to love them?
A more intermediate question would be whether I must love the Yankees because my producer loves the Yankees. This is especially problematic since I happen to love the Cardinals and might conceivably have already been a lover of the Red Sox (Gasp) if I had been born under less fortunate circumstances.
But it's certainly true that if I were a Red Sox fan, the fact that our loves are both in such conflict with each other could easily form a schism between us, which is sort of the idea I'm driving at in the thought.
Back to your point, if a man loves some sin, and I love that man, the fact that I already detest the sin is a point of divergence for us.
Even as I was writing this, your objection was occurring to me, but I wasn't clever enough to figure out a less cumbersome phrasing than "we must love whom they love" which is beyond awkward, even if more accurate.
But there's also the sense here of expression of identity, and if we reject someone's cherished objects (even people), we are in some sense rejecting that portion of them.
All of these thought are why I focused on the three most solid instances of the principle (loving X means loving Y which X loves): parents, spouses, and God. The idea is clearly true IN THOSE CONTEXTS, and perhaps less reliable elsewhere.
At the same time, there is a good cautionary note here. I must never love child molesting (to take a case), but in some sense I will never really love the child molestor until I understand him (know him), and in some sense I will never really understand (know) him unless I can get inside his sinful desire structure. Because I've never been afflicted with this particular sinful desire, I am more easily condemning of such people precisely because I so fundamentally don't understand them. And anytime I can't understand someone, I know that I'm far more prone to interact with them less effectively because of the fact. My love is impreded by my lack of knowing them truly.
In this sense, there is a something pretty important even in the case of the sinful person with this person.
Thanks for the thoughtful resopnse.
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