God Hates the Sinner And Hates the Sin

One of the most popular beliefs of the day is that God loves everybody, and the very fact that it is so popular with all classes ought to be enough to arouse the suspicious of those who are subject to the Word of Truth. God’s love toward all His creatures is the fundamental and favorite tenet of Universalists, Unitarians, Theosophists, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Russellites, etc.

No matter how a man may live—in open defiance of Heaven, with no concern whatever for his soul’s eternal interests, still less for God’s glory, dying, perhaps with an oath on his lips—notwithstanding, God loves him, we are told. So widely has this dogma been proclaimed, and so comforting is it to the heart which is at enmity with God, we have little hope of convincing many of their error.

That God loves everybody, is, we may say, quite a modern belief. The writings of the church fathers, the Reformers or the Puritans will (we believe) be searched in vain for any such concept. Perhaps the late D.L. Moody—captivated by Drummond’s “The Greatest Thing in the World”—did more than anyone else in the last century to popularize this concept.

It has been customary to say God loves the sinner though He hates his sin. But that is a meaningless distinction. What is there in a sinner but sin? Is it not true that his “whole head is sick” and his “whole heart faint,” and that “from the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness” in him? (Isa. 1:5, 6 [show] [5]Why will you still be struck down? Why will you continue to rebel? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. [6]From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and raw wounds; they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil.
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Is it true that God loves the one who is despising and rejecting His blessed Son? God is Light as well as Love, and therefore His love must be a holy love. To tell the Christ-rejector that God loves him is to cauterize his conscience as well as to afford him a sense of security in his sins.

The fact is, the love of God is a truth for the saints only, and to present it to the enemies of God is to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs. With the exception of John 3:16 [show] [16]"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (ESV)
, not once in the four Gospels do we read of the Lord Jesus, the perfect Teacher, telling sinners that God loves them!

In the book of Acts, which records the evangelistic labors and messages of the apostles, God’s love is never referred to at all! But when we come to the Epistles, which are addressed to the saints, we have a full presentation of this precious truth—God’s love for His own.

Let us seek to rightly divide the Word of God and then we shall not be found taking truths which are addressed to believers and mis-applying them to unbelievers.

That which sinners need to have brought before them is the ineffable holiness, the exacting wrath of God.

Risking the danger of being misunderstood let us say—and we wish we could say it to every evangelist and preacher in the country—there is far too much presenting of Christ to sinners today (by those sound in the faith), and far too little showing sinners their need of Christ, i.e., their absolutely ruined and lost condition, their imminent and awful danger of suffering the wrath to come, the fearful guilt resting upon them in the sight of God: to present Christ to those who have never been shown their need of Him, seems to us to be guilty of casting pearls before swine.

—A.W. Pink, Objections to God’s Sovereignty Answered

FeebleSaint (JM Vergara) is an aspiring Christian blogger. A sinner saved by God's sovereign grace. An Engineer. A GFX afficionado. A lay-theologian. Nothing but a Feeble Saint. Find me on: Twitter - Facebook - Plurk - Multiply - Youtube - email