Zephyrs of the Zeitgeist

It looks so pious, so loving, so altogether spiritual when we refuse to condemn sin in another. We have attained, we think, to that lofty pinnacle of Christian maturity where we are finally able to show true love.

Well, enjoy the idyllic moment of peaceful self-satisfaction because, unfortunately the diamond needle of truth is about to dig discordantly across the vinyl and wreck future replays forever. We are hypocrites. We love applause, even when it is our own. So deceitful is the human heart – deceitful above all and desperately wicked – that it loves to pull the spiritual wool over any eyes at all. And we ourselves are the closest dupes available.

Much of the time, the reason we refuse to condemn sin in other people has nothing to do with love or spirituality. It has to do with hypocrisy of the most subtle kind. The kind that is protecting its own interests. For if we would obey God and condemn all sin, we would first have to condemn it in ourselves with the same hatred that God Himself does. God hates sin. He hates every false way.

When we think of God hating sin we ought not to think of it as a heavenly raise of the eyebrows or a “Tsk, tsk!” through pursed lips along with a wagging finger. That is a false idea. It is an idea from a fallen and perverse mind that is too delicate to think of the God of love as being given to unquenchably violent rage and eternal hatred. We think that would not be a very nice sort of God. He would not fit our own sensibilities because we ourselves are too pious to be that way. So we make a false idol.

Professing Christians so often hear the truth but simply don’t get it. They know Christ suffered the wrath of eternal God in their place upon the cross. They know it. But they refuse to believe it. How can they believe it and still say inane and vapid things that excuse any form of sin whatsoever in the name of love? How can they believe that Christ suffered the wrath of God because of their own personal wickedness – their utter corruption – and not make the connection with God’s hatred of sin?

It is true that His love and his vehement rage met in Christ on the cross – both were in plain view. But nothing that happened on the cross changed the nature of sin itself. There, Christ paid the price for the sin of all who believe in Him. The price was paid. Nobody was excused! Nothing was brushed under the rug. No eyes were averted. God’s law was not repealed. God did not stop hating sin. He hates it still. And all who do not come to Christ are still under the condemnation of a God whose wrath is being revealed from heaven even as we speak. Grace forbears and restrains the full and final revelation of it. And grace alone does so only until the full number of God’s people has been called in.

It is an unspeakable betrayal of Christ to misrepresent the nature of His sacrifice so basely as to characterize it as God overlooking sin – or to imply that God’s rage against the sins of all people was assuaged by the cross of Christ. It wasn’t. God is still enraged at all who are outside of Christ, and Christians need to say so.

By our salvation - by our being united with Christ - we Christians are united with the God Who hates sin. His thoughts have become our thoughts. His will has become our will. His nature has joined to our nature. Though assured of His forgiveness we do not cease to hate sin simply because the price for our own sin was paid. In fact, with our eyes opened we will hate sin all the more. And we will hate sin firstly and most passionately in ourselves.

The fact that we Christians have been forgiven all our past and future sins does not give us cause to minimize sin when it is manifest in us. It wounds us as it wounds God. It pierces us as it pierced Christ because we are one with Him. Christ did not cease to hate sin, even as He suffered for ours. Neither should we cease to hate sin in ourselves.

Now, I say all of this because the niceness – the daintiness – of those who will not hate sin right alongside their great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, is an offence to God and an ignominy within the modern church. And the prevailing reason for much of this hypocritical delicacy is that people will not first condemn sin in themselves. If they did it would be a relatively easy matter to condemn sin wherever else it is seen. Perhaps many have never been convicted. It might be that some have never actually repented. We are not the final judge of that. We judge sin, not people. We judge it with God’s judgment using God’s thoughts and words. And if the cap fits, then let people wear it.

Here’s the rub. By lessening the horror and offence of sin in others we think that we can do so in ourselves. If they are not so bad, then we are not so bad. If their sins are mere peccadilloes, then ours are momentary aberrations – mere zephyrs of the zeitgeist amounting to zeros in eternity. This is false comfort. Self-deception. Lies from the father of lies and the murderer of souls.

If you seriously want to manifest love to someone then decry sin. Decry it in yourself. Hate it. Mourn over it. Despise it. Be filled with anger at it. When you can be honest about that, it will take much less effort to be honest about it in others.