The Hatred of Love

The Special of the Day... From the Orange Moon Cafe...

     "Unto the Son He saith, Thy throne, o God, is forever and ever.  A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Thy kingdom.  Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity" (Hebrews 1:8-9).

    As the Lord Jesus Christ lived an earthly lifetime in the world He created, we can only imagine how grieved He must have been to experience His handiwork gravely damaged by the effects of sin.  "The whole world lieth in wickedness" declared the Apostle John (I John 5:19).  Little wonder then that our Savior "hated iniquity," because it so ravages those whom He loves. 

    He hates sin in your life and mine for the same reason.  Unbelief and disobedience results in the believer's inability to experience the grace of life provided through the Lord Jesus.  "To be carnally minded is death" (Romans 8:6).  As a young man whom I greatly respect once said when he was merely a boy, "Satan makes good things seem bad, and bad things seem good."  Or, in terms of our present consideration, he makes sin seem like a doorway into life rather than the gaping maw of the grave it actually opens to our wandering feet.  Indeed, we "die" every time we distrust and disobey our Lord in the sense that we embrace the iniquity that prevents our experience of Christ's indwelling life.  This is a true death because "to live is Christ" (Philippians 1:21).  Nothing else qualifies as life, as defined by the God who hates sin in direct proportion to how dearly He loves us.

    We do well to remember this Divine sensibility as we look upon a world characterized by so much pain, loss, heartache and heartbreak.  The view will affect our own sensibilities, and increasingly lead us to share our Lord's attitude toward the subtle, but monstrous cause of so much agony.  The Savior lived for more than three decades amid the spiritual, moral, relational and physical carnage.  Again, we cannot know how deeply it affected Him, except to remember that the Bible refers to the Lord Jesus as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3).  Such a place must exist in us also, along with our Lord's hatred for the iniquity that promises life, but ravages with death.

"The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
(Romans 6:23)