Did Jesus love us, while the Father hated us?
For those who think that somehow that Jesus loved us, but the Father couldn’t bear us because of our sin, the bible tells us:
“Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise. (John 5:19-20)
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Cor 5:19)
“And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1)
What about the brutality and violence of the Old Testament?
A related area of misunderstanding concerns the brutality and violence in the Old Testament. Again, it was a result of interaction between man’s unloving wickedness and God’s patient love. Before we can understand that interaction, we must understand a little of God’s love.
His love does not come naturally to our sin-warped, self-centredness. Jesus put the Father’s love on display by healing the sick and lavishing love on sinners who least deserved it. On the other hand, He railed at self-righteous religious leaders and warned us that:
“All who came before me are thieves and robbers;” (John 10:8)
What He meant was that even the Old Testament prophets through whom God spoke were sinners. By contrast, Jesus was the sinless Son who accurately revealed the Father. As a result, we must read the Old Testament in the light of Jesus’ revelation of who God is.
God is love – a unique kind of love that is defined in a well-known passage of the New Testament often used at weddings:
“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends” (1 Cor 13:4-8)
There have been times in history when people’s unloving choices (sins) have reached a point where brutality, disease and poverty had the potential to end human existence. God’s intervention on some such occasions caused many deaths in the offending cultures.
To those raised in Christian civilisation, the Old Testament record of such events seems brutal. But God didn’t intervene because He hated them. He did it for much the same reason that we eliminate lethal spiders from our home – to protect the family as a whole.
For more detail on this subject, view in sequence the three videos below:
Recent Comments