Editorial – God is love
God is not politically correct –with massive implications for His children and their mission…
Survivors of the world’s disasters invariably sing the praises of their rescuers. Gratitude flows logically and naturally. For two thousand years, Christians, their own lives rescued and turned around by the mercy of God, have proclaimed that “the Father has sent His Son to be the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14). His motivation? “God is love”. The best news, one would think… Yet the notion that men and women need saving is largely doubted, resented, despised, mocked and even hated in most of the world.
God’s Word predicts a needlessly miserable end of time scenario for countless rebellious mortals: “People gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores. They did not repent of their deeds.” (Revelation 16:10-11) Now, let’s pause to process this terrible prospect… This is like cursing the rescue teams who ran into Manhattan’s Ground Zero while everyone else who had legs was running out. God sends a Saviour – His own Son – and is cursed by the race He died to save? Is there a madness at work here? If the greatest reality in the cosmos is that God is – and that God is love– surely universal denial of this reality is… madness?
History disconnect
Our politically correct population loses its grip on reality the more ‘PC’ it becomes. Younger adults are PC without
knowing it – it’s their ‘norm’. They have no idea of the lost freedoms of former generations when polar-opposites could peacefully co-exist without screaming “I’m offended” and would even defend each other’s right to be ‘opposite’. They have no idea that both Nazis and Stalinists would welcome the selfcensorship that today’s Brits exercise, for fear of losing one’s job, being arrested, prosecuted, attacked – even killed. I wish I could say that the Church is free of this paralysing fear, but that’s far from the reality.
It’s not God’s love that is hated – it’s that His love can’t be separated from His righteousness, justice and purity – and He can’t love without the truth. God’s love is a popular concept – but not His holiness, not His non-conformity. What we sinners ‘need’ – what we demand – is a God who is just like us.He must conform to our standards and never talk about sin, because that makes us uncomfortable and offends us deeply. If He would only settle for our easygoing, hormone-driven definition of ‘love’… why can’t He accept that love and lust are the same thing? His demand for faithfulness undermines our moody freedom…
Like teenagers, confused and torn between rebellion and responsibility, our race resents and resists love’s boundaries across our reckless path. Once we see that God is love, that God defines love and that God acts only in love, every “thou shalt not”in the Bible makes different sense. When God says “Don’t”, He’s saying: “I Love you”. Such unkindness!
Actually, that “God is love” is the reason that He is hated. We mortals are naturally self-centred. True love must be taught; it must be modelled before we ‘get it’. Otherwise, it’s an alien concept. Left to our infant self-preoccupation, we become self-preoccupied adults, selfpreoccupied citizens. God has nothing to learn about love. He is not preoccupied with Himself but with us, with the welfare of sinners: saved sinners and
not-yet-saved sinners. He is love’s standard. God is not politically correct. True love can’t be PC, because political correctness separates entire nations from the truth, forces people to live within a fiction and quickly shows its hatred of those who stand for the truth and refuse to be silenced. When we are politically correct, we reveal that someone has discovered the price of our loyalty and ‘bought us’. There we were, on display in society’s slave market… Our price tags read: ‘reputation to protect’, ‘ambitious’, ‘afraid to die’, ‘family to shield’, ‘money motivated’ … The buyers with the loudest, most terrifying threats bought our submission and our silence. Now we serve them in mute shame and others, who might have stood firm with our example, also crumble and conform.
Not for sale
Intimidation and flogging failed to silence the apostles. They were not for sale; they had already been bought. Their Master had purchased them with His own blood. It was their joyful freedom to be His slaves. They had been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. God – as “the Man Christ Jesus” – had defeated sin and death and hell for sinners who could do none of these things for themselves. This was good news; the very best news. Moreover, their Risen Lord had commissioned them that their eyewitness testimony and His teaching should produce disciples in all nations. The Holy Spirit revealed to them that God”desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:4). Thus, these bold men became, unintentionally, the natural enemies of those who suppress the truth. The world’s power-brokers put God’s messengers in chains, but His kind message laughed at prison doors – and His kind messengers laughed at death…
“God is love”. It is not enough to say that God is ‘loving’. That might imply variability, circumstances and times at which God might not be loving. The apostle is not describing God’s whims but His essence: “God is love”. The Greek permits no reversal of the text. We cannot translate: ‘Love is God’. John’s logic is simple and clear. The person who does not love (as defined by God) does not know love. The stranger to love is therefore a stranger to God. The same apostle can say, accurately, that “love is of God” (1 John 4:7).Love derives from God; not God from love. This means that love is defined from above, not from below. The love of which John speaks has no self-interest in it.
This, dear Christian, explains how you came to know Jesus. Through two thousand years, many missionaries have shared Paul’s experience: “I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have laboured and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches.” (2 Corinthians 11:26-28) If you asked them why they would choose to live in harm’s way, they would echo Paul:“Messiah’s love compels me…”.
Some years ago, I met a Christian pastor from Fiji. His faith and calling sprang from soil stained with the blood of the first missionaries who made the decision to die before they left home. Compelled by Jesus’ love, they put themselves knowingly, calculatingly, in harm’s way rather than leave his fierce ancestors in pagan darkness. Your faith and mine also rests on such selfless sacrifice – and ultimately on Calvary. The implications for our own missionary calling are obvious…
Until very recently, political correctness was indulged with a joke and otherwise ignored as a wacky irrelevance by the saner majority of a free British society. Today, society is not free and political correctness is no joke – it’s self-censorship, generated by fear and – to the increasing shame of the mother of parliamentary democracies – fortified by recent laws and lawmakers. In less than two decades the subtle power of political correctness has enslaved millions who now, unwittingly, toe the (undeclared) Marxist political line and guard their every word, even in private conversation, lest their buried truth should escape into the light and cause ‘offence’. With borrowed historical insight, we note that ‘the lights are going out all over Britain’.Thus far, it is a bloodless coup – but history warns that the landscape could darken still more…
Fake is the new real
’Reality’, now, is whatever you want it to be – it can be anything but the truth. You can stand naked before a full-length mirror, ignore what is plainly before your eyes and choose to be whatever gender you ‘feel’ at that moment – or even refuse to choose if you prefer more ‘open’ options. When it comes to perceiving gender reality, hormones now trump optics – every time. You can take a religion that teaches ‘kill the unbeliever’ and a religion that teaches “love your enemy”and equate them, so that their ‘gods’ are considered identical and uniqueness is denied to either one; OR… you can invert that whole viewpoint and equate ‘fundamentalists’ who terrorise, kidnap, rape and behead fellow human beings with ‘fundamentalists’ who refuse to change one word of the Bible that requires them to love God, their neighbour, their enemy, to feed the poor, clothe the naked, “live at peace with all men”and tell the world that Jesus died and rose again to save God’s enemies – even if it’s dangerous to say so.
In a world of fake news and fake reality, you can now be arrested for preaching God’s saving truth in public, but you can march through London flying the flags of a terrorist organisation funded by the peace-loving mullahs of Iran. The market for truth has bottomed out, but deadly fiction enjoys government support. “So, justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter.” (Isaiah 59:14)
In the UK, our native land has suddenly taken on the look of a hostile, alien landscape; unfamiliar to us, but quite ‘normal’ to the first Christians and believers in most other nations of the world.
‘Harm’s way’ is the natural habitat of Christian mission. The Good Shepherd never abandons His sheep, but He leads them out on His Father’s business: to rescue the wolves. If they knew Our God, our enemies would not be our enemies. We are hated without a cause, but we do not love as blindly as we are hated. The love we are called to return is not naïve but ‘child-like’ – that is, ‘childof-God-like’: “…love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6:35-36) “God is love”.