Hateful or Faithful?
You are at an outdoor picnic, park, or family gathering when suddenly you see a three-year-old child darting after a ball and running full stride towards speeding traffic. What do you do? Do you make the conscious decision NOT to sound a warning and just let the child run headlong into certain, sudden, flesh-rending and brake-squealing destruction? Just what is the most loving, caring thing you could possibly do at that point? The answer is so incredibly apparent that you probably wonder why I would even ask. Hold that thought…
God is love (I John 4:8). In His greatest of all love – and being love incarnate – He sent His prophets to generation after generation of His erring children who were chasing after every whim of the wind, to warn that disobedient brood heading towards their self-inflicted and certain destruction about the direction their chosen paths would ultimately take them, finally sending His beloved Son Himself to do the exact same thing (Matthew 21:33-22:13).
As said above, God is love (I John 4:8); Jesus was God (John 1:1-3, 14); therefore Jesus is love too. So; was Jesus unloving in sounding the warning to the hypocritical and disobedient religious folks of His day about their chosen direction which would ultimately cause their destruction? For telling them point-blank that they were wrong because they did not know the Scriptures (Matthew 22:29)? For calling them “blind fools” and a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:13-35)? Certainly not. He would soon die for their sins! He did not hate them, but instead loved them beyond our ability to even begin to understand even as He does us! Hence the swiftness, firmness, and severity of His warnings! You see, it is not hateful, or spiteful, or mean-spirited, to warn those who are headed for certain doom, about the deadly and destructive direction they are headed! In fact, it is far, far from it! In fact, it is what Love Incarnate continuously did – and continually and consummately does! It is what the purest of love will ALWAYS do See Matthew 3:1-10; Galatians 1:6-10, 5:1-12)!
And so, while some sadly misinformed folks today who want to continue to live in their sinful and abhorrent lifestyles without the restrictions and responsibilities that such a Scriptural knowledge brings them might want to call a faithful to the Word of God, warning-giving gospel preacher or congregation of God’s children “hateful” for sounding the same exact warnings to those headed ignorantly into eternal disaster as God, Jesus, and their devoted disciples and messengers have always done, remember my beloved brethren: what they call “hateful,” God calls “faithful.” And let’s just say, I wouldn’t want to let someone who was unwilling to sound a warning to those in life-threatening unseen danger watch my grandchildren… would you yours? How much worse then is it, to have them refusing to give or to heed eternally-devastating warnings, hmmm?