We run around talking about hate. This group hates that one. That group hates someone else. We are told that it is part of the system in which we live.
In a way, that is true. The system isn’t one government or another. It isn’t one race versus another. It isn’t one ethnicity versus another.
The system that we live in is that of the sin of humankind.
When we rebelled against God, we opened the door for the evil one (Satan) to come in and rule our hearts. We severed the connection with the one who is love and embraced the one who is death and hatred. We began to wage war against our Creator, God.
There isn’t one of us who isn’t guilty of this type of hate. It just manifests differently depending on whom we are. We don’t learn deceit and hate. Sadly, it comes naturally, since we are born in servitude to the being who is hate.
We were not made to be hateful. We were made to be in communion with God and to love one another. Because of our wish to be like God, we lost the ability to truly love like he does. We know only how to hate.
It doesn’t surprise me that, in this day and age where people no longer believe in God, that this hate is boiling over. It is splashed across the news. We can see hate when a police officer pins a man by his neck to the ground until he dies. We see hate when people run wild in the streets rioting and looting and harming and killing one another in some of distorted way of honoring the man who was murdered.
Protests are not evil but doing harm to others is. There is no redeeming quality to killing people or in harming your neighbors. There is nothing eternally gained by stealing and destroying. There is only destruction.
That destruction is not just to the city you live in but to your own soul. That kind of hate corrodes you and hardens your heart to hearing the good news of Jesus.
Jesus saw the wretched state of our souls and he still loved us. He loved us so much that he was willing to die for us.
Imagine if you were found guilty of the most heinous type of crime imaginable and, when the Guilty verdict was read, someone you didn’t even know came forward and said they would take your death sentence and allow you to live. Imagine then that you somehow convinced yourself that that person deserved to die and not you. Imagine then that you were the one that nailed him to the cross.
Imagine that same person wasn’t just another human being. Imagine if he was also the God who created the universe simply by the words of his mouth.
It just isn’t fathomable to our brains. Humans don’t behave like that. That’s why humans could never be the perfect sacrifice that was demanded to forever make the relationship right between God and man.
A human is sinful in their own right and their verdict is already Guilty. They can’t take the punishment of another because they already deservedly share in that same punishment.
God had to come to the earth himself. He lived as a man (while still fully God) and lived sinlessly. That way, he could offer himself, an innocent man who, on his own, did not share in our punishment.
Just as one man (Adam) brought sin into the world and broke our spiritual relationship with God, one man (Jesus) was able to repair that relationship and bring forgiveness for our sins into the world.
We need to see it and acknowledge it. We need to know that we are guilty and that we deserve our sentence of death. We each need to accept that Jesus died for each of us. We then need to make the decision to follow him and to strive to life as he asked us to do.
We need to know that hate is in the world but that, as followers of Jesus the Christ, we are called to love and not to hate. In the face of hate, we are to love one another. We are even to love those who hate us; maybe loving those individuals most of all. It is easy to love those who love you, it is extraordinary to love those who hate you.
The only way to fight the hate that is born into us through our sin is to learn how to truly love. The only way to truly love is to know and follow the only who is love. God loves us and Satan wants to kill us and destroy us.
Who do you want to follow for the rest of your life?
Who do you want to spend eternity serving?
For me, without question, it is God.
James 4:1-10
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says,
“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.