Good & Evil : Clinging & Hating
If 26 years of being alive and 16 years of being a follower of Jesus Christ has taught me anything, it's that I don’t hate sin like I should.
It wasn't until I read Romans 12:9 recently that I was able to address this sad truth.
I am an excellent justifier of sin. We all are. In fact, we’re great at it. History has shown us we've used scripture to justify some pretty horrible things.
We’ve even marginalized the severity of sin in the last place you’d ever expect — the local church. We’ve tried to convince God himself that what he called absolute truth before time and space even existed is no longer relevant thanks to progressive culture.
We’ve allowed gradual shifts in our societal norms to fog up the lens through which we interpret God’s teaching. We live in a time where your religion is not your religion, your worldview is your religion.
So if Romans is telling us to hate what is evil, affectionately known as sin, why haven’t we done so?
As a people, we naturally don’t hate evil at all. We slow-dance with evil. We invite evil over for dinner. We spend our money on evil. We even google evil late at night when no one's around.
In a culture where morality is as useless as last year's iPhone, words have lost their meaning. No doesn’t mean no, it means come back tomorrow and we’ll see. But hate is still a strong word is it not? Surely that part couldn’t have changed. The dictionary describes it as an intense dislike or an extreme aversion to. But among the various definitions, this is my favorite: an unwillingness toward.
That word unwilling is pretty self-explanatory. If your unwilling to do something, you just simply won’t do it.
Imagine if we possessed that same unwillingness to sin. If we absolutely refused to go there. If we thought it so repulsive that we’d accept death to avoid it. Radical.
I believe with all my heart that that’s the kind of response the scripture calls for when it says to hate what is evil.
The second half of that sentence is just as powerful: cling to what is good. That word cling paints a vivid picture as well. I see a finger-nail tearing grip. I see an unwillingness to let go of that ledge.
If we’re clinging to good, by virtue of simple science, evil could never be present because the two are opposing states. Just as light and darkness cannot co-exist nor can sin immerse us when good is our life line.
The scriptures tell us a lot of things but let’s hone in on 2 definites to close up this thought:
1.) God hates sin so much that he sacrificed his only son for the sake of getting rid of its permanent sting and grasp on our lives. 2.) God never changes. He is the same yesterday, today and forever.
So what does that tell us about how God feels about sin today? Right now. In THIS present culture far removed from the “old days”? In the same culture where Hollywood has made sex outside of marriage a thing of conquest and adventure. In the same culture where drugs and alcohol are a glamorous experiment. In the day and age where the strong, healthy family is an anomaly.
My guess is, he’s got the same opinion he’s always had.