Posts Tagged ‘cheap grace’

God’s Law and Jesus’ love — part 4

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Contrary to popular myth, among Christians and others, Jesus did not come to trump God’s Law with a new-and-improved presentation of His love. Clearly, Scripture tell us otherwise, and I hope this series has outlined the truth persuasively and with Christ-honoring grace.

Jesus revealed not just God’s love, or just God’s Law, but both. Anything less is not real love.

Part 1 introduced the myth, the forms it can take, and some of the reasons why people may believe it. We also must remember not to overcorrect for an imbalanced “lovey” Jesus.

Part 2 delved into the depths of Jesus’ famous (but apparently not taught enough) truth in Matthew 5, that He did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. The rest of His Sermon on the Mount shows that He wasn’t simply making the Law easier for people. He reminded them instead of how hard God’s real Law is to obey, and (by proxy) how we need Him to fulfill it.

Part 3 brought one of Jesus’ debates about the Law, with the Pharisees, into focus.

That is where I’ll pick up today, with the series’ final column. This will exegete the rest of Mark 7: 1-13, and see the reasons Jesus gave for His opposition to the Pharisees. Jesus did not defend His disciples for breaking the Law, but said that the Pharisees’ rule wasn’t real Law. And He didn’t debate the Pharisees because they pushed the real Law, but because they didn’t.

And I’ll conclude with the most important thing to learn from these Biblical truths.

2. Did the Pharisees accuse the disciples of violating God’s Law?

And the Pharisees and the scribes asked [Jesus], “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”

Answer: No. They asked why the disciples didn’t obey man-made traditions.

If the Pharisees were honestly confusing the two — God’s Law and their own made-up laws — they didn’t say so here. Jesus didn’t seem to think it was an honest mistake on their part.

3. Did Jesus say the leaders needed to lighten up, love a little more?

And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

Jesus could not make His reasons clearer. If the Pharisees had really asked why Jesus’ disciples weren’t obeying the Old-Testament Law — and the Pharisees’ problem was that they were all about God’s rules and not Jesus’ love — Jesus’ response here makes no sense.

He does not say “you must learn to accept and love others instead of talking about God’s rules.”

Instead, He says, quoting Isaiah 29:13: You are teaching your own rules rather than God’s real rules, and your worship of God is in vain and without heart.

Answer: No, Jesus did not argue from only “you must love people more.” Instead He said they were hypocritically ignoring God’s real Law in favor of their made-up laws.

Many professing Christians1 claim that Christians who defend God’s Law or holiness, or a plain reading of His Word, are automatically leaning toward hypocrisy and unloving attitudes in the same way the Pharisees did. But if the Pharisees were actually defending God’s real Law, why would Jesus call them hypocrites? He would have to mean they were claiming to adhere to God’s real Law, while actually ignoring it.

4. Was the Pharisees’ main problem only adding their own laws onto the real Law?

And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God) — then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”

Answer: Not at all. And Jesus clearly says the Pharisees were not just naïvely confusing their own religious rules for the real Law. Even worse, they were actively rejecting the real Law and not just ignoring it — they were defying it, and teaching others to do the same.

I love His wording here: “You have a fine way … !” The sarcasm and outrage just blazes forth in His phrasing, with divine authority only He could have.

Again, Jesus doesn’t base His argument on “you must love more,” or even, “you are adding your own rules on top of God’s real Law.” He says “you are rejecting God’s real Law.” Here He cites a specific example: Moses, speaking for God, had commanded that people ought to honor their parents. But instead of following and teaching that part of the Law, the Pharisees had effectively thrown it out in favor of their own rule: you can avoid caring for your parents so long as you claim a Very Spiritual Exemption for your property, i.e., oh, well, this is “God’s money.”

Can you see it here? Jesus was disgusted. With the Pharisees’ very high-sounding, religious and “spiritual” idea about this, they were violating God’s real Law. They were making His word “void … by your tradition that you have handed down.” And that was just a small example, He added.

Conclusion

Many people have different reasons for wanting to make Jesus a dispenser of “love” apart from God’s Law. But such an approach simply isn’t found in Scripture.

The passages here and in part 2 are not isolated cases. For example, in Jesus’ righteous rant against the Pharisees in Matthew 23, He never talks about how they’re all about the real Law and He’s all about “the better way of love” or any of that. He laments and lambastes them because they have “neglected the weightier matters of the law.” What are these? “Justice and mercy and faithfulness.” All are important — and all are what God’s real Law was all about.

Anyone who believes Jesus even came close to opposing or overruling His own Father’s Law with love needs to consider the whole picture that Scripture shows us. Not one time does He play the “good cop” to God’s or His real Law’s “bad cop,” and contradict Himself in that way.

If this really sinks in, it should come as a shock! After all, we have always been taught that Jesus came not to just “make” the Law harder, but to provide a way of salvation.

And that’s true. Any of this emphasis on Jesus’ upholding God’s Law should not simply reinforce someone’s “well I guess we’d best try and obey the Law even harder” reaction! The only reaction this should bring us is gratitude, to Christ, for what He also did to fulfill His own Law.

This is the most important thing to know from busting this myth.

Christ fulfilled God’s real Law by sacrificing Himself as the ultimate atoning sacrifice (or propitiation, 1 John 4:10) for the sins of those who would repent of sins and believe in Him.

Knowing this, and that God’s real Law still applies today, helps us see our need for Christ even more. Instead of only reinforcing the Law and either calling people to obey it by themselves, or just to love each other better, His goal was to die, rise to life, redeem His people with His blood and start His Church. He fulfilled God’s Law so we would trust in Him, not in moral rules.

Thank God for His Law that shows us our need for Him. Thank God for His sacrifice that shows us His love. Thank God for the Bible that shows us both truths in perfect balance.

  1. Particularly of the liberal-theology variety, I must add. ↩

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God’s Law and Jesus’ love — part 3

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Does Jesus “trump” God? If God’s Law in the Old Testament was only about following rules, did Jesus come to show “a better way of love”?

Many people seem to think so (see part 1 of this series). For very different reasons — perhaps trying to correct for real-life, sinful legalism in other Christians — they say things like, “Jesus wasn’t about rules; He is about a loving relationship with Him.” And many such things they say.

But it doesn’t take that complicated a reading of Scripture to show otherwise (seen in part 2).

Yet the question remains: if Jesus actually defending the Law and insisted it was still in effect — and maybe worse than some people thought — why then did the Pharisees pick on Him so much? And why did He argue against them? Some people might ask: “Weren’t they the religious leaders who had no love and only the Law?” What was their argument truly about?

In these last two columns of the series, we’ll begin more Biblical exploration of those questions.

Further in

It seems Mark 7: 1-13 is one of the best passages about this.

Here, in one of the clearest arguments with the Pharisees, Jesus did not base His arguments on anything close to “I am not about the Law; I am about ‘love.’” Some professing Christians (or real Christians who aren’t taught well on this topic) may assume that was His goal.

But instead He made three main points:

  1. In all their “laws,” the Pharisees had no heart for the real God and worshiping Him.
  2. The Pharisees were actually substituting their own made-up laws for the Law.
  3. With their made-up religious rules, the Pharisees ended up denying God’s real Law.

Don’t miss the Mark

I think the scene sets itself here. Mark in his gospel has already described the religious leaders’ reactions to Jesus’ teachings and miracles. But when the Pharisees see the disciples violating a religious tradition, this encounter is so far the most clear about the exact nature of their conflict.1

Did Jesus oppose the Pharisees because they were only about the Law, with no love for people? My suggestion: ask this very question as we read …

Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) And the Pharisees and the scribes asked [Jesus], “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”

And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God) — then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”

Mark 7: 1-13

This is a fascinating passage. Similar to last week, let’s draw out the points one by one, and ask even more specific questions before reading sections of the story up close:

1. Were the disciples really “defiled,” as in breaking God’s real Law?

Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed.

The word defiled is crucial here. Some readings of this would hold that the disciples were being very cavalier about the Law of Moses. This assumption would say that somewhere in the Law is something about needing to wash hands exactly this way. And with all the laws in Leviticus and more (which often sound strange to us), that’s an easy assumption to make.

But how does Mark define this use of defiled? He says “that is, unwashed,” and goes on to say:

(For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.)

This understanding of defiled is not according to the Law, but means only “unwashed,” and according to nothing more than the “tradition of the elders.” If they are coming back from the secular marketplace, for example, they have decided it’s their rule to do ritual washing.

Mark goes on to say that according to their religious rituals, they wash all kinds of things, not just to keep them clean physically, but to keep them clean (in their view) spiritually.

But though the Law is detailed, with many odd-sounding commands, it does not say to do that.

Answer: No. This is Pharisee-style “defiled.” God’s real Law doesn’t require this washing.

In next week’s final column, we’ll see how Jesus opposes them, not based on some you-must-lighten-up-and-love rationale, but based on the real Law. Again, here it is important to see: the disciples were not truly defiled according to God’s Law. This “defiled” only means “unwashed,” and only as defined by this Pharisee belief — which itself is never mentioned in the Law.

Next week: did Jesus condemn the Pharisees for being up-tight about God’s real Law? Did He argue that they needed to love people more and stop being so legalistic about the real Law? And did He fault them only for adding laws to the real Law, or actively rejecting it?

  1. Perhaps the first time I saw this myself was in a sermon at my church last year. ↩

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God’s Law and Jesus’ love — part 2

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Did Jesus come only to teach love and not God’s Law? Is it true to say “Christianity is not about rules, but relationships”? What did Jesus Himself say about it? (Continued from last week …)

What’s the Word?

One very relevant passage to explore 1 is from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” 2 Many wrongly think Jesus only offers better ways to live, or moral encouragements for all who listen. But although His words may sound soft-spoken, the realities are much harsher.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 5: 17-20

Wow. Let’s be sure we don’t miss the profound truths buried in that paragraph. Nothing than less than an attempt at exegesis (my best, anyway) seems due here …

1. Jesus fulfills, not abolishes, the Law.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

Lest anyone think Jesus came to offer anything different from the Law, He directly denied it. “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them,” He said. I wonder: if I had been Jesus (scary thought), and I had wanted to tell people for sure that the true Law was not dead and gone or unnecessary for anyone in the present day, how would I have communicated this more clearly?

If Jesus actually did abolish the effects of the Law, here He was lying or obscuring the truth.

2. The Law won’t end until the world ends.

“For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”

In case we missed the point, He makes it even more clear: the Law is still in effect “until all is accomplished.” Not a nano-piece of it will expire until that time.

Might someone think that has already happened — that at some point before now, the Law’s effects have passed as He predicted? No, Jesus’ context makes clear what “all is accomplished” means: the time when “heaven and earth pass away.”

I just looked out my window. Earth is still here, so I presume Heaven is too. He hasn’t yet redeemed, remodeled and combined them (Revelation 21).

Therefore I presume the Law’s iotas and dots are still un-passed.

3. We should not downplay the Law.

“Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven”

These seem like very strong words: those who try to downplay the Law and its truths aren’t just misguided, naïve or doctrinally wrong, but they “will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.”

That just makes me want to wipe my brow and pray I won’t be too cavalier about the Law!

God’s standards are just as holy today as they were back then. Jesus hasn’t lowered the standard; here, He has just made it higher and more strict than ever. If He hadn’t made it clear here and elsewhere that He Himself was the fulfillment of that standard, and died and rose again to prove it, people might still be calling Him a “legalist” today.

4. If we follow the Law’s commandments, we will be called great.

“but whoever does [even the least of the Law’s commandments] and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

I’d much rather be placed in this group. And why is that? So we can be called “great in the kingdom of heaven.” Christians ought not do as I once thought deep down, that the best and most “spiritual” Christianity is disinterested devotion to religious duties. Rather, I should want to want the best reward He can give — Himself — in the Kingdom when it comes here directly.

5. Want Christ’s Kingdom? Then out-obey the Pharisees.

“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

We might not see Jesus’ impact here without comparing it with a direct-opposite view: a “cheap grace” that assumes we don’t need to consider God’s holiness, only His love.

But here, Jesus doesn’t mention a word about God’s love. He talks about His great love at other times, and it’s absolutely essential to remember that as we seek to know Jesus and all of His character. But here, His focus is His Father’s holiness and the Law. Its standard was in effect then, and remains in effect today for those who don’t believe Him.

6. Christians are not under the Law, because of Christ’s coming and personal faith.

Years later, Christians in the Galatian church were being told opposite ideas of the Law, by very “spiritual” teachers who claimed the Christians were still under its requirements. But Paul wrote:

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.

Galatians 3: 23-26

So Paul makes things even clearer to Christians: they are no longer captive to the Law. But the essential ingredients for the status change are Christ’s coming, what He did, and personal faith that brings forgiveness of sins and adoption as God’s sons.

Next week: if it’s true that Jesus did not oppose the Law, but came squarely on its side, why then was He so often fighting with the Pharisees? Weren’t they all about the Law when He wanted them to understand His grace and love? What do you think?

  1. Along with Mark 7: 1-13. ↩
  2. Some of this material is adapted from the YeHaveHeard Preface — after all, it’s from the Sermon that this website gets its name. ↩

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God’s Law and Jesus’ love — part 1

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Is it possible this myth heard ‘round the world is actually increasing in popularity? I wonder if even now it’s dead even with or even past the “Christians aren’t supposed to judge ever” myth?

Perhaps it’s best to leave this little lie alone. After all, it brings so many people together in agreement, doesn’t it? Many Christians want to be loving to their unsaved friends, or “worldly” Christians. Or they may want to correct for their legalistic backgrounds, and make sure they emphasize that God is all about love, not rules. The popular evangelical phrase remains, on a billion church signs: that “Christianity isn’t about rules, it’s about a relationship.”

So they present one side of a truth, to the point of half-truth: Jesus isn’t about the Law.

But that is not what Scripture says. This is clear not only from the epistles written by Paul and other apostles about Jesus, but from the words of Jesus Himself.

“Take a look, it’s in a Book …”

Ye have heard that it was said …

Jesus fought the Pharisees because they were all about the Law, and He was all about love.

AKA: Jesus wasn’t about rules, He was about love and personal relationship with Him.

AKA: “Christianity isn’t about rules, it’s about relationship.”

Figure A:

“The God of the Old Testament is a vengeful God,” says a popular professing Christian during a lecture circuit, named the same as his new book with a catchy, “outrageous” title. “He is all about the Law and following a system of rules. Then along comes Jesus, and His only law is the law of love! He accepts people just the way they are. He breaks down the barriers.” 1

Figure B:

[After agreeing that boundaries are in the Bible] Jesus is frequently breaking through those boundaries, challenging what the OT purity laws say about dirt and cleanliness, Sabbath and love…which is why Christianity has always had a bit of an iconoclastic streak. Add to this Jesus’ acceptance of the Other, be they of an enemy empire (the Centuriion)2, or heterodox (like the many Samaritans who held a different canon and worshiped at a different temple), or outright occult (the blessed Magi who visited the child Christ [. . .]), you see a relaxing of the boundaries and a universalizing of the Old Covenant’s YHWH into a God who brings “peace and glad tidings of great joy to all peoples[.]”

From an acquaintance’s Facebook post

Figure C:

All my religious training was in Sunday school, maybe 25 years ago, and the main thing I remember was that God was always smiting the Pharisees. At least I think it was the Pharisees[. . . .]

My wife, who has had bales of religious training, tells me that this was the Old Testament God, who was very strict, whereas the New Testament God is a genuinely mellow deity, the kind of deity who would never smite anybody or order you to smear goat’s blood on your firstborn son, which is the kind of thing the Old Testament God was always doing.

The otherwise hilarious author and humor columnist Dave Barry, from a 1985 column

What’s the truth in this?

While it is easy to make lovey-dovey Christians (or those who want or claim to be so) into easy villains, I hope to Heaven that Biblical Christians will not overcorrect the opposite way. We’re already needing to deal with overcorrection — from not-loving-enough views of God to a “love”-as-the-only-defining-attribute view of God. Let’s not swing the pendulum back again!

It is so true that Jesus came to Earth to exercise love. No informed Christian would deny this. He healed the sick, taught of His Father’s care for people, lived as a Man, comforted the hurting, and did not fight back when He was persecuted.

He did not specifically deploy punishments, like God the Father. At that point, it wasn’t His goal.

What’s the lie in this?

What Biblical Christians would disagree with is that “love” is so easily understood as simple healing from sickness, or acceptance of all other views, or especially making things easier for people who had suffered under the Old Testament Law for centuries. Rather:

  1. Jesus doesn’t just release people from the Law’s burden. He increases it, by reminding us that true violations are in our hearts, not in our deeds! Only He Himself can remove its burden.
  2. Jesus does not oppose the Law. He opposes false views of it. He decries the often-willing ignorance of some people, in particular religious hypocrites. Such people refuse to see that the Law pointed to Him as the One Who relieves its burden for those who repent and believe Him.
  3. And Jesus did not come to overthrow the unfair, too-hard Law. He came to fulfill it.

(This topic is so incredible, deep and rich that it will take at least three parts of a new series to get through it. Watch for the next part coming Saturday. Meanwhile, a great way to study up on this topic is to re-read the Sermon on the Mount, especially Matthew 5: 17-20, and Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees in Mark 7: 1-13, and onward. What do you think?)

  1. Though I doubt many conservative Christians would say this aloud, I wonder if many of them secretly wonder. And I might guess they’d repeat the “not rules, just relationship” phrase. ↩
  2. Sic ↩

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Fiction, delays and doctrine ‘emergent-cy’

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Today I finally finished (first draft) a novel whose story and images were born Sept. 22 (a date significant for other reasons too), 2007. Pre-revisions, it’s 42 chapters. It wasn’t intentional; I wanted 40.

So, that is one reason why I didn’t post a new column for yesterday.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been learning a lot about the “emergent” movement, and particularly its emphasis on saying the Christ-died-in-place-of-sinners idea is not right (calling it “barbaric,” or in the infamous words of Steve Chalke quoted by Brian McLaren, “cosmic1 child abuse.” A writer acquaintance of mine, Rebecca Miller, has been writing a lot about these “emergent-cy” doctrines. Her Jan. 25 installment, The Emerging Heresy, caused much “conversation” and I found myself writing a lot of comments and rebuttals in response.

A few of those comments are excerpted below, but I encourage readers to have a look at the full back-and-forth thus far. It’s well worth a deep read, for a helpful cross-section about what many “emergent” activists are teaching, possible reasons why, and the need to address them with as much truth and grace as we can, and maybe even a little sarcasm.

From what I can tell of “emergent” Christians, they may mean well in their re-imaginings and all that sort of thing. I fear that what they are doing is taking one hammer in hand, namely, that of avoiding What the Church has Done Wrong in the Past — either actual wrongs, or perceptions thereof. Many such people seem to have backgrounds in legalistic churches, and/or megachurches that cared more for programs (ostensibly doctrine) than they did for people, the issues of the world, etc.

With that hammer in hand, every problem begins to look like a nail. And the result is that too many “re-imagining” folks swerve to opposite extremes. With the chief end of man reset from “glorify God and enjoy Him forever” to “we must fix the problems in the church, and then the world,” legalism roars back into force, more hip and socially aware and creative than before.

The three issues at the heart of this debate: God’s nature, the seriousness of man’s sin, and Christ’s Atonement for sins.

[. . .]

McLaren and others have referred to the idea of God’s plan to crucify His Son to satisfy His wrath as “divine child abuse.” For all that exploration and conversation and open-mindedness, they make an exclusive claim about what Christ’s death was *not* about. Scriptures clearly saying the contrary are thrown aside for the sake of the System. The System takes this as axiomatic: God needing to punish His Son on behalf of those who would believe is a “barbaric” concept.

[. . .]

Again I cite: a plain reading of Romans, a plain reading of Hebrews, plain reading of the entire Old Testament, plain reading of the whole Bible — respecting the (divinely inspired) authors’ intent from the beginning, ignoring (as much as possible) our own 21st-century, philosophical, “enlightened,” chronologically-snobbish cultural constraints.

Cheez, it hurts to see my Savior’s sacrifice so denigrated. By believing this, one says three things about the God one claims to value more highly than such a “barbaric” God.

1. “My sin isn’t so bad.”

God could not be so offended by humanity’s rebellion, or my own personal desire to use Him and his gifts as a means to my own idols, as to require a punishment. I’m either a basically-good person, or I’m a victim of sin, and instead of being only angry at me, God should only feel sorry for me. (What a narrow and false dilemma! Yet Scripture dares to show that God is both/and, quite above reductionistic divisions of His character.)

2. “God isn’t so good.”

Along with elevating man’s nature far above the level permitted by clear Scriptures about his natural and willful wickedness, such a claim is an insult to God’s holiness. He’ll overlook sin; regardless of how He punished it in the Old Testament, He’s learned better now, and pretty much everyone is okay by Him because He’s figured out how to rise above it all.

Justice is cheap. Grace is no longer valuable and undeserved — it’s expected! God just indulges the little hellions. Universalism is constantly hinted at, and now (as many expected) directly taught by many “emergent” leaders. Reacting to the wrong “get a contract with God and you’re saved forever” notions, they have overreacted and said *no* conscious new birth (repentance and conversion) is necessary to be in God’s favor.

3. “God is about me, not about Himself.”

Contrasted with the clear truths that God wants to give of Himself to the world, to those who repent and believe in Him, because He is the most glorious “thing” He could offer — is the idea that His all-defining, all-central characteristic is “love.”

In this view, God’s “love,” undiscerning, always tolerant, never condemning a person for his free-will choices to reject Him as the ultimate good, is now His defining virtue. He does everything for the sake of just love, love, love — as certain people wish to define it, that is. Even the “Harry Potter” series, with all its “love, love” basis, was deeper than that.

  1. Or “divine” ↩

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