It is not uncommon these days to hear calls for tolerance and acceptance that say, in essence, “If you love me, you’ll let me do whatever makes me happy.” Although this isn’t a new idea, the voices are much louder than they used to be. Often this comes from a misconception of the biblical idea that “God is love.” C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain:
“By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness… And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness… What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ …whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’ …I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction… If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt” (35-37).
David Powlison wrote something similar in Good and Angry:
“[God’s] mercy is not niceness. His mercy is not blanket acceptance of any and all. Mercy to us costs him—the blood of the Lamb. And mercy comes to us at the cost of our sins and pride. His kindness is an open invitation to turn to him in repentance and faith, to come to him in our need for mercies freely offered, and our trust in mercies freely given” (as quoted in Take Heart, Jan. 13).
God’s love is not benign approval of whatever we may love and enjoy. His perfect love means He puts divine boundaries on what is acceptable, because He knows what is best for us. We, in our sinful nature, often choose what is less than best—what is convenient, comfortable, and even corrupt. It is for this reason that we have His written Word to guide us, to help us understand what has been true from eternity, as opposed to what may appear true in our culture today.
The Apostle John wrote, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:8-10).
God didn’t create the world so He could just smile down on whatever His creation wanted to do. He created us to be brought into relationship with Him. Because of our sin that relationship was broken, and so God sent Jesus to pay our debts, redeem us from sin, and make us right with God again. God’s love for us meant that He gave the ultimate sacrifice, not to simply make us happy, but to make us more like Himself, in the perfect righteousness that we’ll experience for eternity if we follow Him as Lord in this life.
So when we look to God’s model of love to guide us, we don’t choose indiscriminate niceness and acceptance of anything and everything our culture comes up with. It doesn’t matter whether the demand is from a child asking for unlimited cookies, or an adult wanting unlimited sex, or anything in between. In love, we should recognize that many things are off limits if we truly want what is best for one another. And we need to look at it from an eternal perspective—will today’s choices lead to ‘fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore at God’s right hand’ (Psalm 16:11), or will they lead to “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:42 & 50)? True love should make us do all that we can to point people to eternal life, not eternal death.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
© 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.
