God is love! Or..?
I’m sorry if this gets your goat a little bit… And if it does get your goat, there may be some things you need to reevaluate, if you are also calling yourself a Christian.
These days, there’s a sort of false teaching making the rounds – even in churches. Namely that God is ONLY love, understood to mean that he will never punish anyone. Many are under the impression that the Bible is just a symbolic guide and should not be taken literally… Many go as far as to believe that Hell does not exist and that EVERYONE goes to Heaven – in spite of the fact that hell and ‘judgment’ are mentioned several places in the Bible.
Let me ask a counter-question… Your daughter is raped, but you choose to be ‘loving’, and you don’t take the perpetrator to court. Now, later on he goes out and does it to a whole lot of other people and destroy their lives.
Is that love? And if so, love toward whom? Toward the perpetrator? Or toward the many girls who had their lives destroyed?
If you drink and drive, you get a ticket – and if it is really bad, you lose your license.
…but if the police were loving, they would let you go, so you can keep driving and perhaps even hit people, because you are so drunk.
You simply can’t separate love and justice. You CANNOT be loving without being just, because there are always people who don’t feel like following the law.
God has made some rules for us. Not to harm and bind us, but to care for us. We KNOW there are consequences for failing to obey. This is not mean of God, rather it is justice in love.
So, let me emphasize exactly what the Bible says… NOBODY goes to Heaven unless they whole-heartedly choose Jesus Christ as Lord of their life. That requires personal faith, turning from their old lifestyle, and baptism (which, of course, means full submersion).
Andreas Slot-Henriksen
25 January 2018
Translated from Danish in 2019
by Lisbeth Agerskov Christensen
