God Hates Sin

"Love can forbear, and Love can forgive...but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object....He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored."  Traherne, "Centuries of Meditation", II, 30

I have recently been reading C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain.  The above quote was at the beginning of the chapter on Divine Goodness.  

These days we hear people who claim to be Christians upholding sin in the lives of others and saying "God is love" as if that means that we should tolerate and even celebrate the sin.  If a Christian dares to speak out against those who live in open sin yet expect to be welcomed as a brother or sister, they are put down with these words.  

Indeed God is truly love.  That is his nature as we are shown throughout scripture.  At the same time we see that God hates sin.  A loving God must hate anything which destroys his people.  God cannot act contrary to his nature.  One of our former professors used to say something like this:  There are things God cannot do.  For example, He cannot lie, for He is truth.  He cannot die, for He is life.

The quote from Traherne makes it so clear.  God cannot accept sin.  If he accepted sin he would not be loving the person.  He longs to restore us to a perfect relationship with Him.  

We are called upon to love like Jesus loves.  If God could just accept sin there would have been no reason for Jesus to die on the cross.  Accepting the sin along with the sinner is not the way Jesus loves.  He came to reconcile us to the Father and show us how to live.  

Human beings will always try to be gods, deciding what is right and wrong for themselves.  Denying absolute truth and making up their own "truth."  Don't be deceived.  

God is love and He cannot be reconciled to sin.  

(I am finding The Problem of Pain to be a bit more difficult reading than other of Lewis' books I have read.  However, there are some great chapters and the chapter on Divine Goodness is one of them.  I recommend reading it for a clearer exposition on this topic.)