THE BIBLE GOD'S LOVE FOR YOU IS TWISTED

The Bible teaches that God is love. It says God hates his enemies (Psalm 5:5). It says he is a God of wrath (John 3:36). He loves all but loves some more than he loves others (Romans 9:13). So God is love but not just love. He is also justice and mercy and jealousy and even revenge (Romans 12:19). The Christian solution to all this perplexing disarray is that God expresses five different kinds of love. His universal love is the love he has for all people. His redemptive love is the love by which he saves some and not all. He loves by covenant when he keeps the promises he made us. He loves as a parent when we become his adopted children. He loves us intimately when we are not only saved and washed from sin but when we obey him.

LOVE IS NOT PERFECT

Human nature seeks love but in fact it is not perfect and has a dangerous side.  Buddhism says that it is compassion we should focus on not love.

A man's love for his wife can lead to him killing somebody who offends her. Or he may end up her slave if she has materialistic tastes.

Love for a person involves love for them as a person and their goodness will also be loved.  We respond lovingly to good characteristics in a person even if we do not love the person as a person.

Christians say love is not liking but valuing the person as to do good for them.

WHAT ABOUT GOD'S UNCONDITIONAL LOVE?
 
Most of Christianity teaches that God loves us unconditionally for two reasons.
 
1 Because he is the kind of person that wants to do that.
2 Because it is the only kind of love we can get and need for we don’t deserve any blessing.
 
The second reason is judgemental.  If unconditional love is like a last resort and is that reluctant then it is not unconditional love.

Many theologians disagree with the second reason because rights are based on needs and you can’t have a right to God’s love. God could do good for you without loving you so you don’t need his love. Besides, this love which will mean that God wishes you well is ridiculous for it means that God wants you to get away with your sins and be rewarded for them which is not love at all according to the Bible which says that love must agree with justice to be true love.
 
It is one thing to love a person unconditionally when they are a mixture of bad and good but another if they are good for nothing. Unconditional love can be a way of trying to inspire a person to leave their sins behind but that is only sensible if there is a good chance it will work. Otherwise you are just encouraging them to be useless.
 
No verse in the Bible teaches that God loves unconditionally. The Bible speaks of God’s redemptive love which is the love with which he wants to save sinners so that he can hate them no more. It speaks of his covenant love by which he keeps his promises. It speaks of his intimate parental love which is love in the full sense. So whenever the Bible speaks of divine love it does not always mean the same kind of love. A God who won’t make Hell where sinners go to be punished forever like an eternal party is not a God who loves unconditionally but conditionally. If we are to love the sinner and hate the sin it follows that we should feel terrible about the souls in Hell. This means Heaven is as bad as Hell pain-wise. The only difference is that there is no sin in the first place. Obviously the doctrines of Heaven and Hell deny that you should love the sinner and hate the sin. Sinners are punished in Hell and in jail not sins for you can’t make sins pay for what they did, you can only make people pay. You punish people not sins. We say you punish yourself when you drink too much or whatever but that is not making yourself pay for your sins so it is not really punishing yourself. You are not doing it to punish. Jesus called Hell everlasting punishment (Matthew 25:46) so God punishes there forever.

Jesus’s statement that all men will know his disciples by how they love one another is fascinating (John 13:34). Notice he does not say they will know Jesus’ disciples by how they love them! No the love is between disicple and disciple. If anybody outside of that gets love then it is not worth being thankful for. If love is true and genuine it will never fade out (1 Corinthians 13:8). In fact to limit love is to partly oppose it and set it up for petering out.
 
Real unconditional love cannot be forced. It is something you voluntarily choose to do. Some theologians even question that God’s love can be unconditional when he is the kind of being that does this meaning he cannot be any different.  He does not get to choose like a human person does. It’s his nature so not his choice so it is not real love! He would need to be capable of not loving at all for this love to be real voluntary love. But he is not. God would know that his nature forces him to love and being so intelligent would realise that this is not real love at all. It’s forced and he lies to himself that it is unconditional love. So if God loves anybody unconditionally he must actually be able to hate.

Offering this God of unconditional love is cheating those who want this love.  It shows that if you want to give unconditional love to others then you have to reject God.
 
Religion counsels us to hate the sin but love the sinner. Hate means to dislike intensely and with violence of emotion, not necessarily action. It is really treating sin like a thing. To hate a thing like sin is irrational. You cannot hate a thing and be rational. When we hate a thing it is because an irrational emotion has kicked in. The hate is emotional but it is not us being truly ourselves. Proper hate involves and necessitates us being truly ourselves. Religion warns that you can hate the sinner and imagine you hate the sin not the sinner. Religion warns that hatred of sin easily becomes hatred of the sinner. Logically, the more you hate sin the more easily you might hate the sinner and be in denial. The more you hate the sin the more likely you are to be a danger to the sinner and hate the sinner. Jesus said in Matthew 5 right at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount that if your eye makes you lust for a woman and lust is a sin that you must hate the sin of lust so much that you would gouge the eye out. Some take him literally but all agree that whatever he meant he was commanding an intense hatred for sin. We know that when we hate sin we cannot leave the person out for sins don't happen on their own. They are what people do and they reflect and reveal the kind of persons they are, whether they are bad or good people. To advocate hatred of sin is to advocate hatred of the sinner. The person is the sin in a real sense. The more people want you to hate sin the more they put you at risk of hating the sinner even if the sinner can sometimes be loved and his sin hated. To advocate extreme abhorrence for sin as Jesus did is advocating hatred of the sinner and leading to it.

GOD HATES THOSE WHO HATE HIM

The Bible is clear that God hates those who hate him. It is equally clear that we are not to love God’s enemies. We are told to be good to our own enemies only when we have to be to prevent the just from suffering.

John 3:16 says God loved the world that he gave his son to save it.  The expression world does not mean literally everybody on earth.  It is answering a Jewish opinion that only Jews can attains salvation.  1 Timothy 2:4 says that God wants all to be saved.  You can hate your enemy and still wish he would change and be your friend.  Romans 5:8 says that God loved us while we were still sinners.  It refers to those who have already converted.  If God sees an evil person has the potential to convert and loves them that is not necessarily unconditional love.  Why do so few verses seem to be about the alleged universal love of God for all that many fantasise about?

In some places it says that God hates bad people even before they turn bad.  Romans 9:13 says, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” Paul explains that this was God’s view even before either of them were born (9:11). Romans 9:14-23 says that because God does not owe us anything and we deserve only suffering and death that God is right to love one person and not another just because he wants to. He can love A less than B too. Now in so far as you don’t love somebody that is to the extent you hate them or don’t care about them or you both hate and don’t care. Thus the Bible plainly teaches that God can love you a bit but so little that he hates you. He might just as well not love you at all for all the practical difference it makes. So it is foolish to be comforted by the thought that the Bible God loves you for it might be of very little comfort if you knew just how little he loved you. It would be arrogance and blasphemy to suppose that God loved you a lot.
 
All who hate one another wish that they did not and that the persons would change so they love in a sense. God could wish the wicked would change but refuse to succumb to this wish. It is because this wish is present that he is able to hate perfectly. You only hate a person when they won’t use the good you see in them.
 
Proverbs 11:20 and Psalm 5:5 and several other places state that God hates sinners as does Romans 9:13-15. 2 Chronicles has God saying through a prophet that anybody who helps the ungodly incurs the anger of God. The context shows that the king who this threat was directed at did no real harm. It show that the king would not have helped the ungodly in such a way that he would have been assisting them in destroying his people or him. And the prophet said that God’s problem was not any risk like that but the fact that people who did not cherish God were treated with a bit of kindness. They might have been unbelievers but that does not make them bad or any worse than the people of God and the king knew that.
 
The Catholic Church added vindictive books to the Bible. Sirach 4:5,6 warns that if you ignore the poor man and he gets bitter and calls on God to curse you then God will hear his prayer. Wisdom 14:8,9 states that the idol and the maker of the idol are accursed and goes on to say that the reason is that the ungodly man and his ungodliness are equally hateful to God. No loving the sinner and hating the sinner there. The verse proves that loving the sinner and hating the sin is just a theory that has permeated the Church but is not to be considered to be correct or authorised teaching. This does not contradict Wisdom 11:24 which says that God makes nothing that he hates. You can be made to be loved and earn God's hatred. Wisdom says that the children of adulterers will have no consolation when judged by God - Wisdom 3:18.
 
To say that the Bible forbids hating sinners though it commanded the cruel execution of gays and Atheists and other people that God wanted out of the way is total blindness. We see how wrong it is to say that hate is wrong while cruel actions like that are not. It would be better to hate others than to kill them. We see here how the Bible seeks to turn morality upside down. We have more references to God’s hatred for sinners than we have for his alleged love for them and the latter verses are misinterpreted so nowhere does the Bible say that God loves sinners. If it did the minority verses would have to be interpreted in the context of the majority verses meaning that we would have to take the love non-literally and the hate literally and not vice-versa as many Christians do.
 
Christians say that since we do not know who will be saved we have to love everybody and only God can hate sinners for only he knows who will be saved and who will not be. But it is a contradiction to say you value a person as a potential saint. That is valuing what God wants and not the person. It is putting the qualities before the person to the person being left out if the equation. It is denying the fundamental principle of real right and wrong in which field the Bible has no competence whatsoever, that the person is the absolute value. If the person is the absolute value then a God who creates the laws that lead to death and everlasting torment is wholly evil.
 
The Bible says that those who die estranged from God will suffer in Hell forever and are put beyond repentance. If you could condone that you could condone anything. God must do something to them to stop them repenting and turning to him. With doctrines like that it makes no sense to forbid hatred. It is worse to wish that your faith be true even though the faith says that X will go to Hell if he dies in sin than to wish that X would fall and break a leg.