Tuesday 11 October 2016

Naturally, God hates sin.


God did not sit down, deliberate carefully, and then decide that on balance he should hate evil. Nor is his freedom circumscribed by some law of retribution external to himself, like some human judge bound, even when he disapproves of them, by the laws passed by his national legislature. “Just” is what God is. “Angry with sin” is what he is. It is his whole nature, his very being, to recoil from it and condemn it. It is unimaginable that he should place idolatry, blasphemy, murder, rape, child abuse, greed, deceit, and exploitation outside the law, ignoring the pain they cause and the havoc they wreak. No human society places evil outside the law, and it is one of the paradoxes of this whole discourse that those who cry out most loudly for justice (against, e.g., child abusers and rapists) are often the very ones who deny the Almighty any judicial function. Yet our human systems of justice can have no legitimacy except as ordained by God, and while postmodernism may calmly discuss “Whose justice?,” our sanctions against crime clearly presuppose the validity of law and of appropriate retribution. We cannot deny to the Judge of all the earth the prerogatives we concede to our own petty judicatories. It is precisely because we are made in his image that we ourselves feel revulsion in the presence of evil.  – p252, Donald Macleod, The Work of Christ Accomplished in The Christian Dogmatics (italics original)

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